Vatican City, Jul 9, 2017 / 09:16 am (CNA/EWTN News).- During his 22 years as spokesman for St. John Paul II, Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls became somewhat of a legend in the Vatican – not only for his keen professional abilities and insight into the Pope’s mind, but also for his genuine kindness and deep spiritual life.
In a word, most who knew the late Spanish layman, who died earlier this week, have referred to him as a “gentleman” who was elegant, professional, kind and incredibly savvy.
Fr. John Wauck, a longtime friend of Navarro-Valls, described him as “an old-school gentleman and a consummate professional – capable, discreet, committed, loyal.”
Likewise, Greg Burke, current Director of the Holy See Press Office, said after announcing news of Navarro’s passing on Twitter that “Joaquin Navarro embodied what Ernest Hemingway defined as courage: grace under pressure.”
Burke said that he had met Navarro-Valls while working as a correspondent for Time Magazine the same year that the publication had named St. John Paul II “Man of the Year.”
In dealing with the Pope’s spokesman, Burke said “I expected to find a man of faith, but I found a man of faith who was also a first class professional” that was already well known and respected by his peers in the communications world.
“I didn’t always agree with Navarro, but he always behaved like a Christian gentlemen – and those can be hard to find these days,” Burke said.
Navarro-Valls was born in Cartagena, Spain in 1936. He studied medicine at the Universities in Granada and Barcelona, and worked as a professional psychiatrist and teaching medicine before obtaining degrees in journalism and communications.
He joined Opus Dei after meeting its founder St. Josemaria Escriva, continuing to collaborate with the founder in Rome, where he moved in 1970.
In Rome he was a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC and was twice elected president of the Rome-based Foreign Press Association in Italy.
He was the first lay journalist to hold the position of Director of the Vatican Press Office, which he was appointed to by Pope St. John Paul II in 1984. He served through the Pope’s death and two years into the pontificate of Benedict XVI before retiring in 2006.
After, he served as president of the advisory board of the Opus Dei-affiliated Campus Biomedical University in Rome until his death.
In his tenure at the Vatican Press Office spanning more than two decades, Navarro-Valls helped to modernize Vatican communications, especially as technology advanced. As Burke said, “he lived through the fax to the age of the internet.”
In 1992, he used $2 million to equip the press office with up-to-date technology and to modernize the facilities. He also streamlined the distribution of materials by making archives, documents and the Pope’s activities accessible online.
He died in Rome July 5 surrounded by fellow members of Opus Dei after battling terminal cancer. His funeral was held Thursday, July 6 at 11a.m. at the basilica of Sant’Eugenio, and was celebrated by the Vicar General of Opus Dei, Bishop Mariano Fazio.
Mario Biasetti, a journalist under the last five popes and a friend and colleague of Navarro-Valls, said he was a professional journalist, and it showed in everything he did.
Even when a colleague or a journalist would ask him a tough question, “it didn’t faze him,” Biasetti said. “He would tell you exactly what happened, but he would do it with a smile.”
“Joachin Navarro was a very well thought of man all-around. He had no difficulty to speak with anybody, whether officially or not officially.”
Biasetti traveled on many papal trips with John Paul II, and Navarro was always there and always by his side, he said. He was also always willing to pitch in and “always came through” for journalists with whatever they needed.
For Burke, one of the key things that stood out about Navarro-Valls is that he was someone who would work “shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us,” who “knew the world” and was good with languages.
Burke noted that before coming to the Vatican, Navarro worked as a correspondent, “and his colleagues from around the globe clearly recognized his merits, electing him President of the Stampa Estera in Rome.”
“I remember watching Navarro closely during the U.N. Population Conference in Cairo – one of the best examples of what Pope Francis calls ideological colonization. It was fascinating to see someone who was defending the faith, but he wasn’t on the defensive. He was leading the fight.”
Asked about what, if any, advice he had given Burke on doing the job, the spokesman said the advice he got “was more personal than professional, such as ‘don’t neglect your interior life, and make sure you pray – you’ll need it in this job.’”
This attention to the spiritual life is something that was also obvious to others who worked with Navarro. In Biasetti’s words, the Spaniard “was a journalist, yes, but he was also a churchman.”
Fr. Wauck, a professor of the Institutional Church Communications faculty at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and a fellow member of Opus Dei, recalled that this spiritual dynamic was evident even in Navarro’s work.
The priest said that when he thinks of Navarro, the first thing that comes to mind is “the conversion of the Time magazine reporter Wilton Wynn,” a well-known old-time reporter in the Middle East and Rome during John Paul II’s pontificate.
“Naturally, it was the vibrant Christian example of the Pope that attracted Wilton to the faith, but his long friendship with Navarro-Valls played a key part as well,” Wauck said, adding that Navarro-Valls “maintained an affectionate concern for Wilton’s spiritual well-being for the rest of his life.”
Another memory the priest recalled is “a small act of kindness” that took place over the summer some 15 years ago.
Fr. Wauck said that he had mentioned, in passing, in front of Navarro, that he had broken his swimming goggles. “The next day, I found a new pair on my desk, and they were much better than the ones I’d broken.”
Fr. Federico Lombardi, Navarro-Valls’ immediate successor as Director of the Holy See Press Office, also reflected on his relationship with his late predecessor, calling to mind Navarro’s character and impact on Vatican communications.
Lombardi recalled meeting Navarro after coming to Rome in 1991 to take on the role as Director of Programming for Vatican Radio.
After meeting and working alongside the Spaniard, particularly when the Pope traveled abroad, it immediately became clear that he was “a stable and important component” of the papal entourage, “but also likeable, friendly and cordial,” Lombardi said.
“Naturally I already knew him for his fame as a brilliant and competent ‘spokesman’ for the Pope,” he said, noting that the official title for someone in Navarro’s position is “Director of the Holy See Press Office.”
However, in the case of Navarro-Valls, spokesman “was an entirely appropriate name.”
Even if this wasn’t the official description of his duty – which was rather “Director of the Press Office” – it must be said that in his case it was an entirely appropriate name given the close relationship he had with John Paul II.
According to Lombardi, it was Navarro himself who often stressed that it was “absolutely necessary to have – and to indeed have – a direct relationship with the Pope, in order to know his thinking and line of thought with surety and clarity, and to be able to present himself to the world, to the Press Office and to public opinion as an authoritative interpreter of that thought, and not just hearsay.”
Throughout Navarro’s lengthy tenure working in the Vatican, there was absolutely “no doubt” that “he was very close to the Pope, so close that he must be considered one of the most important figures of that extraordinary pontificate.”
This, Lombardi said, is “not only because of his evident public visibility, but also for his role as intervention and advice. Certainly John Paul II had great confidence in him and held his service in high esteem.”
Burke, who is Lombardi’s successor as Director of the Holy See Press Office, referred to this relationship when he announced Navarro’s passing, posting a photo of him standing next to John Paul II with a big smile.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”tl” dir=”ltr”>Joaquin Navarro, 1936-2017.<br>Keep Smiling. <a href=”https://t.co/VCqL4GH5sS”>pic.twitter.com/VCqL4GH5sS</a></p>— Greg Burke (@GregBurkeRome) <a href=”https://twitter.com/GregBurkeRome/status/882672100091322370″>July 5, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
“I tweeted out a photo of Navarro-Valls and John Paul II smiling together, saying ‘Navarro, keep smiling.’ But I actually took that quote from John Paul II,” he said.
It was after a meeting between the Pope and the editors of Time Magazine, Burke explained. Navarro was standing off to the side a little, but smiling, happy with how things had gone and Pope St. John Paul II, noticing, said to him in English: “keep smiling.”
“You could tell that they had a very, very good relationship,” he said.
When it came to Navarro’s professional abilities, Lombardi said that at U.N. conferences the Spaniard would end up playing a primary and even diplomatic role, thanks to his “experience and communicative ability.”
“His intelligence, elegance and relational abilities were prominent. To that is added a great knowledge of languages and a true genius in presenting news and information content in a brilliant, attractive and concise way,” Lombardi said.
These are all gifts that made Navarro “an ideal person as a point of reference in the Vatican for the international information providers, but also for relations” with people in the public, communications and political spheres.
As both a layman and a consecrated member of Opus Dei, Navarro could be counted on as a competent and respected professional, but also as someone “whose dedication and faithful love of the Church could really be counted on, for the effective availability of both time and heart.”
For Lombardi, the lengthy duration of Navarro’s service as Director of the Press Office, his authoritativeness, efficiency and the quality of his work make his tenure “an age that will likely remain unique in the history of the Press Office and of Vatican communications.”
“Certainly, the dimension of communications and public relations in the immense pontificate of John Paul II cannot in any way be independent of Dr. Navarro’s work and personality,” he said. “It was an invaluable service to the Church.”
Lombardi voiced his gratitude to Navarro, specifically for the “courtesy and attention” he showed during the time they worked together.
“I always considered him a teacher in the way of carrying out his service and I never would have imagined to be called to succeed him,” Lombardi said, adding that his predecessor was “totally inimitable.”
“In the context of a different pontificate I tried to interpret and carry out the task assigned to me as best as I knew how, but preserving, for what was possible, his precious legacy,” he said.
Lombardi and Navarro remained friends even after the latter stepped down. For Lombardi, his predecessor was always “an example of a discreet, true and deep spiritual life, fully integrated with his work, a model of dedication to the service of the Pope and the Church, a teacher in communications.”
“Even for me – as I already said, but I willingly repeat – he was inimitable.”
[…]
Instead of 152 paragraphs and 47 pages, what the progressives wanted is 11 words in one line.” Maybe this: “Synodality is to Fatherhood as Woodstock is to the Apostolic Succession”.
And, too, about now returning to what the International Theological Commission wrote about synodality in 2018, there’s this:
“…It is essential that, taken as a whole, the participants give a meaningful and balanced image of the local Church, reflecting different vocations, ministries, charisms, competencies, social status and geographical origin. The bishop, the successor of the apostles [!] and shepherd of his flock [!] who convokes and presides over the local Church synod, is called to exercise there the ministry of unity and leadership with the authority which belongs to him [!]” (n. 79).
Had Grech, Hollerich & Co. folded this foundation into their vademecum, rather than with bishops reduced “primarily as facilitators,” much ink need not have been spilled in the past few years, and today the progressives would be spared much cognitive dissonance.
So, still, yes to always better “listening” and being heard, but in a theologians’ food fight, less herding of the laity to be conned, scripted, and conscripted.
“So what were we discussing?” Indeed.
“What were we discussing?” And, what more, or less, COULD have been discussed?
Literally, just now, yours truly found a dated but possibly relevant article tucked in a book on my random and sparse shelf. On February 14, 2013, three days after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation and two weeks before the resignation took effect, and a full month before his successor was elected (March 13), he (Benedict) addressed the clergy in Rome, “without notes and from the heart.”
Writer Rev. Matthew L. Lamb recalled the purpose of the Council, reflected in the Documents, and then he quotes generously the conclusion of Benedict’s “electrifying” address:
“I would now would like to add another point: there was the Council of the fathers—the true Church—but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council unto itself, and the world perceived the Council through these, through the media. Therefore the Council that immediately and efficiently arrived to the people was that of the media, not that of the fathers. And while the Council of the father was realized within the faith, and was a Council of the faith that seeks intellectus, that seeks to understand itself and seeks to understand the signs of God at that moment, that seeks to respond to the challenge of God at that moment and to find in the word of God the word for today and tomorrow, while the whole Council—as have said—was moving within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council the journalists was not realized, naturally, within the faith, but within the categories of today’s media meaning outside of the faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic.
“For the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different currents in the Church. It was obvious that the media were taking sides with that part which seemed to them to have the most in common with their world. These were those who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression ‘people of God,’ the power of the people, of the laity. Ther was this threefold question: the power of the pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and to the power of all, popular sovereignty.Naturally, for them this was the side to approve of, to promulgate, to favor.
“And so also for the liturgy: the liturgy was not of interest as an act of faith, but as a matter where understandable things are done, a matter of community activity, a profane matter. And we know that there was a tendency, that was also founded historically, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps even in the Old Testament, but in the New all that matters is that Christ died outside: that is, outside of the gates, meaning in the profane world. A sacrality therefore to be brought to an end, profanity of worship as well: worship is not worship but an act of the whole, of common participation and thus also participation as activity.
“These translations, trivialization of the idea of the Council were virulent in the praxis of the application of liturgical reform; they were born in a vision of the Council outside of its proper key, that of faith. And thus also in the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, historical, to be treated historically and nothing else, and so on. We know how this Council of the media was accessible to all. Therefore, this was the dominant, more efficient one, and has created so much calamity, so many problems, really so much misery: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialized….And the true Council had difficulty in becoming concrete, in realizing itself; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.”
(Citation is from http://chiesa.espresso.republic.it/articolo/1350435?eng=y, but does not work. The above is quoted directly from Rev. Matthew L. Lamb, “Vatican II After Fifty Years: The Virtual Council versus the Real Council,” The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, Fall/Winter 2012 including early 2013).
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refused to sign the document on religious liberty and Guadiem et Spes; the council was corrupted from within, with the media council managed from inside the council chamber by Cardinal Villot, who supplied lots of scandal to his fellow freemason running the French Newspaper LaCroix. (Information published from an interview in Catholic Catechism of the Crisis in the Church by Abbe Matthias Gaudron). This all helped their French Grande Orient lodge forment the phallic revolution of May ’68.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refused to sign the document on religious liberty and Guadiem et Spes; the council was corrupted from within, with the media council managed from inside the council chamber by Cardinal Villot, who supplied lots of scandal to his fellow freemason running the French Newspaper LaCroix. (Information published from an interview in Catholic Catechism of the Crisis in the Church by Abbe Matthias Gaudron). This all helped their French Grande Orient lodge forment the phallic revolution of May ’68. Cardinal Villot was a Luciferian Freemason.
Thanks for this prophetic contribution. What would it take to get those at the Vatican to read it let alone respond to it?
What will church history make of this? It will probably be condemned as a huge waste of time, resources and money and have nothing to show. It is an exercise in confusion that would make the Charge of the Light Brigade seem as a sensible military decision!
I wish they’d all just go home and resume their quiet lives of anonymity. They should return to worshipping God, frequenting the Sacraments (especially Confession), aspire to lives of holiness and proclaim the Gospel as Jesus exhorted all of us. As for Francis, since he is coming to a close of his pontificate, he needs to step back and take a fearless moral inventory of the impact his papacy has had on the Church and seek to restore unity to the Body which has been dreadfully fractured by actions he’s taken and things he’s spoken. This is best done by frequent meetings with a Spiritual Director – someone specifically chosen who won’t tell him what he wants to hear but, rather, what he needs to hear. In this last regard, I think the emeritus bishop of Tyler TX is well-suited for the role.
Mr. Beaulieu above – Thanks for the passage from Pope Benedict.
It about sums up my experience of the Church in the last 59 years.
Some of us do not have a forum to express ourselves. Synod on Synodality has been the Protestant approach and we have seem how their churches scrambled within 500 years. This will certainly break the church: Even when we were given questionnaire at the level of parish, I sensed there was unclear motive.This is not the Pope’s ideas, some evil power has cropped in which needs prayer. But God helps those who help themselves – you ask for help but you run, then God will help you run faster to defeat the enemy. We read what is happening in Vatican, but out hands are tied. Can some Cardinal or Bishop or someone able to see the Pope tell him that this path is evil and has already failed the Protestants.
“This is not the Pope’s ideas…”
The Synod on Synodality surely is his idea. How can you conclude otherwise, considering he called it, etc.?
Dr OJ, you suggest somone tell the Pope that this (synodal) path is evil and has already failed the Protestants.
May I suggest that is precisely why the Pope via Cardinal C6 Marx chose it? The objective is clear to anyone who has understood the Church Institution is occupied by anti-Catholic forces. (There is no other rational explanation for the terrible destruction 1962-1965 and then the fall out.)
Francis is the culmination of currents of dissent from Catholic orthodoxy that has characterized the whole post VII era. Except for some erroneous heterodox sentiments implied in various sentences, the documents of VII were orthodox but invited an unwarranted optimistic faith in the trajectory of contemporary history, which led to a great deal of junk theology and liturgical free-for-alls. Many clerics and prelates were captivated by bad theology, but few ever believed a distorted mind could ever rise to the top and raise havoc. Not only through his own foolishness, but in resurrecting dissidents of the past, Francis’ actions serve as a rebuke to the confident loyal Catholics who baselessly assumed the era of dissent died in the seventies. Human vanity never dies.
From what can be gathered from remarks here by theologian Myriam Wijlens and exchange between Raymond Arroyo and Robert Royal, Arroyo having access to some related documentation – the major impact on the Church will be governance. The implementation of permanent parish and or Diocesan councils.
What is of interest are regional councils with a larger share of independent authority. It appears to be a restructuring of Ecclesial governance more localized and horizontal rather than leading vertically to the Roman pontiff. Some theologians perceive a beneficial return to the early conciliar Church, although the early Church trended toward consolidation centered in the papacy. Especially when doctrinal issues on the nature of Christ came to fore.
From this writer’s perspective, after 2000 years of defining doctrine the purpose apparently is to implement a variegated approach to not simply regionally interpreting doctrine but inclusive of new rules or disbandment of doctrine. A restructure of a Church unified in name only. An ironic reproduction of the person whose Catholicism is limited to name. We might add, relevant to Peter Beaulieu’s quote of Benedict XVI upon resignation of the papacy, “These were those [the media and clergy] who were seeking the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression ‘people of God” the final success of Luther’s Reformation.
A major problem was created years ago when the local parishes started writing their own Mission Statements. The result was total CHAOS (compete disorder and confusion) and misguided Roles and Activities.