of Argentina's worst terrorist attack, using what is increasingly
becoming his signature way of communicating: an amateur
Smartphone video message, recorded on the fly by a visiting
friend in the comfort of Francis's Vatican hotel room.
To be aired on Friday during the official commemoration of the
1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires that
killed 85 people, the video is the latest evidence that Francis has
no qualms about circumventing the Vatican's media machine to get
his message out, for better or worse.
A close friend of the pope's, Claudio Epelman, executive director
of the Latin American Jewish Congress, shot the video last month
on his Samsung phone when he visited Francis at the Vatican.
Epelman said he asked Francis, who was an auxiliary bishop in
Buenos Aires at the time of the attack, if he would like to send a
message to Argentina's Jewish community to mark the anniversary.
"He thought about it for half a second and said, 'Do you have your
cellphone with you?'" Epelman told The Associated Press. "And I
said 'yes' and then he said, 'Good, let's record it now!'"
In the message, the pope speaks off-the-cuff, with the hum of
passing cars audible through the open windows of his hotel room.
He condemns terrorism as "lunacy" and says Argentina must come
to terms with the damage and pain the unsolved crime still causes.
"Today, together with my solidarity and my prayers for all the
victims, comes my desire for justice. May justice be done!" he
says.
Paedophiles
Last year, Argentina and Iran approved a "truth commission"
aimed at moving the investigation forward by enabling Argentine
prosecutors to travel to Tehran to question former Iranian
officials suspected of organising the attack.
But little progress has been made and Jewish groups say
Argentina's failure to press Iran guarantees impunity. Tehran
denies any involvement.
It's the second time Francis has provided a homemade smartphone
message to issue a directed message, and confirms that the 77-
year-old pope is perfectly comfortable using new media and
technology to communicate, even though he grew up listening to
opera on Argentine radio on Sunday afternoons, keeps a hand-
written agenda and has never owned a cellphone.
Earlier this year, he caused shockwaves by recording an iPhone
video message of brotherly friendship to a gathering of
Pentecostals, one of the Catholic Church's fiercest competitors for
Christian souls around the world.
It was shot by an evangelical clergyman friend and broadcast at a
Pentecostal conference, whose participants responded by praying
in tongues for the pope and sending back a video message of
thanks.
While Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI sent the first papal tweet from
the Vatican's @Pontifex account in 2012, it was a carefully
orchestrated affair arranged by his Vatican communications
team.
Francis is breaking new ground by going it alone, granting
audiences and interviews he arranges himself and allowing
trusted friends to deliver messages to groups he might otherwise
have a hard time reaching through official Vatican channels.
"Pope Francis is clearly very comfortable communicating in new
ways, and seems unconstrained by the 'old ways' of doing things",
said the Reverend James Martin, a Jesuit author. "And like Jesus,
he grasps that the best way to communicate is by speaking to people
plainly, and by using accessible media. For Jesus, that medium was
often the parable; for Francis it might be an encyclical, but it also
might be YouTube or a smartphone."
Francis' willingness to shun the Vatican's bulky press operation in
favour of the immediacy and unstuffiness of new and unofficial
media has come at a cost.
Just last week, the Vatican spokesperson, the Reverend Federico
Lombardi, was forced to issue a lengthy clarification after Francis
chatted with an Italian atheist and journalist, Eugenio Scalfari.
In the interview published in the left-leaning newspaper La
Repubblica, Scalfari quoted the pope as saying that there were
cardinals among paedophile clergymen and that he would find a
solution to the problem surrounding the celibate priesthood.
Scalfari has admitted he doesn't take notes or record his
interviews, and merely reconstructs them after the fact as he
remembers them. As a result, Lombardi said, the quotes attributed
to Francis cannot be confirmed. And he suggested Scalfari might
have intentionally manipulated the pope's words "for naive
readers".
Francis clearly doesn't seem to care: It was the second interview
he has given Scalfari. After the first, Lombardi was forced to issue
a clarification as well.
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