The brand is everything. Name-recognition, credibility, reliability are all things highly valued by a discriminating public and advertising the brand is all about value creation.

The greatest guarantee of value-adding is good will and the market place determines that. Right now the Vatican is desperately seeking both. It needs to promote the brand and clarify product identity.

The new help is Greg Burke. He is an Opus Dei numerary, previously Rome correspondent for Time Magazine and the formerly Legion owned National Catholic Register (not Reporter). Most recently he was with Fox News.

Burke knows Rome and the news and information industry. He knows the public and the power of persuasive language.

But his immediate focus is getting his employers to understand the power of modern information technology and public perceptions about the credibility factor of the information communicated.

In a recent interview with Catholic News Service, he commented:

My appointment reveals the perception of the need to pay attention to the media not only at the moment of communication but already in the preparation of what will be communicated. I’m not a public relations expert but I know what journalists seek, I am used to monitoring the information scene, I have some ability to understand on what thing a word or news that is given will fall.

Lately the Vatican Press Office has been working overtime attempting to negotiate the rapids of a power struggle between the Roman Curia and the Secretariat of State.

The latter’s head, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has determined to assert total control over all Vatican communications. In doing so, he has paid dearly and is now under constant siege internally and externally.

All of this has also taken a toll on the patience and dedication of Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, the Office’s spokesman. Burke’s assistance and expertise will no doubt be welcomed by Lombardi, who is keen to promote genuine professionalism, candour and transparency.

Coupled with Cardinal Bertone’s story is the ongoing tabloid drama of Curial internecine, corruption, power-games, intrigue and deception which graphically indicate advanced institutional decay and decline. There is an unholy war raging in the Vatican. It is doing good neither for product identity nor the tainted Catholic brand.

As a member of Opus Dei, Burke would be sensitive to a perception that his organisation is highly secretive and that the Vatican itself is seen in a similar light.

Those in top Church leadership have become accustomed to working within a sub-culture of shame and honour, privilege, status and protectiveness of position at all costs. Vatican bureaucracy has long operated on graded levels of truth and transparency.  Real, unadulterated truth, even pontifical secrecy, is restricted to the clerical managerial class while a vastly different cosmeticised version is filtered through to the docile and compliant pew-sitters of the lumpenproletariat.

No doubt Burke would be conscious of John Ralston Saul’s definition of PR as a negative form of imagination. Mussolini said “invention is more useful than truth.”

Full Story:  CathBlog - Getting brand Vatican 'on message'

Source: CathNews