Pope Francis adds two vice directors to Vatican communication dicastery

Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, speaks at a May 2, 2023, press conference. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/ACI Prensa

Vatican City, Jul 18, 2024 / 10:18 am (CNA).

Pope Francis on Thursday added two new vice directors to the senior management of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication.

Massimiliano Menichetti, 53, is a 20-year veteran of Vatican News, where he has served in a number of leadership roles, including deputy editor-in-chief, manager of the multimedia publishing center, and coordinating chief of Vatican Radio-Vatican News. He has also been a journalism lecturer at Italian universities and co-authored a book in 2017 on the Vatican trial known as “Vatileaks 2.”

Menichetti joins two other vice directors in the editorial department, working under director Andrea Tornielli, who joined the Vatican communications team in 2018 after coordinating the “Vatican Insider” webpage for the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Former Italian TV director Francesco Valle, 52, has been named vice director of the general affairs office of the dicastery. He started working for Vatican communications in 2023 as manager for commercial activities.

Valle will work under Paolo Nusiner, who has led the general affairs office of the Dicastery for Communication since 2015. 

Nusiner, who was formerly president of the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire for 18 years, is also president of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, with campuses in cities throughout Italy, and president of the Tiber Island-Gemelli Island Hospital in Rome.

Existing Vatican communications leadership

The Dicastery for Communication has been led since 2018 by Paolo Ruffini, the first layman to be named prefect of a department of the Roman Curia. Father Lucio Adrián Ruiz is the dicastery’s secretary.

Others on the management team include Andrea Monda, director of the Vatican’s long-running newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, and Matteo Bruni, director of the Holy See Press Office.

Nataša Govekar, a theologian from Slovenia, heads the communication dicastery’s theological-pastoral department.

Govekar is also a member of the directorial team of the Centro Aletti, an art and theological center in Rome founded by the disgraced Father Marko Rupnik.

Vatican publishing house signs deal

Also on Thursday, the Vatican’s publishing house signed an agreement with a Catholic university press in Rome to help with the editorial production of some of its publications.

The Libreria Editrice Vaticana (LEV) will assist the Urbaniana University Press with “the editorial management of the scientific production” of the university’s historic publishing service, according to a July 18 press release.

Part of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, the Urbaniana University Press is the successor to a historic publishing house from the 17th century — the Propaganda Fide Polyglot Printing House.

Propaganda Fide is the historic name of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, which is focused on missionary work and assisting missionary territories in the Church.

Four years after the then-sacred congregation was founded in 1622, Pope Urban VIII created the “Polyglot Printing Office of Propaganda Fide” for the publication of Catholic texts in diverse, non-Latin languages, according to Agenzia Fides.

According to the missionary-focused news agency, which is under the Dicastery for Evangelization, the first volume printed by the Polyglot Printing House “was probably a Greek version of the ‘Guía de Pecadores’ by the Dominican Luigi da Granada, written in 1588.”

This work “was followed by works on grammar, law, controversies, and spirituality, all aimed at serving the missionaries in the East,” Agenzia Fides reported.

“With publications in multiple languages, the Polyglot Printing House laid the foundations for intercultural communication and an unprecedented dissemination of the Christian message and knowledge,” according to a press statement from the Dicastery for Communication and the Urbaniana University Press.

“This mission is more relevant today than ever in an increasingly interconnected world,” the statement continues, noting the press’ present-day commitment to increasing cultural and scientific publications in languages such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Konkani.

According to the press release, the agreement of the two presses to join editorial forces on some publications fulfills the instructions in article 183 of Pope Francis’ 2022 apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium, to unify “the Holy See’s activities in the area of communication so that the entire system consistently responds to the needs of the Church’s evangelizing mission.”