How to Cover the Catholic Church

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Covering the Vatican | 23
official statements issued by the Holy See Press Office. It’s sent out a few hours
after the Bollettino, but in plenty of time to follow up on a story stateside.
To subscribe in English, go to
Note that the VIS bulletins are only a rundown; the actual Bollettini may
include additional information.
Keep an eye on Vatican Radio r noteworthy
interviews with church officials. If you read Italian, the daily e-mail summary,
including transcripts of the news program, can be informative. Send a request
to you want to subscribe. Otherwise, the
English-language home page s a list
of news and feature stories, though you’ll need to download audio files for
anything other than headlines. Also available on the Web site are general audi-
ences, papal Masses and other Vatican events. If you’re in Rome, tune to FM
93.3 or 105 to catch English news live at 8:30 a.m. and 6:15 p.m., and to FM
93.3 for the English feature program at 9:50 p.m. and again the next morning
at 7 a.m. Both English news and feature broadcasts are also available on the
Web site, and certain clips can be found as podcasts on iTunes.
The Vatican publishes a daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano (The
Roman Observer). You’ll recognize some information from the Bollettini, but
more significant are the various scholarly articles that can serve as glosses on
Vatican statements and church teaching. For example, the paper ran a piece in
2005 that further explained the Congregation for Catholic Education’s instruc-
tion on accepting homosexuals as candidates for the priesthood. In 2006 a
biology professor wrote an article on intelligent design, stating that the theory
was not science. Unfortunately not all the articles are reprinted in the weekly
English edition, which comes out on Wednesdays, and only a few of those
are available on the Vatican’s Web site at
you want the whole newspaper, you’ll have to subscribe
to the print edition. As with Vatican Radio, journalists can sign up online for
a daily e-mail, which contains the entire newspaper, but the service is only
available in Italian. For archival material and back issues, send an e-mail to
Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of
Peoples, is another handy resource o receive the agency’s
news roundups via e-mail, send a request to cause
the congregation oversees missionary work, Fides focuses mainly on news out-
side the Vatican, but it does offer some good interviews with Vatican officials
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