INTRODUCTION

Following are key excerpts of an interview with Dr. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, Spokesman to H.H. John Paul II, conducted by John Tagliabue and published by the New York Times on June 29, 2002. The original article appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/29/international/europe/29NAVA.html

The M+G+R Foundation has added commentaries where appropriate. In other cases we chose to leave the underlying message for the discernment of each reader. Those who have eyes to see, will see; others, even if we explained Dr. Navarro-Valls statements extensively, will not.




June 29, 2002
A Doctor-Spokesman Attends to Papal Image
By John Tagliabue

Nineteen years into his career as papal spokesman, Dr. Navarro-Valls, now 65, still has occasional headaches with the centuries-old papal bureaucracy, the Roman Curia.


“The Roman Curia is, historically, a very old organization”, he said. “We are talking in terms of centuries. Its formal organization goes back to Sixtus V.” Sixtus was a 16th-century pontiff known as the “iron pope”, for creating the curial machinery essentially to crush the influence of cardinals and bishops.


Dr. Navarro-Valls took up his work after a career as a physician and psychiatrist. Early on he saw religion, medicine and psychiatry as linked: religion would answer the questions that psychiatry could not. “I was fascinated at the time”, he said of himself as a young man, “by those big questions, about life and death, and what makes man happy.”

In his dealings with the press, Dr. Navarro-Valls acknowledges that he finds uses for his psychiatric training. But he struggles with the question of whether to follow the suggestion that the church should “use the media.”


A medical doctor and professor of psychiatry at the universities of Barcelona and Granada in his native Spain,... He worked as a journalist until 1983, and just as he had decided to return to medicine, he received an invitation to lunch at the Vatican.


It seems that Pope John Paul, then five years into his papacy, had heard praise of him from a number of people – some belonging to the secretive Catholic men’s society Opus Dei, which the doctor had joined in his early 20’s. Several months later, the pope invited Dr. Navarro-Valls to overhaul the Vatican press service.


“My hobby became my profession”, he said, laughing. “And medicine became my hobby”.


Dr. Navarro-Valls waved a copy of an unclassified cable relating to that conference – a message to the State Department from President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the Holy See, Raymond L. Flynn. It described the irritation of some delegates over perceived Vatican obstructionism and manipulation, but added that the “skill and tenacity” of the Vatican’s diplomats “and the public affairs virtuosity of its chief spokesman —the Spaniard Joaquín Navarro-Valls, a close confidant of the pope— took many by surprise.”


“I began from the question that arises in psychiatry of how the media in general, including advertising, influence human attitudes, both for better and for worse”, he said. In 1970, his first book, “Manipulation in Advertising”, appeared; three others have followed, on the media, education and the family.


Talking of those years, he described a “pilgrimage” to the London house where Freud had lived.


He is still very much involved with Opus Dei, in which he now holds a senior rank that entails a commitment to celibacy.


Early on, the pope, whom he sees daily, assured him of access to the Vatican bureaucracy. “He opened doors”, Dr. Navarro-Valls said. “Without his approach to the media, without the mentality of the pope, change would have been impossible.”

Getting information from the Vatican can still be laborious (though Dr. Navarro-Valls bridles at comparisons to Kremlin secretiveness).


He is highly regarded by the Vatican press corps, whose members appreciate what he has achieved given the peculiarities imposed by Vatican constraints.


To this day, for example, the pope does not hold news conferences or grant interviews.



EPILOGUE – Original

As we have demonstrated in a number of articles (1), His Holiness John Paul II was not a free man. His “keeper” was an Opus Dei psychiatrist whose first book was entitled Manipulation in Advertising, and that was what he did with the Papacy for nineteen years.

Yes, H.H. John Paul II was indeed Mary’s Pope and because Her Maternal guidance and protection he did much in spite of his keepers.

Why did God allowed this to happen? We refer the reader to “The Trajectory of H.H. John Paul II” (2) – in there you should find the answer.


EPILOGUE – Added on May 2, 2005

On an extensive interview granted by Dr. Joaquín Navarro-Valls to his former employer the Spanish Daily ABC and published by said daily on Sunday, April 17th, 2005, pp 10-12 there are two statements which we find of interest enough to include them in this document.


It does not seem necessary for us to comment upon those remarks. May those who have Eyes will See (3) what they must.









En Español:  Joaquín Navarro-Valls, psiquiatra, el portavoz oficial del Vaticano - Extractos Comentados