There is a liturgy that newsrooms celebrate with a devotion that no love for the truth could ever match: the liturgy of confrontation. It hardly matters what actually happens within the Leonine Walls, it hardly matters what the Pope says or does: the headline is already drafted, the script is already written, all that is missing is the pretext. And when the pretext fails to arrive, one is manufactured to order.
We have had yet another demonstration of this in recent hours, with the punctual return of the usual drumbeatsurrounding the planned meeting between Pope Leo XIV and Marco Rubio. The interpretive key, needless to say, is a single one: the showdown, the duel, the trial of strength. And yet Leo XIV has repeated it until he is blue in the face: stop treating the activity of the Pope as though it were some social-media spat or a banal political agenda. Words to the wind. Journalists press on regardless, unmoved and deaf to any plea, because the script sells and the script is sacrosanct.
This is how Trump's insults against the Pontiff become front-page material, and how every word uttered by Leo XIV is bent, wrung out and reduced to a retort aimed at the tycoon. When the Pope was carrying out an apostolic journey of enormous significance, the press could not have cared less: not a headline, not a piece of analysis, not a flicker of curiosity. Too little quarrelling, too little to flog. Far better to wait for the sentence one can lift out of context, the gesture one can dress up with innuendo, the right moment to stage the spectacle of confrontation all over again. If you stop to notice, of the Pope's magisterium and of the magnificent, at times piercingly sharp, words he pronounced in Africa, the press did not breathe a syllable. But the moment the row with Trump erupted, lo and behold, the Pope was suddenly newsworthy again: and his words, all at once, became raw material to be weaponised. And today, precisely as the Holy See is trying to mend fences, to rebuild relations, to take the heat out of the moment, the press is doing the exact opposite of what the moment demands: it piles in and fans the flames. Because peace does not sell, diplomacy does not cut through, and dialogue does not generate clicks.
The most recent case is textbook. The appointment of an entirely secondary bishop to Wheeling–Charleston, West Virginia, has commandeered the headlines of the major dailies, including Italian ones. Why on earth should so marginal an episcopal transfer deserve such prominence? Quite simple: because, according to them, it amounts to "a slap in the face to Trump". The prelate is a former undocumented migrant, therefore — so the newsroom logic runs — the Pope must have meant to send a political signal. Pity that Mgr Evelio Menjivar-Ayala was appointed bishop back in 2022, under a different pontificate, and that Leo XIV has merely reassigned him now to another diocese. A perfectly routine act of ecclesiastical governance dressed up as a gesture of rupture. But that is how the press operates: if the headline doesn't stoke the row, the job isn't done.
And this is precisely why newsrooms have come to harbour a visceral dislike for this Pope. From his very first meeting with them in the Vatican, on the morrow of his election, Leo XIV asked one specific thing: disarm the language, stop fomenting hatred, stop distorting reality. A request that, plainly, touched a raw nerve. Because to disarm the language would mean to dismantle the very engine of the system: the interests of newsrooms and proprietors are too powerful, and that engine cannot be switched off. They cannot stop, they will not stop. And they will go on rewriting every gesture of the Pope in the only grammar they know: the grammar of conflict.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Director, Silere non possum