With the new year, “L’Osservatore Romano” is turning over a new leaf of its own. Pope Francis wasn’t satisfied with the weekly edition in Spanish that has existed for almost fifty years and is now directed by the Argentine Silvina Pérez. He wanted a new edition just for Argentina, which was launched in recent days complete with his signed inaugural
dedication. And he has entrusted its editorship to another of his countrymen, Marcelo Figueroa.
And it is precisely the selection of this editor that is the biggest news, as
Settimo Cielo anticipated last November 25.
The unprecedented news is that Figueroa is not a Catholic but a Protestant, a pastor of the Presbyterian Church and for twenty-five years the director of the Argentine Biblical Society, in addition to being a longstanding friend of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who wanted him to be there on his recent journey to Lund, for the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, and has now put him into none other than the director’s chair of the official newspaper of the Holy See.
In Argentina, it was Figueroa who seated at the same table, with himself in the middle, the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires and the Jewish rabbi Abraham Skorka, for a series of conversations broadcast by Canal 21, the television channel of the archdiocese, later transcribed for a book published in Italian by Libreria Editrice Vaticana with the title: “Conversazioni sulla Bibbia”.
That cycle of meetings was interrupted at its thirty-second episode by Bergoglio’s election as pope. The thirty-third, left unproduced, was to have as its topic the word “friendship,” as Figueroa later recounted in “L’Osservatore Romano.”
Today Figueroa is right at home at Santa Marta. In the spring of 2015, when he had to undergo a delicate surgical operation back in Argentina, Francis stayed close to him with continual telephone calls and letters. After he recovered, in September of the same year the pope gave a long interview to him for FM Milennium 106.7, a Buenos Aires radio station. And a year later, he even promoted him not only as director of the Argentine weekly edition of “L’Osservatore Romano,” but even as a “columnist” for the bigger daily edition.
His solemn investiture in this latter role was a curious article in two voices: his own and that of the undisputed leader of the editorialists of “L’Osservatore Romano,” who is also the coordinator of its women’s supplement, “Donne Chiesa Mondo,” Lucetta Scaraffia:
The article, on a whole page of the November 9 issue of “L’Osservatore Romano,” was constructed in the form of a conversation and was a sort of assessment of the pope’s journey to Lund and therefore of the current state of relations between Catholics and Protestants.
But it had a precedent that is worth remembering.
A few days earlier, on November 1, Lucetta Scaraffia had published in “Corriere della Sera” an article on the same topic that had brought dismay to the Catholic camp: