Vatican Seeks Out FOX News

(Via Rising Hegemon) Just when I'm beginning to think conservatives are going to conquer the Universe, the conservatives start pulling bonehead moves. In Vatican terms, though, this may actually be an improvement:

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has brought in the Fox News correspondent in Rome to help improve its communications strategy as it tries to cope with years of communications blunders and one of its most serious scandals in decades, The Associated Press learned Saturday.

Greg Burke, 52, will leave Fox to become a senior communications adviser in the Vatican's secretariat of state, the Vatican and Burke told the AP.

...He defined his job, which he said he had been offered twice before, as: "You're shaping the message, you're molding the message, and you're trying to make sure everyone remains on-message. And that's tough."

...Burke, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, is a member of the conservative Opus Dei movement. Pope John Paul II's longtime spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, was also a member of Opus Dei.

...Even the Vatican's response to the leaks from within the Vatican of sensitive papal documents hasn't involved a terribly sophisticated public relations strategy. Just last week the Vatican No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, blamed the media and the devil for fueling the scandal and accused journalists of "pretending to be Dan Brown."

Brown wrote "The Da Vinci Code," the best-selling fictional account that portrayed Opus Dei — of which Bertone's new communications adviser is a member — as being at the root of an international Catholic conspiracy.