Terry Prone: ‘Fake news’ in the Vatican amid the struggle over the Pope’s reforms

Synodality — the Pope’s desire to have the Church begin to listen to local communities and the grassroots faithful — drives traditionalists nuts

Pope Francis addressed soldiers and their families on Saturday in Rome. It was his first public appearance since his scheduled trip to Africa was postponed due to problems with his knee. Picture: Andrew Medichini/AP

The last time I was in Rome, I dived into the Trevi fountain, fully dressed, having first secretly stashed my watch in the pocket of the khakis worn by my beloved.

It was burning, baking hot, that late afternoon, with people seeking out any shade they could to reduce the sun’s onslaught.

Diving into the Trevi fountain seemed seem like a good idea, if only to cool down, although that wasn’t why I did it. I did it to show off.

When I swam back to the point of entry and my beloved lifted me off the pool wall into a sodden embrace, it seemed that all of Rome approved of the two of us, such was the round of applause.

Later, as we walked back to the hotel, me drying off but also dripping on the cobbles, we met people walking the other way who nodded and smiled and murmured “Ah, Trevi”, suggesting that they were familiar with the gesture.

That was 50 years ago on holiday. Last week, I was back in Rome for work. The city, in the intervening years, has developed more cars, many of them tiny two-seaters and, where Dublin has ranks of bicycles lined up ready to be rode by anyone weary of walking, Rome, on literally every street, has e-scooters.

You register online, pick up a scooter, use it to get to where you want to be, and abandon it there. You don’t even have to slot it into a particular rank.

If everywhere you look in Rome is a statue or a ruin, everywhere else you look is an e-scooter.

They add immeasurably to the thrilling low comedy that is Rome’s traffic. Romans park in a rabidly random way, so the streets are jam-packed with cars on all sides and corners.

Negotiating around them would seem to call for strategic vision and extreme calm, whereas native drivers, particularly of taxis, apply maximum speed and a kind of joyous recklessness which means that even if the passenger is belted in, they end up holding on for dear life to the roof handles and the seat in front of them. (Electric cars don’t seem to have caught on in a big way, nor are charging points immediately evident.)

What is evident, however, is a retained respect for Covid-19, of which the most obvious evidence is the high-quality white mask, worn on the wrist as an accessory by men and women alike, ready for deployment when they move indoors.

Tourists either ignore masks altogether or wear them all the time, even before they go into the next basilica or shrine on their map.

Apropos shrines: Irish mainstream media, for the last week or so, has been carrying stories of the Pope planning to visit one dedicated to the first Pope to resign — Celestine V. Not only did Celestine put in for his P45, he did it remarkably quickly, lasting only five months.

But then he was a quiet monk who had been elected against his will in the first place. The news that Pope Francis is planning to make a day trip to the cathedral in L’Aquila where Pope Celestine V is buried has caused speculation that the current Pontiff is working up to retiring.

When I raised this with a social media expert in the Curia, he said it was classic fake news. The visit to the shrine or the mooted plan to retire? The plan to retire, he said, furiously. 

Francis is definitely not going to retire. Or resign. He has no such plans. Fake news.

Someone else suggested that the reason for the fake news was to encourage right-wingers in the Vatican in the belief that they could outlive the Pontiff and roll back all this environmental nonsense he had published in the Laudato Si encyclical and — rather more importantly, from their point of view — put an end to any momentum that might be building around the Pope’s idea of synodality.

Synodality apparently signifies the Pope’s desire to have the Church begin to listen to local communities and the grassroots faithful.

It drives traditionalists nuts. They see it as democracy losing the run of itself and creeping into an institution that gets its instructions directly from the deity and needs no input from the lower orders, who are there, effectively, to obey those instructions when delivered by the hierarchy.

These traditionalists were given extra hope by the announcement, two days ago, that His Holiness was postponing his planned visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan so as not to interrupt the therapy being applied to his banjaxed knee.

As we walked back to the hotel, me drying off but also dripping on the cobbles, we met people walking the other way who nodded and smiled and murmured 'Ah, Trevi', suggesting that they were familiar with the gesture.

The social media man spoke of these traditionalists with curled lip. The implication of his diatribe about fake Papal news was that the conservatives were making stuff up in order to encourage themselves.

He had personally investigated the fake news report and posted detailed, evidenced refutations on several of the websites he curates. 

How, I asked. How what, he responded. How had he investigated the fake news report? Is it not true that the Pope is planning to visit the shrine mentioned earlier?

Yes, he admitted, that much is true.

So, I asked, what’s not true?

That the Pope is planning to retire, he said impatiently.

Did you ask him?

Of course not.

So you didn’t go back to the source? The horse’s mouth?

This confused the issue quite some, because the horse’s mouth was a new concept to him, he not coming from Ireland or England.

Of course not, he said again, once the horse’s mouth was sorted.

“Well,” I asked, beginning to weary of the horse and indeed of the Pope, “if you didn’t ask him, how can you know he won’t resign?”

He looked at me as if I was the other end of the apocryphal horse and told me Francis wasn’t the resigning kind. Which may be true, but doesn’t conclusively establish the earlier rumour as fake news.

However, I was too dispirited by what had happened to the Trevi fountain to fight with him.

I had just discovered that diving into the fountain has moved from being a romantic gesture into something unacceptable in Italy’s capital city.

Any young people, besotted with love, who are still minded to fling themselves into the water at Trevi prior to wetly walking home, had better have a fast getaway e-scooter ready, because otherwise they’ll be arrested, charged, and fined up to €450.

No fines apply to throwing coins into the pool, which people do in the belief that it will make their wishes come true.

It could be argued that coins litter and pollute it whereas the occasional diver does it no permanent harm.

But times have changed and the presence of a human body in the fountain now makes a dangerously antisocial act out of what used to be an impulsive gesture of affection.

I’m still glad I did it, all those years ago. Ah, Trevi…