VATICAN (CNS): “Your work should be creative, always, and go above and beyond” the usual, he said, Pope Francis told the people at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication during a May 24 visit its offices. The pope said to not let a complex organisational hierarchy stifle creativity, hamper decision-making and impede serving its actual purpose.
If everything is “too well ordered, in the end, it ends up being caged and not helping,” the pope said, adding, “The problem is (making sure) that this system that is so big and complicated works.”
He also said that employees of its two outlets, Vatican Radio and the L’Osservatore Romano newspaper, should ask themselves every day how many people are they really reaching “because there is the danger—for all organizations—the danger of a lovely organisation, a lovely job, but it does not get to where it has to go.”
After visiting managers and staff in the building, the pope delivered impromptu remarks in the ground floor conference room, thanking employees for their work, and noting how the different entities were all together and well-organised.
He told them of a problem he noted when he was in Argentina, was that when someone got an important new position at a company, the first thing they would do was order elegant new furnishings at an upscale office supply store without having even looked at what the office already had because it had to be “all new, all perfect, beautiful.”
‘Your work should be creative, always, and go above and beyond” the usual… If everything is “too well ordered, in the end, it ends up being caged and not helping”
Pope Francis
But that person would not ensure that the actual enterprise would work, he said, adding that “it is important that all this beauty, all this organisation work (and) to work is to go, to walk” or journey.
Another example of organisational “functionalism” getting in the way, he said, is having too many “undersecretaries” or administrators serving under a director. Whenever someone needs something to get done, “they go to the undersecretary who has to fix it and who says, ‘Wait a second, I’ll get back to you,’ and they have to call the director … namely, it doesn’t work.”
The pope noted that it ends up being a system where the person cannot decide or have his or her own say, making it “lethal” for the organisation by putting it “to sleep and killing it,” he said.
He asked the dicastery’s management and staff to be careful and make sure that the organisation is working by helping foster creativity.
“Your work should be creative, always, and go above and beyond” the usual, he said. If everything is “too well ordered, in the end, it ends up being caged and not helping.”
To make sure an organisation is really working, “it is necessary to make sure everyone has enough freedom to work, that they have the ability to take risks and not go and ask permission, always permission … this is paralysing,” he said.
‘it is necessary to make sure everyone has enough freedom to work, that they have the ability to take risks and not go and ask permission, always permission … this is paralysing,’
Pope Francis
The pope also sat in a studio with two Vatican Radio journalists to offer a brief, live reflection to listeners.
Massimiliano Menichetti, editor-in-chief of Vatican Radio and Vatican News, explained that offering programmes in multiple languages via traditional broadcast radio, satellite radio, Internet and short wave was part of fulfilling the pope’s mission to “go to the peripheries where no other means (of communication) arrives.”
Menichetti said, “We try to never leave anyone all alone, even during this time of a pandemic.”
Photo: CNS/Vatican Media
Pope Francis responded by thanking staff for their work, but he said there were many reasons to be worried about the radio and the newspaper and that there was one thing he was most concerned about: “How many people listen to the radio and how many read L’Osservatore Romano?” he said.
“Because our job is to reach the people, that the work that is done here— which is beautiful, it is great, it is tiring—get to the people,” he said, recognising their service in multiple languages and shortwave transmissions.
“But the question that you must ask is: how many? It gets to how many people?” he said.
The danger all organizations face, the pope said, is ensuring they accomplish what they set out to do.
Pope Francis said it reminded him of the classic fable by Aesop of the mountain groaning in labour only to give birth to a tiny mouse. It is often interpreted as a warning against believing in big or boastful talk because some promise more than they can deliver.
The Dicastery for Communication’s entities supply images, news and features in almost 50 languages for radio, video, print and internet. It also coordinates the efforts of the Vatican publishing house, the Vatican press office, the Vatican’s video, television and photography services, Vatican Radio—which was celebrating its 90th anniversary—and L’Osservatore Romano, which was celebrating its 160th anniversary.
According to the Vatican press office, there were 250 million page-views on Vatican News in 2020, with an average of 21 million page views a month, peaking at 46 million during the first Covid-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) lockdown in the early spring.
More than 1,000 radio stations around the world are partnered with Vatican Radio to rebroadcast its transmissions and about 21,500 people read the Vatican newspaper—either online or in print—each day, and there are about 40,000 subscribers to its print editions published in Italian and other languages, the press office said.
