Vatican spokesman recounts coverage of Pope John Paul's final days

Published: 2006-05-01

ROME (CNS) -- When Pope John Paul II fell gravely ill last year, the Vatican's media machine had to walk a fine line between openness and alarmism, said Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls. On the one hand, any public move to expand media services would have been taken as a signal of impending papal death, Navarro-Valls said April 29. But it did not make sense to try to cover up the seriousness of the pope's crisis when he had lived his entire ministry in the public eye, the spokesman said. Navarro-Valls spoke about the "untold story" behind the papal transition at a seminar for church media professionals sponsored by the Opus Dei-run University of the Holy Cross in Rome. In the end, more than 4 million people and several thousand journalists descended on Rome in what became a global event. Despite years of planning, that was unexpected, Navarro-Valls said. "We tried to imagine, but we never imagined anything like this," he said.

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