If you have lived and worked in Washington, D.C., you know that Beltway-land has its own unique media traditions.
For example, no one is surprised when politicos issue somewhat embarrassing statements and proposals late on Friday afternoons, especially during the seasons in which half of the city’s journalists and chattering-class superstars are parked in traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Annapolis on their way to the beach. After all, who pays attention to the news on Saturdays and it’s too late to do a major feature for the Sunday newspaper.
Then there is the “October surprise,” which is when a presidential candidate who is trailing — especially an incumbent president — makes a wild domestic policy proposal, foreign policy gesture or accusation against his enemies in an attempt to jump-start the race and gain ground in the polls.
With that in mind, it’s interesting to pause and think about an interesting Crux analysis piece by editor and super-insider John L. Allen, Jr., that just ran with this headline: “Pope’s ‘August surprise’ could be most counter-cultural stand of all.” Allen didn’t make a specific proposal for an upcoming bombshell, but did say that this pope has a history of making news during a month when Italians — it's almost a sacred tradition — are on vacation.
I asked Clemente Lisi, our resident Italian and Catholic-media pro, what he thought of this thesis. He quickly answered — even though (irony alert) he is on vacation this week. His email said:
I know the feeling well. I spent every August in Italy as a child visiting relatives and being on vacation. And yes, everything was closed!
This papal August surprise could very well be a symptom of the media’s lack of attention during this month. In the pre-Donald Trump years, August was typically considered a “slow month” — at least in the United States — and also a time when many editors took time off after a long year. The same thing happens in Italy, probably on a grander scale.
I don’t want to assess sinister motives to this pontiff, but part of it could be because lots of people aren’t paying attention to news when they are “off the grid.” This “August surprise” could happen again only because it has been a busy summer already. It can also happen because there seems to be some urgency on the part of Francis’ allies to ram through changes following his recent health scare. I think all these factors could contribute to something.
This brings us back to the Allen analysis. Here is passage about his thesis:
Popes, of course, don’t have to stand for reelection, yet every year Pope Francis nonetheless has delivered what we might call an “August surprise” — doing or saying something that shakes up the status quo.
The surprise usually isn’t so much whatever the pope did, but the fact he’s doing anything at all during a month when Italians are trained from birth to believe they have a natural law right to an undisturbed vacation. …
Francis doesn’t slow down a bit in August. I mean, his family is from the northern Italian region of Piedmont, for God’s sake … has he seriously never heard of ferragosto?
Say what? That’s Greek to me.
The term is an elision of the Latin term Feriae Augusti, meaning “the holidays of the Emperor Augustus.” As the name suggests, it’s a traditional summer break that reaches all the way back to ancient Rome. Though technically ferragosto falls on August 15, the feast of the Assumption, in reality it’s a period rather than a single day. Most Italians take at least the week off, and many take the entire month.
While Americans and other cultures may stagger vacations throughout the year, Italy basically crams them all into one somnambulant month.
To prove his point, Allen pounded out a year-by-year list of the “August surprises” from the Pope Francis team, everything from a 2013 Vatican photo op with soccer great and fellow Argentine Lionel Messi to a meet-and-greet with Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerburg.
But here are a few of the ideas with real doctrinal meat on the news bone:
2015: During a Wednesday audience, Francis said pointedly that divorced and remarried Catholics are not excommunicated and should be shown greater understanding. The statement foreshadowed his tumultuous two synods on the family, culminating in Amoris Laetitia. He also confirmed his gay-friendly approach by sending a friendly letter to the author of an Italian children’s book touting different models of the family, at a time when the book actually had been banned by the city of Venice.
Or how about this one?
2018: The pontiff traveled to Ireland, where the impact of clerical sexual abuse scandals has been keenly felt, hard on the heels of a grand jury report in Pennsylvania that reignited criticism of the Church’s response, and later issued a dramatic letter “the people of God” on the abuse crisis. Francis also revised the catechism, the official compendium of Catholic teaching, to make the death penalty unacceptable in all cases.
As we say around here: Read it all. And any thoughts about what Pope Francis might do this August to shake things up a bit? Maybe change his mind on the Latin Mass? #Ducking.
FIRST IMAGE: Graphic from the American In Rome homepage.