PopeWatch: Trust

He is so out of control, his own communications office is censoring him!

From The American Catholic

When it comes to the current gang at the Vatican we can only trust that they will attempt to deceive, in big ways and in small:

Italian media have raised an alarm over attempts by the Vatican communications office to censor Pope Francis’ words in an apparent effort to make them more palatable to a global audience.

The latest casualty of the Vatican’s editorial clean-up crew was the pope’s address last weekend to students and teachers from the San Carlo Institute in Milan, in which the pontiff often went off-script to add spontaneous and occasionally colorful commentary.

A comparison between the official Vatican transcript of the address and the video of the actual event reveals not only ordinary grammatical tweaks to correct the pope’s Italian, but the expurgation of entire expressions or phrases deemed potentially problematic. It is unclear whether the censorship has taken place with the pope’s knowledge and approval or without it.

As Breitbart News reported Monday, one important discrepancy between the two texts came when the pope “named names” of those he blames for wars in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan. During the meeting, the pope exclaimed with voice rising in anger that these wars have taken place because “rich Europe and America sell weapons to kill children and kill people.”

Curiously, the pope’s explicit mention of Europe and the United States was lifted from the transcript of Saturday’s address, and the pope’s censors replaced his provocative words with a gentler substitute.

“But why do they wage such a cruel war? Because other countries sell them arms, with which they kill children and people,” the redacted text reads (emphasis added).

The attentive folks at caffestoria.it discovered the doctoring of another controversial expression during the same speech in reference to migrants and mafias.

“People say they are delinquents,” the pope told his audience. “But we have our own share of delinquents here as well. It was not the Nigerians who invented the mafia. It is a national ‘treasure,’ the mafia is ours, ‘made in Italy,’ it’s ours. And all of us have the possibility of becoming delinquents.”

The pontiff’s words, meant as a rebuttal to those who have underscored the growth of a dangerous Nigerian mafia in Italy, were completely removed from the official transcript of his address offered by the Vatican, as if the pope had never said them.

Go here to Breitbart to read the rest.  It was that bold, bad man, Oliver Cromwell, who may have said to a painter, “Paint me as I am, warts and all.”, or words to that effect. Obviously that rule does not apply at the Vatican currently.