Lord Patten, it has been announced, will be advising Pope Francis on improving the Vatican’s use of media. Cue immediate and inevitable misreporting of what that actually means in practice. The Daily Mail led the way with the headline “God’s Spinner” and opening line “Tory peer Lord Patten has become a spin doctor for the Pope - just two months after stepping down from the BBC for health reasons.” The Guardian was not alone in reaching for sexual abuse scandal as a common feature between Patten’s tenure at the BBC and the Vatican, the implicit suspicion being that the Church needs someone to spin that disaster away.

The reality is that Lord Patten has been appointed to a role less to do with spin and far more to do with a belated recognition on the part of the Church that its media operations are quite simply not fit for purpose. A bewildering array of different communication branches exist within the Vatican and a large portion of the budget is taken up by Vatican Radio and the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

The newspaper is infamously dated, despite worthy recent and ongoing attempts at modernization. Vatican Radio, which broadcasts in 40 languages, is inordinately expensive and in an internet age represents very poor value for money. By contrast smaller, more modern approaches have been very successful recently. The Pope’s various twitter feeds are amongst the best followed in the world (even the Latin language one clocks over 250,000 followers and has been credited with a role in the revival of the popularity of Latin!). The Pope App has also been a great success.

These more recent developments surely point towards the future. A more innovative media approach that takes better account of social media, the internet and smart phones, with an express intention of being able to reach new, younger, audiences. That is the brief on which Lord Patten will be on the committee that will advise the Church. Saving money, or at least optimising what is currently being spent is also likely to be high on the agenda.

Disappointingly then for the Mail and Guardian, this appointment represents not the sinister attempt of the Church to brush up its image and sweep away the clerical abuse scandal but a rather more mundane and sensible reform of an operation that was distinctly underdeveloped. All of which explains the appointment of Lord Patten, a safe pair of hands who, though not without his critics, has the experience and credibility to be able to advise the Vatican on how it needs to fix and improve upon the most pressing areas.

In Lord Patten the Vatican will hope it has found a safe pair of hands to steer a large bureaucracy towards the reforms it needs without ruffling too many feathers along the way. The more relevant question is not whether he will find a way of repairing the Church’s image on sexual abuse, but whether his committee will be able to find anything really innovative in reaching out to younger people. If it can’t find a way to do that then no amount of spin will help it makes its message relevant.

Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos

Image from wikimedia available in the public domain