Greg Burke has stood
down as Vatican spokesman and head of its press office amid a
revamp of the Holy See's communications set-up, the Vatican said
Monday.
It said Pope Francis had accepted the sudden resignations of
Burke and his deputy director, Paloma García Ovejero.
The pope has named longtime communications official
Alessandro Gisotti as interim head of the Vatican press office,
it said.
Gisotti was hitherto social media coordinator for the the
Dicastery for Communication.
Burke, 58,had been press office head and Vatican spokesman
since August 2016, when Ovejero was also appointed.
Burke had previously been senior communications adviser with
the Vatican's Secretariat of State and formerly a correspondent
for the Fox News Channel, and for Time Magazine, based in Rome.
Burke announced his surprise resignation in a tweet.
"At this time of transition in Vatican communications, we
think it's best the Holy Father is completely free to assemble a
new team," Burke wrote.
He and Garcia both thanked the pope.
"A stage is ending. Thank you for these two and a half
years," Garcia tweeted.
The pope recently overhauled the Vatican's media operations
for the second time by ousting the longtime editor of Vatican
newspaper L'Osservatore Romano and naming a new director of
editorial content for all Vatican media, Italian journalist
Andrea Tornielli.
The shake-up comes at a challenging time for Francis' papacy
with sex abuse cover-up allegations reaching the highest
echelons ahead of a February pow-wow with bishops on the issue.
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