Visits: 9
ROME — On the flight back to Rome after a papal trip to the United Arab Emirates last month, the Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki got an unexpected surprise.
As the pope’s customary news conference with the reporters was winding down, a large square cake was wheeled into the cabin and placed next to him. “They told me we’re celebrating Valentina’s 150th birthday,” he said with a laugh, adding: “She doesn’t look so mummified to me.”
The celebration was actually for a milestone that even the most seasoned Vatican correspondents rarely reach: It was the 150th papal trip for Ms. Alazraki, who has covered Italy and the Vatican for Televisa, Mexico’s largest media conglomerate, since 1974.
After cutting the cake, she offered the first piece to the pope, but he declined, saying, “It will make me get fat.” Then the pope — and the cake — were whisked away.
That was the last Ms. Alazraki saw of the cake. She did not get one nibble. Even Alessandro Gisotti, the Vatican’s spokesman, was unable to clear up the mystery. “I hope it was good,” he joked.
Not three weeks later, Ms. Alazraki was again sharing the stage with the pope, this time during a Vatican meeting on the clerical abuse of minors, where she delivered a stern dressing-down to the 200 or so prelates in the audience.
Presenting herself as a journalist, a Roman Catholic lay woman and a mother, Ms. Alazraki warned the clerics that unless the church began to come clean and publicly admit its sins, getting ahead of the scandal instead of covering up or “playing ostrich,” the faithful and public opinion would become ever more unforgiving. And reporters, she said, would take no prisoners.
“If you do not decide in a radical way to be on the side of the children, mothers, families, civil society, you are right to be afraid of us, because we journalists, who seek the common good, will be your worst enemies,” Ms. Alazraki said.
Pope Francis had called the meeting to drive home the message to the world’s bishops — in particular those who continue to dismiss the scandal as a problem of the West — that there in no room in the church for abusers or for those who look the other way.
CreditAlberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ms. Alazraki insisted that reporting abuses was the only way forward “if you want us to believe you when you say, ‘From now on we will no longer tolerate cover-ups.’”
Journalists, she concluded, “are not vicious wolves,” but rather potential allies of bishops “against the real wolves.” Her remarks drew applause in the plenary hall and from colleagues watching the speech on screens in the Vatican media room.
“It was a totally courageous speech,” said Philip Pullella, a correspondent for Reuters who has known Ms. Alazraki for nearly four decades. “Only a woman could have done that, and not every woman could have done that. She spoke as a loving, Roman Catholic mother — and then she proceeded to read them the riot act.”
Ms. Alazraki was born in Mexico City in 1955. Her parents — an Italian actress and a Mexican screenwriter and film and stage director of Turkish descent — divorced when she was a toddler.
Though she has spent more of her life in Italy than in Mexico, she proudly considers herself “absolutely Mexican.”
“My husband says that I transform when I am in Mexico and when I am with Mexicans,” she said. “I am a different person.”
She said she admired Mexican people, particularly Mexican women, some of whom she got to know doing research for a book about violence against women for a Catholic foundation. “They react with great strength in very difficult situations,” she said.
Only when cooking does her Italian side predominate. “It’s my passion, and I am a very good cook.”
She was a cub reporter for Televisa when Pope Paul VI died in 1978, and she helped cover the 33-day papacy of John Paul I. Her big break came when she famously ambushed Pope John Paul II shortly after his 1978 election, and before his first trip to Mexico, by jumping out from behind some potted plants to present him with a sombrero. “If I think about it now, I was crazy,” she laughed. “But it worked.”
The pope was amused, and they exchanged a few words. It was “not a Pulitzer-worthy interview,” she said on a recent afternoon, but she made an impression; when she started reporting from the Vatican, she was one of two women who traveled on papal trips.
Giampaolo Iorio, who covered the Vatican for Italian news outlets and has worked as a contributor for The New York Times, recalled a time when reporters who worked at the Vatican could be counted with one hand and a finger or two. “Women came much later,” said Mr. Iorio, who is now retired. “And Valentina was one of the first.”
Ms. Alazraki became one of the reporters closest to John Paul II. “It was a strange role,” she said. “Yes, as a journalist, but also as a small bridge between him and Mexico, a country that he loved, and that loved him very much.”
In 1988, during her stint as president of Rome’s Foreign Press Association, she persuaded the Polish pope to visit the association (He is still the only pope to have done so). She also asked the pope to invite foreign correspondents and their families to his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, “because it was bigger,” she laughed. He did.
Three decades later, she was called as a witness to testify on the virtues of John Paul II, the first step toward the sainthood that the church acknowledged in 2014. (The reporter in her came out when she noted, in her speech to the bishops, that the pope’s memory was tarnished by his protracted support of Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the ultraconservative Legionaries of Christ, who was later found to be a pedophile and womanizer.)
Even now, she thinks that when people stop her on the streets of Mexico or in St. Peter’s Square, it is not because she’s a television personality but because they associate her with John Paul II. (She has also written several books about him).
“For 26 years, if the pope was on TV they’d hear my voice, so there’s this instant pairing,” she said. “They want to thank me for being a connection with the popes. It’s not fame, it’s fondness.”
She pulled the surprise sombrero trick on Pope Francis when he went to Mexico in 2016. “The photographers are happiest when the popes put on the sombrero. It’s a tradition now,” she said — though she spared Pope Benedict XVI because he is more reserved, “and I thought it would embarrass him.”
Francis sat down for an hourlong interview with Ms. Alazraki around the second anniversary of his papacy, one of only a few such interviews he has granted.
Ms. Alazraki said that her great privilege as a journalist was “tied to the sensation of having touched history with my hands.” She cited watching John Paul II with Fidel Castro in Cuba, with Mother Teresa in one of her homes for the neglected, and with Nelson Mandela at the end of apartheid. She cited the visit of Benedict XVI, a German pope, to Auschwitz, and a meeting in Cuba between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Churcha. “These moments stay with you,” she said.
After giving her own presentation to the bishops last month, Ms. Alazraki returned to the Vatican media room and was greeted with sustained applause by the reporters present.
“I hope I represented you well and that you’re not angry with me,” she said.
Mr. Pullella joked that he was retiring early “to be her agent.” Other journalists gathered around her to offer praise. But she did not give them much time.
“Thanks all,” she said. “But now I have to go to work.”.
