Catholic Church hires Fox News reporter to help craft PR efforts

Please ... just stop already. You can't make this stuff up anymore:

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican has brought in the Fox News correspondent in Rome to help improve its communications strategy as it tries to cope with years of communications blunders and one of its most serious scandals in decades, officials said Saturday.

Greg Burke, 52, will leave Fox to become the senior communications adviser in the Vatican's secretariat of state, the Vatican and Burke told The Associated Press.

Of course. You're an ultraconservative organization beset by multiple scandals. You need better press. Who you gonna call? Fox News, baby! Once you've worked for Fox, batting away financial scandals is second nature, and I bet you'd even have a leg up on that whole covering-up-pedophilia thing, if the Church actually was bothering to address it anymore, which they're not.

There's even great fodder for the conspiracy-minded. Or, at least, further indication that one of the most seriously screwed-up segments of "screw everyone but us" Catholicism is all the rage in Popeville:

Burke acknowledged the difficult task ahead but said that after turning down the Vatican twice before, he went with his gut and accepted the third time around. "This is an opportunity and challenge that I'm not going to get again," he said.

He said he didn't know what, if any, role his membership in Opus Dei played. Opus is greatly in favor in the Vatican these days, particularly as other new religious movements such as the Legion of Christ have lost credibility with their own problems.

As the story mentions, the Vatican is currently faced with the problematic task of trying to put a nice face on multiple scandals, and they've been failing very, very badly at it. The Christlike answer, of course, is to mostly dismiss the content of the scandals and label the whole thing a public relations problem'done and done. I'm not sure, however, that hiring one meager Fox News reporter is going to get that job done. The level of spin this stuff needs may require the creation of a whole new cable channel.