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ace. After a brief speech by the pope only a chosen few -- mainly Italians -- were brought up to the pope for the "bacia mano," the formal greeting during which Catholics kiss the pope's hand.
• After the audience was over, as the pope walked down the center aisle, other journalists reached out to shake his hand. Some even hoped to ask him a question. But Vatican aides and security whisked him away, never to officially meet with the press again. (Weeks later he was found dead by a nun in his bedroom.)
• John Paul II was different. As soon as the speeches were over, he freed himself from his "protectors" and began shaking hands, randomly picking out members of the press.
• Benedict held his first media audience in the modern Paul VI audience hall. The pope gave a perfunctory thank you to all the journalists in English, French and German, but failed to do so in Spanish, something for which the Spanish-speaking journalists never forgave him. A pre-arranged "bacio mano" with selected media notables followed. Next the pope turned his back on the hundreds of disappointed reporters and television operators -- and was gone through a side-door of the audience hall.
• It was the first sign that Benedict would never be comfortable with the press.
• To Benedict, it turned out, the press was an unfortunate means for a necessary end -- getting the church's message out. Even then it was not always clear that he was sending out the right message: Early in his papacy, Benedict caused an uproar by quoting a Medieval Byzantine emperor saying that in Islam, "you will find things only evil and inhuman."
• By contrast, John Paul II, in his first years as pope, made the savvy step of bringing in Joaquin Navarro-Valls, then a Spanish newspaper correspondent, as his spokesman.
• Things changed dramatically, even for a papacy that was good from the start at managing its message.
• Navarro-Valls was always available, often willing to give inside information (In 1989, he hinted to me strongly that the pope would receive Mikhail Gorbachev -- and the encounter happened in December of that year) and knew how to "spin" a story.
• He even arranged a meeting with the pope at Rome's foreign press club -- something that's impossible to imagine Benedict doing.
• John Paul showed he had a mind of his own: At the press club, the pope glanced at the speech his Vatican handlers had prepared for him and said he wouldn't give it because it was not want what he wanted to say.
• Years later, Navarro-Valls tripped up on his own spin.

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