The Vatican goes dark: Inside the conclave’s high-tech blackout

The Vatican goes dark: Inside the conclave’s high-tech blackout

Eight of the cardinals who will choose the next pope are active Twitter users, but the Vatican is going to long lengths to ensure their accounts stay silent during the conclave.

On Monday, jamming devices designed to block cellphone calls, Internet signals and hidden microphones were installed inside the Sistine Chapel and nearby guest residences. WiFi will be blocked throughout Vatican City until the end of the conclave. And the conclave’s active Twitter- and Facebook-users have been “forbidden access to their accounts along with all other forms of communication with the outside world,” according to Catholic News Service.

“In this electronic age, I worry some cardinals may go into iPad and Twitter withdrawal,” joked Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a blog post last week.

The strict social media lockdown isn’t particularly surprising — the conclave, which literally means “with key,” has long been obsessed with secrecy. The cardinals swear an oath to that effect before even entering the Sistine Chapel, punishable by excommunication. Anyone else associated with the election, from doctors and nurses to housekeeping staff, must also swear to never tell anyone anything they hear.

Just last week, the Vatican cancelled its daily news briefings over concern there could be leaks.

But the severity of the lockdown does highlight some of the inherent tension between social media (with its ethos of transparency) and the church (which is notoriously opaque), even as the church’s leaders join Twitter and Facebook.

“There is no understanding that there is another world, a network that we all live in together,” Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, one of the Vatican’s social media advocates, told the Post’s Jason Horowitz in February. “There isn’t this understanding.”

The eight conclave tweeters, according to CNS, are Timothy M. Dolan of New York, Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, Gianfranco Ravasi of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Odilo Scherer of Sao Paulo, Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, Lluis Martinez Sistach of Barcelona, Ruben Salazar Gomez of Bogota and Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles. The account of a ninth conclave tweeter, Angela Scola of Milan, has recently been deleted.

Mahony, the retired archbishop of Los Angeles, has kept up an active digital presence from Rome since he arrived there in late February, updating his blog and tweeting regular Vatican updates. But even he knows better than to keep that up during conclave.

American teacher in Japan under fire for lessons on Japan’s history of discrimination

Miki Dezaki, who first arrived in Japan on a teacher exchange program in 2007, wanted to learn about the nation that his parents had once called home. He taught English, explored the country and affectionately chronicled his cross-cultural adventures on social media, most recently on YouTube, where he gained a small following for videos like “Hitchhiking Okinawa” and the truly cringe-worthy “What Americans think of Japan.” One of them, on the experience of being gay in Japan, attracted 75,000 views and dozens of thoughtful comments.

Dezaki didn’t think the reaction to his latest video was going to be any different, but he was wrong. “If I should have anticipated something, I should have anticipated the netouyu,” he told me, referring to the informal army of young, hyper-nationalist Japanese Web users who tend to descend on any article — or person — they perceive as critical of Japan.

But before the netouyu put Dezaki in their crosshairs, sending him death threats and hounding his employers, previous employers and even the local politicians who oversee his employers, there was just a teacher and his students.

Dezaki began his final lesson with a 1970 TV documentary, Eye of the Storm, often taught in American schools for its bracingly honest exploration of how good-hearted people — in this case, young children participating in an experiment — can turn to racism. After the video ended, he asked his students to raise their hands if they thought racism existed in Japan. Almost none did. They all thought of it as a uniquely American problem.

Gently, Dezaki showed his students that, yes, there is also racism in Japan. He carefully avoided the most extreme and controversial cases — for example, Japan’s wartime enslavement of Korean and other Asian women for sex, which the country today doesn’t fully acknowledge — pointing instead to such slang terms as “bakachon camera.” The phrase, which translates as “idiot Korean camera,” is meant to refer to disposable cameras so easy to use that even an idiot or a Korean could do it.

He really got his students’ attention when he talked about discrimination between Japanese groups. People from Okinawa, where Dezaki happened to be teaching, are sometimes looked down upon by other Japanese, he pointed out, and in the past have been treated as second-class citizens. Isn’t that discrimination?

“The reaction was so positive,” he recalled. For many of them, the class was a sort of an a-ha moment. “These kids have heard the stories of their parents being discriminated against by the mainland Japanese. They know this stuff. But the funny thing is that they weren’t making the connection that that was discrimination.” From there, it was easier for the students to accept that other popular Japanese attitudes about race or class might be discriminatory.

The vice principal of the school said he wished more Japanese students could hear the lesson. Dezaki didn’t get a single complaint. No one accused him of being an enemy of Japan.

That changed a week ago. Dezaki had recorded his July classes and, last Thursday, posted a six-minute video in which he narrated an abbreviated version of the lesson. It opens with a disclaimer that would prove both prescient and, for his critics, vastly insufficient. “I know there’s a lot of racism in America, and I’m not saying that America is better than Japan or anything like that,” he says. Here’s the video:

The Vatican goes dark: Inside the conclave’s high-tech blackout

Eight of the cardinals who will choose the next pope are active Twitter users, but the Vatican is going to long lengths to ensure their accounts stay silent during the conclave.

On Monday, jamming devices designed to block cellphone calls, Internet signals and hidden microphones were installed inside the Sistine Chapel and nearby guest residences. WiFi will be blocked throughout Vatican City until the end of the conclave. And the conclave’s active Twitter- and Facebook-users have been “forbidden access to their accounts along with all other forms of communication with the outside world,” according to Catholic News Service.

“In this electronic age, I worry some cardinals may go into iPad and Twitter withdrawal,” joked Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a blog post last week.

The strict social media lockdown isn’t particularly surprising — the conclave, which literally means “with key,” has long been obsessed with secrecy. The cardinals swear an oath to that effect before even entering the Sistine Chapel, punishable by excommunication. Anyone else associated with the election, from doctors and nurses to housekeeping staff, must also swear to never tell anyone anything they hear.

Just last week, the Vatican cancelled its daily news briefings over concern there could be leaks.

But the severity of the lockdown does highlight some of the inherent tension between social media (with its ethos of transparency) and the church (which is notoriously opaque), even as the church’s leaders join Twitter and Facebook.

“There is no understanding that there is another world, a network that we all live in together,” Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, one of the Vatican’s social media advocates, told the Post’s Jason Horowitz in February. “There isn’t this understanding.”

The eight conclave tweeters, according to CNS, are Timothy M. Dolan of New York, Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, Gianfranco Ravasi of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Odilo Scherer of Sao Paulo, Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, Lluis Martinez Sistach of Barcelona, Ruben Salazar Gomez of Bogota and Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles. The account of a ninth conclave tweeter, Angela Scola of Milan, has recently been deleted.

Mahony, the retired archbishop of Los Angeles, has kept up an active digital presence from Rome since he arrived there in late February, updating his blog and tweeting regular Vatican updates. But even he knows better than to keep that up during conclave.