We are pleased to share the publication of our new chapter, “Multimodal, multilingual, and constructive communication in Vatican News,” included in the volume Constructive News Across Languages and Cultures, edited by Ashley Riggs and Lucile Davier (Routledge, 2025). The chapter is co-authored by team members Anne O’Connor, Raluca Tanasescu, and Anna Beatriz Dimas Furtado. The chapter will be available soon in Open Access.
Abstract:
As a global institution, the Roman Catholic Church is committed to communicating in multiple languages, often multimodally, and its approach to news reporting can be described as a constructive news ethos. The news portal of the Catholic Church, Vatican News, therefore offers an excellent opportunity to comparatively study constructive news content across languages and cultures. The present chapter used a multimodal corpus of reporting on climate issues on the Vatican News platform in five different languages from October to December 2023. A mixed-method approach to the corpus consisting of metadata analysis, keyword analysis, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and visual analysis was adopted to establish recurring themes and to enable a comparative overview of the whole multilingual segments. What emerges from this analysis is that, although news reporting in different language groups may vary in terms of length and expression, similar concerns and attitudes – driven by a constructive news approach – consistently shape the news coverage across the languages considered in the corpus. Furthermore, our analysis finds that image and text work together in the Catholic Church’s news reporting, and that there is a convergence of meaning across modes which invariably relates to an institutionally supported solutions-based approach to climate change.
