From Antagonism to Apostolate? The Alvarado Appointment and EWTN's Long Quarrel with the Francis Papacy

There is a particular irony that the Church occasionally permits herself, and it is rarely accidental. Today, the 2nd of June, Pope Leo XIV named María Montserrat Alvarado—known to nearly everyone as Montse—as Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, effective the first of November. She is the President and Chief Operating Officer of EWTN News, and with her appointment she becomes the first laywoman ever to lead a dicastery of the Roman Curia. That a Holy Father should entrust the Vatican's entire communications apparatus to a senior executive of the very network that, for the better part of a decade, served as the principal megaphone of opposition to his predecessor is a development that no one of us should pass over too quickly.

I have followed this appointment with considerable interest, and I want to set down both why I greet it with hope and why a measure of reservation seems to me not merely realistic but prudent.

The Record One Cannot Pretend Away

Let us be candid about the institutional history, because a charitable reading of the present requires an honest accounting of the past. During the twelve years of the Francis pontificate, no Catholic media conglomerate gave such sustained and open space to the Holy Father's critics as did EWTN. The flagship vehicle was, of course, Raymond Arroyo's The World Over, which over the years furnished a hospitable platform to figures such as Cardinal Burke, the schismatic Archbishop Viganò, and even Steve Bannon—voices that ranged from the loyally critical to the frankly seditious.

The friction reached the Holy Father himself. In 2021, in conversation with the Slovak Jesuits, Francis lamented a large Catholic television channel that did not hesitate to speak ill of the pope, and he characterized such attacks as the work of the devil—words universally understood to be aimed at EWTN. Earlier that same year, in Baghdad, he had told one of the network's own reporters, with disarming directness, that they should stop speaking badly about him.

I do not repeat this history to nurse a grievance. I repeat it because any pretense that the antipathy did not exist would be disingenuous, and because the gravity of what Pope Leo has done is intelligible only against that backdrop. To hand the keys of Vatican News, L'Osservatore Romano, Vatican Radio, and the Holy See Press Office to a leader drawn from that very house is either an act of remarkable confidence or an act of remarkable risk. I am increasingly persuaded it is the former.

The Distinction That Matters

Before reservation hardens into suspicion, a distinction must be insisted upon, for without it we should be guilty of the very sin we deplore in EWTN's polemicists—the collapse of careful judgment into partisan reflex.

Montse Alvarado is not Raymond Arroyo. There is not a scintilla of evidence in the public record that she personally trafficked in the antagonism that disfigured the network's commentary programming. Her formation is professional rather than ideological: a master's degree in political science, fourteen years at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty defending conscience rights in the public square, and since 2023 the management—not the editorial voice—of EWTN's global news operation. EWTN News, which she has overseen, is a distinct enterprise from the opinion programming that earned the network its reputation for hostility.

More striking still is the reporting from Rome. Gerard O'Connell of America, no friend of EWTN's editorial line, relays that informed Vatican sources judged the appointment a shrewd one, and that Alvarado has labored since 2023 to bring the network beyond its adversarial posture toward the Holy See. That is a significant testimony. It suggests that the Holy Father has not capitulated to EWTN; he has co-opted its most capable executive and, in doing so, may have peeled her away from the orbit of its polemics altogether.

The Case for Hope

Read in its most generous light—and I am inclined to read it so—this appointment is an instrument of communio. Pope Leo has done something his predecessor, for understandable reasons, could not: he has extended a hand to the very constituency most disposed to mistrust him, and he has done it not by flattery but by elevation. He has placed a serious, faithful, professionally formidable laywoman at the summit of Vatican communications, and in the same gesture he has signaled to conservative American Catholics that they are not to be read out of the Church's central life.

There is, too, a deeper continuity at work. The Dicastery for Communication was itself a creation of the Franciscan reform of the Curia, and the opening of senior Vatican offices to the lay faithful—men and women alike— lows directly from Praedicate Evangelium, Francis's 2022 reform of the Roman Curia, which established that governing authority in a dicastery derives from the canonical mission entrusted by the Pope rather than from sacred ordination—thereby opening such offices to the lay faithful for the first time. To appoint a laywoman to this post is therefore not a repudiation of Francis but a maturation of his program. The interpretation is one of continuity, not rupture.

The Reservations That Remain

And yet a responsible hope is not a naïve one. Three reservations seem to me worth considering.

First, an institution is not reformed by the elevation of one of its officers, however gifted. The World Over will continue to air; Mr. Arroyo will continue to host it; and the donor base and ideological gravity that NCR's own investigations long ago documented will not dissolve because Montse Alvarado has crossed the Tiber. Her departure may, paradoxically, loosen the very moderating influence she is said to have exercised.

Second, there is the question of formation. The Dicastery for Communication is not a litigation shop nor a broadcast network; it is an ecclesial organ whose mandate, as its own statutes affirm, embraces the theological and pastoral dimensions of the Church's witness. Managerial brilliance and a lawyer's discipline are necessary gifts; they are not, by themselves, sufficient ones.

Third—and here I confess my own bias as a Catholic priest of more than half a century—I shall be watching for the disposition of the new prefect toward the reformed rite verses the Traditional Latin Mass controversy and the synodal trajectory of this pontificate. The polemical wing of EWTN was never merely anti-Francis in a personal sense; it was, at bottom, suspicious of the Council and its liturgical fruit. I do not impute that suspicion to Alvarado. But neither shall I assume its absence until it is demonstrated.

A Provisional Judgment

The temptation, in matters such as this, is to render a verdict before the evidence is in—to be either prematurely celebratory or reflexively cynical. Both would be a species of the very narcissism I have so often deplored in our ecclesial discourse, in which the commentator's certainty matters more than the slow disclosure of the truth.

So, I will say only this. Pope Leo XIV has made a bold and, I suspect, a prescient wager: that the way to heal a polarized communications culture is not to exclude one side but to ennoble its best representative and bind her to the service of the universal Church. It is the wager of a pastor who believes that grace works through persons and not merely through structures. Whether the wager is vindicated will depend less upon Montse Alvarado's competence, which appears beyond dispute, than upon her conversion of heart toward the communio she is now charged to serve. For that, and for her, I shall pray.

The Holy Father has opened the door. The Church will watch, with hope and with vigilance, to see who walks through it.