Pope Benedict XVI and George Orwell
48 years ago, in 1948, George Orwell published his famous novel "1984".
Few people have read the book but almost everybody nowadays is familiar with the title of a popular reality TV programme: "BIG BROTHER" - in "1984" the term was used for the dictator in control of the totalitarian society of the future depicted by Orwell.
Still fewer people are aware of the term "NEWSPEAK", the official language of the Orwellian society which was designed to invert the content and meaning of words into their contrary. In 1947 - one year before the publication of "1984" - philologist Viktor Klemperer had published his analysis of "LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii" (The language of the Third Reich). The same author later undertook a similar effort for "LQI - Lingua Quarti Imperii" (the language of the "Fourth Reich",i.e. the socialist German Democratic Republic) but these texts as well as Klemperers diaries during and after the war were never published until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The Vatican has published a new version of Pope Benedict's Regensburg conference (see my blog on "Ownership of Reason, Faith - and of God?" September 14, 2006), adding short remarks signalling a certain distance of the speaker from his citation of Manuel Palaeologus concerning the prophet Muhammad.

Osservatore Profano, asks:
1) Has Pope Benedict XVI never had the opportunity to read "1984"?
2) If Yes, Osservatore Profano should like to beg His Holyness pardon for having
suspected the Vatican of using "NEWSPEAK" as part of it's communication concept
3) If No, then WHY must the Vatican's communication concept use "NEWSPEAK"