Pope Leo XIV Hands Vatican Communications to the Woman Who Pulled EWTN Back From the Brink

Montse Alvarado is the first laywoman ever to lead the Holy See’s media. She spent three years steering EWTN away from its war with Pope Francis — now she inherits the Vatican’s slow, scattered communications machine.

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On Tuesday, Pope Leo XIV named Maria Montserrat Alvarado — a Mexican-American known to nearly everyone as Montse — to lead the Dicastery for Communication.

She becomes the first woman ever to hold the post. When she takes over on November 1, she will oversee every outlet the Holy See runs: the press office, Vatican News, Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore Romano, the publishing house, and the whole apparatus that carries the pope’s voice to the world.

Here is the part that matters most — and the part that will surprise readers of this newsletter who have spent years wary of the network she comes from.

For the last three years, Montse Alvarado ran EWTN News. She spent those years pulling it toward the kind of honest journalism the Church actually needs.

That sentence deserves some explanation, because a lot of you have a long memory when it comes to EWTN, and for good reason.

Founded by Mother Angelica from a garage in Alabama, EWTN grew into the largest Catholic media organization in the world: eleven television channels, programming in multiple languages, more than 400 million households across 160 countries.

For much of the last decade, a loud faction of that programming — led by the commentator Raymond Arroyo — treated Pope Francis as an opponent to be managed rather than a shepherd to be served. Arroyo has continued that shtick into the Leo pontificate.

Francis noticed. In 2021, he told suggested that the network was doing “the work of the devil” in a Catholic outlet that claimed to love the Church while tearing down the man chosen to lead it.

That is the EWTN many of you remember. It is not the EWTN that Montse Alvarado hands off this fall.

Here’s the backstory.