The Declaration ‘Dominus Iesus’ (2000) is one of the Vatican documents to have provoked mostjournalistic controversy in recent years. We may ask ourselves why a topic of apparently littlejournalistic interest, such as a theological document, raised so much furore. The analysis of thiscase can help to reveal how the mainstream press deal with religion; and may be useful forverifying some inherent features of journalistic formats, such as news values and the mechanismsof journalistic interpretation. From the analysis of the journalistic reception of the Declaration,one may draw certain conclusions about the possible influence that the ‘language’ and internaldynamics of the mass media exert on the journalistic presentation of complex content, such asthat of a doctrinal Declaration. For this study, we have examined 150 journalistic texts from 68newspapers and magazines from 15 countries.d/navb