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Vatican Radio: Around the World in 80 Years

Vatican City, February 14, 2011 (Zenit.org/SIGNIS)- Vatican Radio is celebrating its 80th anniversary with an exhibition in Vatican Museums, "Around the World in 80 Years". The display reviews the history of the broadcasting station built by Guglielmo Marconi, which put a microphone with global reach in the hands of the Pontiff.

(JPEG) It was with a Latin-language speech broadcast worldwide on February 12, 1931, that an emotional Pope Pius XI inaugurated Vatican Radio with the legendary exhortation, "Listen and hear, O Peoples of distant lands".

From then on for the next several decades, the radio messages were "one of the most important means of communication for the papal magisterium," particularly, the papal "admonitions in regard to the situation of the world," reflected the president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo.

As Vatican Radio was taking its first steps, so too were totalitarian regimes that would deny religious liberty. In this situation, "the radio appeared as the most appropriate instrument, often the only one, to spread a message of faith and liberty capable of surmounting borders," Cardinal Lajolo said. As Eastern Europe suffered under communism, the Pope asked his radio to "become the voice of the Church to support oppressed peoples and the faithful," the cardinal added, while "there was an increase in regular programming in the languages of the countries that had lost their liberty."

Today there are over 300 people from 60 countries working to create Vatican Radio broadcasts, which air in 40 languages, likely making Vatican Radio the radio with the broadest and most diversified reach in the world.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman and director of Vatican Radio, defined the radio station’s work as carrying out the mission of bringing the Pope’s words to the people of the world.

The future

But as Vatican Radio celebrates 80 years of existence, the Church faces new challenges to communicate its message within a "totally transformed information system," Cardinal Lajolo said. Monsignor Peter Bryan Wells, an advisor in the Secretariat of State, spoke about responding to this challenge.

Today, Vatican Radio is not only radio. They maintain a website, www.radiovaticana.org, in 38 languages. In recent years, the station has also established its presence on Twitter and YouTube. Vatican Radio’s technological development is a response "to the expectations of the listeners, ever more sensitive to information." Vatican Radio will also be a pivotal element in the new multimedia platform that the Vatican hopes to launch by Easter and which will combine the efforts of the various media services of the Holy See.

The conviction is that a "new concept of radio is being born". And radio brings its own strengths to the new media world: It is more flexible than other means, and persuasive without being invasive. It can also create an intimacy, "a place for spirituality and responsibility", according to Monsignor Wells.

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