Vatican: The Audiovisual Heritage of the Pius XII Pontificate
Pope Pius XII as seen in a television interview
The Holy See Secretariat for Communications and the elite Italian university Scuola Normale Superiore de Pisa announced a joint project on December 14, 2017, to “gather and study the audiovisual heritage of the pontificate of Pius XII.”
The details of the project have not been made public. It was announced at a conference organized at the Vatican Film Library on the 60th anniversary of Pius XII’s 1957 encyclical Miranda Prorsus on radio, cinema and television.
Monsignor Dario Edoardo Viganò, prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, referred to Eugenio Pacelli’s pontificate as “a great technological investment,” providing the Vatican with its own television service in the late 1940s, before the Italian government even.
Such was Pius XII’s interest in the moving picture that in 1949 he became the first pope to give a televised Easter message. In Miranda Prorsus, the pope spoke of the media as
constructive instruments that form the personalities of their audience; yet if they are left without oversight or specific direction, they will tend towards the lowering of the cultural and moral standards of the population.
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Sources : cath.ch/vatican – FSSPX.News - 12/27/17
