Messe in onda: l'insediamento dei papi nell'era televisiva. Una prima ricognizione nell'archivio delle Teche Rai (1958-2013)

The history of the Church in the second half of the 20th century would not be understandable without referring to the media that told its story. Among the many reflections on the relationship between the two languages, that of the Church and that of the media, a document of the Italian Bishops' Conference from the beginning of the new century entitled Communication and Mission (2004), makes explicit how "the liturgy can be considered the code of codes, the presupposition of every other media code and of every authentic communication." In this scenario, a specific and crucial role has been played by television; the birth and evolution of the medium have been strongly intertwined with the transformations of the Church's institutions since the airing of some Eucharistic celebrations from the experimental broadcasting phase and in the early years of Italian television, thus anticipating by a decade the reflections of the Second Vatican Council on the relationship between the Church and the modern world. The identity of Italian Catholics and the very image of the Church also pass, therefore, through what Pius XII called a "providential instrument" (1955) and Cardinal Martini a "television brother" (1991); the patrimony contained in the Rai Teche archive represents, in this sense, an exceptional documentary value, helping to restore the key passages of a cultural history and an imaginary in construction that has seen in particular in the figure of the pontiffs and their presentation to the public of the faithful traits of immediate communicability. Drawing on the patrimony of the Teche Rai, this contribution aims to reconstruct in a diachronic key the complex and fruitful relationship between the Catholic Church and Italian public television service, identifying the official moments of the coronations and the settlements of the popes as authentic media events with a high symbolic, linguistic and communicative significance.