The Popes on Air: The History of Vatican Radio from Its Origins to World War II

The book offers the first wide-ranging study on the history of Vatican Radio from its origins (1931) to the end of World War II based on unpublished sources. The opening of the Vatican Archives on the records regarding Pope Pius 12 has allowed to shed light on the most controversial pontificate of the 20th century. The research provides an original point of view on the most relevant questions such as the relationship of the Holy See with the new media in the mass society; the relation of the Catholic Church with the Fascist regimes and Western democracies; the Vatican position towards the total war and its attitude towards anti-Semitism and the Shoah. Pius 12’s government of the Church has been analyzed through the reconstruction of the relations between Vatican Radio and the Roman Curia; the study of the strategic, propagandistic and diplomatic use of Vatican Radio by the Holy See during World War II; the analysis of the broadcasts, through what was decided to spread, the ways in which news were disseminated and the choice of the most suitable moment to do it; yet even through what they decided not to say, the silences of the Vatican in front of the tragic events of the war. Pius 12 became more and more aware of the strategic use he could make of the radio and Vatican Radio history told in this book reflected the doubts, the reticence, the prudence towards a war that had highlighted all the contradictions not only of the international situation created during the Twenties and Thirties but above all of the position assumed by the Catholic Church in that short period of time in which sudden and unexpected changes have been produced. At the beginning Vatican Radio was used with hesitancy by Pius 11, who nonetheless recognized the great potentialities of the new medium, then strategically by Pius 12, reflecting his way of leading Church, in constant tension between the new and the old, tradition and modernization. Diplomatic and propagandistic medium but also means of evangelization, Vatican Radio was considered by the faithful the voice of the Pope, which they urgently sought.