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Vatican City (AFP)
For 90 years, Vatican Radio has carried the voice of the Pope to the most remote corners of the world, translated into dozens of languages.
As he celebrated his birthday on Friday, Pope Francis was among those who paid tribute to a broadcaster that provided a vital link between Rome and Catholic churches around the world.
“The radio has this beautiful trait: it carries the word to the most distant places”, declared the Argentine pontiff.
Robert Attarian, one of the two people who run Vatican Radio’s Armenian service, told AFP he felt like “a bridge between the Universal Church and the local Armenian churches, a diaspora of around 10 millions of inhabitants”.
Italian missionary priest Pier Luigi Maccalli described how he listened to Francis’s words via the station after being kidnapped by jihadists in Niger in 2018.
The priest, who was released in October in Mali, described shortwave radio as his “air window”.
Another of her loyal listeners is the French nun and coronavirus survivor, Sister André, who turned 117 on Thursday. “It’s young!” she said from the station.
– Horrors of the Holocaust –
Vatican Radio was created by Pope Pius XI after the creation of the Vatican City State in 1929.
He appealed to one of the inventors of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, for help and it was inaugurated with a speech in Latin by the Pope on February 12, 1931.
The next pontiff, Pius XII, picked up his microphones to talk about the horrors of the Holocaust in a famous Christmas Eve speech in 1942.
He spoke in Italian of “hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own, sometimes just because of their nationality or race, are being put to death or progressive extinction”.
Pius XII did not explicitly mention the Jews, and whether he did enough to expose their persecution is still a subject of intense historical debate.
In any case, historians believe that the papal speech went largely unnoticed in Germany, as the Nazis used to block the airways to sabotage foreign radios.
Vatican Radio has been broadcast by satellite since 1995, but can also be listened to on the Internet or via shortwave radio.
Its programs are broadcast by a myriad of local Catholic radios, reaching unexpected places.
It employs 350 people from 69 countries, broadcasting in 41 languages, including Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Kikongo and other African languages.
– ‘Radio still has a future’ –
Staff in Rome, based in a palace near the Tiber, are also responsible for the Vatican’s multilingual news portal, Vatican News, which was recently revamped as part of a broader reform of its communications.
There are plans to further expand the coverage: for its 90th anniversary, Vatican Radio launched its first dedicated online channels in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Armenian.
Ultimately, Vatican Radio should be able to offer “web radios” with adapted content in 35 different languages, said Jean-Charles Putzolu, French member of the editorial coordination team.
“Radio still has a future, it’s a local medium,” he said, recounting how an English-speaking colleague was recognized as one of the voices of Vatican Radio and hailed as a star during his visit to a refugee camp in Uganda.
© 2021 AFP
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