VATICAN - Cinema and mission: Conference on "Audiovisual sources and the history of Catholic missions"

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - In the Pio IV Hall in the Vatican, the international conference "Cinema and mission. Audiovisual sources and the history of Catholic missions" will be held on October 15. Starting at 8:30 am, speakers from all over the world will lead the various panels of an initiative born with the aim of defining an initial state of the art on the preservation of the visual heritage of the archives of the main orders and congregations involved in the missions, in an attempt to give new impetus to studies on the subject from a historical and cultural point of view.
During the morning session of the dense and qualified program of the Conference, Don Flavio Belluomini, Archivist of the Dicastery for Evangelization, will present a report on the photographic heritage of Fides Agency preserved in the Historical Archive of Propaganda Fide. This heritage, which is an integral part of the history of our Agency, will be presented in the report of Archivist Belluomini in its value as a "source for the history of the missions".

The conference will be opened by Msgr. Edoardo Viganò, Vice-Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and President of the MAC (Fondazione Memorie Audiovisive del Cattolicesimo) and of the CAST Research Centre (Catholicism and Audiovisual Studies), promoters of the day, organized in collaboration with the International Telematic University Uninettuno and with the collaboration of the Historical Archive of Propaganda Fide, the Vatican Apostolic Library, the National University Council of Cinema (CUC) and the General Direction of Cinema and Audiovisual of the Ministry of Culture.
“The term mission covers a set of actions, practices and attitudes and opens up a range of theological and exegetical reflections, but the practice of the mission was sanctioned with the beginning of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1622,” said Msgr. Viganò, curator of the conference together with Gianluca della Maggiore, professor at the International Telematic University Uninettuno and director of CAST, Sergio Palagiano, of ARSI-Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, and Steven Stergar, of the University of Udine. "At that point an action is codified which is a missionary action and, parallel to this action, the ways of preserving the sources are also codified, which at the beginning are the letters of the missionaries and a series of elements that come from the mission lands and destined for Catholicity; but it is in the twentieth century that this modality intercepts the visual and, later, the audiovisual.
Cinema in relation to the mission becomes a historical source that goes through different phases. From an initial passion cultivated in an authentic way by individual missionaries eager to document what they lived, it passes to the attention of the various congregations and religious institutes in the use of the audiovisual for cultural, didactic and evangelical purposes. "In addition to reflections on the production and distribution of films and photographs made during the various missionary experiences, the state of conservation of these same sources and the possibilities of studying and enhancing them will also be addressed", said Msgr. Viganò. (EG) (Agenzia Fides, 11/10/2024)

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