Ecclesia

ECCLESIA. - Illustrated monthly review (Vatican City). Promoted by the information office established to seek news of prisoners of war and to connect them with their families, it appeared (September 1942) as a dutiful testimony of the Pope's charity. To the photographic and statistical documentary record it joined Vatican information, and the acknowledgment of the Church's work in historical documents. It also gave space to literature in every language, while the principal subject remained the panorama of charity exercised toward the victims of the conflict, as a commentary on the reports and photographs that the Office and the Secretariat of State sent. For the entire duration of the war it thus coordinated a complex body of first-hand informational material, becoming the mouthpiece of the Holy See for all the good that radiated upon infinite miseries.

In the immediate postwar period, centered on new developments, it was the flourishing of various columns that ensured its vitality. A monographic orientation seemed at a certain moment to prevail (v., for example, the issues of Oct., Nov., Dec. 1945, which effectively developed, framing them within a vivid setting, "The Clergy and the War," "Sorrow and the War," "Christian Blessedness above War"). Then the review's line adhered to the program of documenting Catholic life in the most significant events, ranging also into poetry and art. Notable are the "Vatican Chronicles."

Luigi Hutter