Vatican Radio

Four days after Vatican City came into existence as a sovereign state, Pope Pius XI commissioned the one broadcast engineer whose name needed no introduction to do the job: Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless telegraphy, was asked to build a radio station inside the new state's walls. Marconi delivered. On February 12, 1931, he stood before the microphone himself and announced, in Italian, that the Supreme Pontiff was about to address the world; Pius XI then read a Latin message he had written for the occasion, becoming the first pope in history to speak on the radio. The signal went out on two shortwave frequencies at ten kilowatts under the callsign HVJ, and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would become Pope Pius XII eight years later, stood among the officials watching it happen. Vatican Radio's first director was the physicist Giuseppe Gianfranceschi, who also headed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Growth came quickly. By 1948, seventeen years after that first broadcast, Vatican Radio was transmitting in eighteen languages, an international reach few other broadcasters of any kind could claim at the time. Nearly a century later the station remains the Holy See's own voice, carrying papal messages, Catholic liturgy and church news to a global audience, one of the oldest continuously operating religious broadcasters anywhere and among the very first to treat radio as a genuinely international medium rather than a national one.