The Arrival of Television in US and Italy: A New Catholic ‘Holy Crusade’ or Something Else?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the origins and the first decades of the US television by focusing on the US religious television and the debates in the Catholic press on the use of the new medium. Through the documentation recently made available by the Vatican Apostolic Archives and an overview on the main US catholic Journals and Magazines, the paper pays attention to the effects that the arrival of TV and the first religious television shows had on the US Catholicism, on its relationship with the Holy See, on the official teachings, and on the different strategy adopted by ecclesiastical authorities as compared to the cinema. The US context is also analyzed against the background of what was simultaneously happening in Europe and especially in Italy. As a matter of fact, the case of the US TV is particularly interesting not only for the history of American Catholicism but also for its close connection to the Italian TV and Italian Catholicism.