[Commlist] Roman Catholic Engagements with Audio-Visual Media around the World (1928-2001). Exploring and Utilizing the OCIC and UNDA archives.

The multi-faceted history and development of the Catholic Church’s 
engagements with audio-visual mass media (radio, cinema, television and 
group media) throughout the 20th century is a crucial aspect of the 
Church’s sometimes ambivalent and complex dealings with modernity. 
During the first decades of the 20th century, the Church was initially 
reluctant to address audio-visual media issues and left this field wide 
open to laic initiatives. This led to the establishmentof a good number 
of different radio and film organisations. The two largest were the 
international umbrella organisations OCIC (Office Catholique 
International du Cinéma) and BCIR (Bureau Catholique International de 
Radio), both founded in 1928. BCIR became BCIRT (adding a 't' for 
television) and eventually changed its name to UNDA (Latin for 'wave'). 
OCIC and UNDA, each featuring member organisations throughout the world, 
had their international headquarters in Brussels. In 2001, OCIC and UNDA 
merged to form Signis, the ‘World Catholic Association for Communication’.

In 2006, the archives and libraries of OCIC and UNDA, were deposited in 
the University of Leuven's Interfaculty Documentation and Research 
Centre for Religion, Culture and Society (KADOC). These extensive 
archives are of exceptional international interest but have hardly been 
studied by scholars. This is partially due to the size of the archives 
(over 90 meters) and partially to the seemingly unstructured original 
placement list, which made the archives rather unpractical and unwieldy 
to work with. The 2018 report opens up the archives and guides 
researchers through the different funds related to OCIC, BCIR, BCIRT and 
UNDA.

The report is the tentative end product of the two-year research project 
‘OCIC and UNDA from the Research Fund of the KU Leuven: Foundations for 
longitudinal, comparative and transnational research into Roman Catholic 
approaches to audio-visual media, 1928-2001’ (project code 3H150291). 
The report introduces OCIC and UNDA through a short history of both 
organisations, explores the most important developments during their 
73-year existence, and looks into their relations with the Church, 
organised laity and the broader field of local, national, international, 
and intergovernmental (media-) organisations. The second part of the 
report introduces the OCIC-UNDA archives through a short history of the 
archives’ management and a detailed institutional history of the 
organisations that shaped them. Taking this into account, the report 
analyses the structure and content of the archives, evaluating their 
state of preservation and lacunas. The report also provides an overview 
of the reference library’s contents with special attention to 
publications of OCIC, UNDA and their predecessors. There are also a 
number of relevant primary sources outside the bounds of OCIC and UNDA’s 
own archival and library collections. The archival collections kept at 
the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV) and Istituto per la Storia 
dell’Azione Cattolica e del Movimento cattolico in Italia Paolo VI 
(ISACEM) which have been explored in the context of this project, as 
well as the interviews with privileged witnesses conducted at the 2017 
Signis International Congress in Québec are also explored in this 
report. Finally, the reader is presented with an overview of the data 
entered in the ODIS database for archival contextual information and an 
annotated bibliography of literature with direct relevance to the 
history of OCIC and UNDA.

The project was supervised by Prof. Roel Vande Winkel and dr. Leen 
Engelen. Drs. Lieven Boes opened up the archives. The supervisors are 
looking for scholars with related research interests, in order to 
stimulate international research on religious engagements with 
audio-visual media, past or present.

Roman Catholic Engagements with Audio-Visual Media around the World 
(1928-2001). Exploring and Utilizing the OCIC and UNDA archives.
Boes, Lieven; Engelen, Leen; Vande Winkel, Roel
KADOC - Institute for Media Studies; Leuven; 2018, 48 p.
ISBN 9789078192398

The report can be downloaded here: 
https://soc.kuleuven.be/fsw/onderzoek/media-and-religion

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