The Osservatore Romano as Vatican Newspaper
How to Access Online the Official Catholic News from the Holy See
Jan 18, 2009 Richard Mankiewicz
The first issue of the Osservatore Romano came out in Rome on 1 July 1861. The aim of the original publication was to support the Papal States against the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. It was unashamedly political and polemical, seeking support for a Papacy feeling under threat. Although initially a semi-official private publication, it became the official voice of the Vatican under Pope Leo XIII who acquired the Osservatore in 1885.
The Osservatore in War and Peace
These were turbulent times for Italy and the Papacy with the rise of Italian Nationalism. The Papal States were conquered by force by an army supporting the Sardinian House of Savoy. By 1870 Rome had been taken and the Papal States reduced to nothing. Not until the Concordat of 1929 would the Vatican City gain its current status as a sovereign state. The strident tone of the early Osservatore was thus a reflection of the historical changes affecting the Roman Catholic Church. Today, it is less polemical and, in the words of Pope John XXIII, "it has asserted the truth, defended justice, advanced the cause of true freedom and safeguarded the honesty and honour of the human condition and dignity."
The Osservatore in Multiple Languages
The Osservatore Romano is published daily in Italian. There are also weekly digests in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and recently in Malayam, as well as a monthly edition in Polish. The full editions, with text only and without the original newspaper layout, can be read as HTML pages (apart from the Malayam edition). However, the paper is a subscription service and their free online editions need to be accessed on the day, or week, of publication in order to get all the articles.
Need to Access the Osservatore Regularly
All the above editions are published online at exactly the same URL for each language. This means that if you would like to read a previous edition then it has already been replaced by the current one. There are links to pdf files of each paper and these files are numbered sequentially so it is possible to enter manually on the browser address bar an older copy. The problem here is that the pdf files only show the front page of the printed edition of the Osservatore so will only have a few articles. The online editions are obviously not meant to replace the printed version but are a service to the faithful around the world who, for whatever reasons, cannot formally subscribe but wish to keep up to date with news and views from the Vatican.
How to Access Vatican News in English
So, for English speakers the best way to read the Osservatore Romano is to access it once a week and possibly save the HTML file to your computer, or print out the web page, so you can read it at your leisure. There are also many Catholic newspapers and journals on the internet and many of their articles are translations or reviews of pieces in the Osservatore. The Vatican page of the Catholic News Service is a good example of this as it is separate from its other news sources.
Statue of St Paul at the Vatican
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