Pope's clout as an author
marks the cultural shift
in religious publishing
Translated from the 3/1/12 issue of
The 3/1/12 issue of OR carried a lengthy interview with Fr. Costa, director of the Vatican publishing house LEV (Libreria Editrice Vaticana), of which this excerpt was highlighted.
What is the situation today for religious books?
Religious publishing is very much alive today, after the crisis of the old ideologies and of education itself, Amid the dominance of multimedia communications, it presents itself increasingly as a necessity in order to promote religious identity in the multiracial Babel.
Benedict XVI, for example, has brought about a significant change fron the cultural viewpoint because with his books and his encyclicals, which are followed by readers and end up as best-esllers, the Pope has 'forced' secular bookstores to sell his books! And behind his books are emerging other religious writings which compel the attention of the secular bookstores.
So there are intgersting prospects for religious publishers even if we are just at the start.
Even in recent international book fairs, such as that in Frankfurt [largest annual book fair in the world], books with a religious dimension have become one of the major categories Many publishign houses are getting into publication of religious books and now carry many religious titles on their catalogs.
This progress has been made possible also because religious books have amplified their own exploratory horizons, no longer limited to liturgy and theology, but widening the view to include the relationship of religion to society, to current affairs and to language.
The Vatican publishing house has been among the promoters of this new tendency, with the advantage of holding the Pope's royalty rights, which has favored its contacts with publishers around the world.
Not very well-known is the interest among Italian publishers in religious books, other than those born in the Catholic world...
In Italy, the distribution of religious books reflected our civilian history in which (since unification) there has been a clear separation between secular and religious. Thus our bookstores were either secular or religious.
It was only in the 1960s, with Vatican II, that something started to change in that separation. And with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, almost by osmosis, it began to be reflected in bookstores.
When did this change gain ground?
In the 1990s. When the ideologies had clearly collapsed, so too the myth of 'non-belief', of 'politics is everything', of 'only the experimentable is true'. Publishers like Mondadori and Laterza started book series on religious historiography and religious essays.
Certainly, the role of the last two Popes has been fundamental in this change, especially that of Papa Ratzinger.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/03/2012 07:28]