Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Fides News Service of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples started its activity in December 1927 immediately after the feast of the Patron Saint of the missions, St Francis Xavier, as the Church's first missionary news agency and one of the first Catholic news services in the world dedicated to missionary information and formation. The idea was propose by the General Superior Council of the Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith as a means of fostering greater mission awareness and encouraging material and spiritual support for the Church's missionary activity as well as missionary vocations. The plan to establish Fides News Service was blessed by Pope Pius XI. The English edition, the first to be launched in 1927, was soon followed by editions in French and Polish (the latter only for a brief time). The Italian edition started in 1929 followed by Spanish in 1930 and German in 1932. In much more recent times Fides acquired editions in Chinese (1998) and Portuguese (2002).
Hundreds of annual volumes in the different languages containing years of missionary events and news, are a patrimony of the Church's missionary evangelisation in the 20th century: a decisive period for the planting and development of local Churches with rapid evolution of territorial structures, formation of a local clergy and the establishment of local hierarchies.
Fides News Service Photographic Archives which contain about 10.000 photographs mainly in black and white, constitute another missionary patrimony of inestimable value, especially the earliest photographs which document the history of Catholic missions between 1930 and 1990. The archives, mostly digitised, can be viewed at www.fides.org.
Today the Agency continues to report on the life of the pilgrim Church all over the world, enriching its news service with various in-depth articles and dossiers of primary interest for the missionary world and for evangelisation in general, seeking always to scan, ever faithful to the Teaching of the Holy Father, the immense horizons of mission ad gentes and the “new forums” of our modern world in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be proclaimed. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 3/12/2007; righe 26, parole 315)
