Rome – One hundred years ago, pilgrims who came to Rome for the 1925 Jubilee could encounter the entire world. At the request of Pope Pius XI, the pavilions of the “Vatican Missionary Exhibition” were set up in the Vatican Gardens. Among other things, artifacts from deserts and rainforests were displayed there, along with bird eggs and reptiles from all latitudes. Also on display were letters and testimonies from numerous missionaries, with their accounts from regions then considered inaccessible.
One hundred years later, an international conference is bringing this event back into the spotlight. The conference is titled “A century after the Vatican Missionary Exhibition, a watershed moment for a glocal world ” and seeks not only to look back but, above all, to highlight the innovative significance and enduring relevance of this visionary initiative.
The conference was supported by several institutions: the Pontifical Urbaniana University –Faculty of Missiology, the IULM University, the Vatican Museums and the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences. The conference will be held on Wednesday, November 5, and Thursday, November 6, at various locations in Rome and the Vatican. The sessions will take place in Palazzo Cipolla , the John Paul II Auditorium of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, and the conference hall of the Vatican Museums.
The Vatican Missionary Exposition aims to illustrate the widespread diffusion of Catholic missions and at the same time, raise awareness of the cultural, artistic and spiritual traditions of different peoples.
The exposition – according to the press release from the conference organizers – “ended on 9 January 1926, with over a million visitors, achieving considerable public and critical success. The more than 100,000 works on display, from all over the world, were presented in twenty-six pavilions built especially for the occasion.”
The Expostion’s success led Pius XI to found, on 12 November 1926, the Vatican Ethnological Museum, entrusting its direction to Father Wilhelm Schmidt SVD , a well-known ethnologist and organizer of the missionary exhibition.
The two-day study event will conclude with a visit to the Anima Mundi Museum, which, within the Vatican Museums, is considered the “legacy” of the Ethnological Museum entrusted to Father Schmidt.
The International Conference is part of the horizon of a new “missionary age,” to which Popes Francis and Leo XIV emphatically referred in their magisterium.
The compass that guided Pius XI was his concern for missionary work, which he shared with his predecessor Benedict XV, the Pope who in 1919 had signed the Apostolic Letter “Maximum illud” “on the activity of missionaries in the world.” The historian André Rétif called Achille Ratti the “Pope of the Missions” because he gave new impetus to the missionary work of the Church of Rome.
These were decisive years, marked by numerous initiatives and innovations that also expressed the strength, boldness, and creativity of the missionary activity that animates the Church of Rome. In 1926, World Mission Sunday was instituted; In the same year, , the Pontifical Urban Athenaeum, the precursor of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, was moved to its headquarters on the Janiculum Hill.
A year later, in 1927, Fides News Agency, the Church’s first missionary press service, was also established.
The purpose of the Missionary Exposition, as Pius XI himself wrote, was “to gather and display in this city, the capital of the world, everything suitable for illuminating the nature and activity of the Catholic missions, the places where they are active—in a word, everything related to them.”
The pavilions of the exhibition, erected in the gardens near the Vatican Museums, were divided geographically into two main sections: the Holy Land, the Americas, some regions of Asia, and Indochina in the Cortile della Pigna; and China, Japan, Oceania, and Africa in the adjacent garden. In the gallery of the Chiaramonti Museum, booths were set up showcasing the travels, work, and stories of all the missionary institutes involved in organizing the Expo. A separate pavilion was dedicated to hygiene and medicine. In total, there were thirty-eight pavilions covering an area of approximately 10,000 square meters.
The main purpose of the exhibition was to document the activities of the missionaries and to highlight all the apostolic work supported by the Church in Mission. It also emphasized the missionaries’ extensive use of scientific instruments, encompassing geography, linguistics, physics, astronomy, and botany. In addition to books and artifacts, visitors were shown geographical maps of the world’s most remote regions, as well as information on the mineralogy, flora, and fauna of the mission territories, collected by the missionaries themselves.
One pavilion also housed two complete collections of the journal “Les Missions Catholiques” and a double collection of the “Annalen de département de la Fédération” . These journals, dedicated exclusively to missionary work, comprised 158 volumes and illustrated with more than 15,000 reproductions of sketches, drawings, and photographs sent by missionaries. And this is done with the aim of making known the stories connected with missionary work, the true fruits of the missions, the many testimonies of men and women who had been transformed by encountering the Gospel, also in the hope of touching hearts and encouraging material and spiritual support for the Church’s works in mission territories, and also to counter the manipulated portrayals of critics who denigrated missionary work by branding it as “obscurantism.”
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