Moscow, 25 December 2007 (Interfax):
Roman Catholic Archbishop Paolo Pezzi of Moscow has decided to close Svet Evangelia (The Light of Gospel), the only Catholic weekly in Russia. ”Given the fact that the structure of the information activity of the diocese is changing, [we decided] to close the newspaper. It will be replaced by other information resources, which we hope will be more relevant to the present state of affairs”, Viktor Khrul, the editor-in-chief of Svet Evangelia told Interfax-Religion on Tuesday.
An editorial under the headline “We do not say farewell forever…” was published in the last issue of the newspaper on 25 December. “You are holding an historic issue of the newspaper Svet Evangelia. This is the last issue. All explanations that we need to be make [about the closing] will be made [at the proper time]”, the editorial read. The weekly Svet Evangelia was established in 1994 by Pezzi’s predecessor, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, now archbishop of Minsk and Mogilyov in Belarus. An Italian priest, Fr Bernardo Antonini, first came up with the idea to establish the weekly. Reporters of the Moscow-based newspaper worked in St Petersburg, Saratov, Sochi, Novosibirsk, Tula, Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Magadan, and Vladivostok.
(Editor’s Note: This is an illustration of how information dissemination has changed over the last decade. With the increased use of the Internet for both personal and corporate communication, it is clear that the Catholics in Russia are re-aligning their information strategy to meet current realities. It must be noted that His Holiness Patriarch Aleksei is leading a similar move in Orthodox circles. Is the print newspaper dead?)
Interfax-Religion
