HISTORY OF THE OCIC, UNDA AND INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC MEDIA ACTION

The multifaceted history and development of the Catholic Church's interaction with audiovisual media (radio, film, television, and mass media) throughout the 20th century can be seen as a crucial aspect of its sometimes ambivalent and complex relationship with modernity. During the first decades of the 20th century, the Church was initially reluctant to address issues of audiovisual media and left this field open to lay initiatives. This led to the establishment of a plethora of radio and film organizations. The two largest international organizations were the OCIC (International Catholic Film Office) and the BCIR (International Catholic Radio Broadcasting Office), renamed BCIRT (with the addition of a "T" for television) during the 1930s, and later UNDA (from the Latin for "wave"), both founded in 1928. In 2001, the OCIC and UNDA merged to form Signis, the "World Catholic Communication Association."

In 2006, as the Signis general secretariat was preparing to move to its new offices, the archives and library of its predecessors were deposited at the Documentation and Research Center for Religion, Culture, and Society (KADOC) at KULeuven, where they have been available for research ever since. The fact that very few researchers have consulted them is due both to the archives' size (over 90 square meters) and to a seemingly unstructured location list, which makes working with them impractical and complex. With this research report, we aim to provide background information on both organizations and guide future researchers through the different archival holdings related to OCIC, UNDA, and their predecessors (BCIR and BCIRT).

The full investigation can be viewed in English at: https://kadoc.kuleuven.be/pdf/onderzoek/oz-ocic-unda-boes.pdf