Find one more for Inside the Vatican …

    Dear friends,

    Greetings!

    I am writing to ask for your help.

    I need to find 1,000 new subscribers to Inside the Vatican magazine. I would like to find them in these summer weeks of July and August. I would like you to find just one of them for me. I would like you to sign up to purchase one subscription to Inside the Vatican for someone you know, a friend, a relative, a son or a daughter, a grandson or a granddaughter.

    The cost per new subscription is quite low: just $25 with coupon code Friends25. It is actually about the price of four or five coffees at certain cafes these days.

    We need these new subscribers urgently, and this is why…

    (Here is the cover of our first Zero issue in April 1993)

    I started Inside the Vatican magazine 28 years ago, in 1993.

    I wished to make it a publication helpful to individuals, and to the Church.

    The intent was to bring Rome, the Eternal City, into homes in America and around the world, and in this way to deepen understanding throughout the world of the mission of the Church.    

    That mission is, ultimately, to offer gifts to men — the gifts of forgiveness, of friendship, of peace, of beauty, of earthly and heavenly bread… the sacraments of the Church, mediating the life of Christ to men… and ultimately the gift of salvation … bringing the gift of life, now and in eternity.

    And so, by writing on what was happening in Rome, under the Bishops of Rome, the magazine aimed to bring these gifts to men.

    ***

    The use of full-color pictures was intended to be a kind of wrapping paper around the gift, and we became known for the beauty of our pages.

    I remember a day when Giuseppe Sabatelli and Grzegorz Galazka — my Italian graphic designer (originally from Siracusa in Sicily) and my Polish photographer (who, as I have written before, by chance arrived in Italy on the very same day I did, he from the border with Austria in the north, me from New York to Fiumicino airport outside of Rome, on May 19, 1984) — were laying out a half dozen photos on a two-page spread. “That looks ok,” I said, “va bene… Ma…” (“Ma” means “but” in Italian.) “But… it really lessens the impact of this one gorgeous photo of John Paul outlined against the sky… That’s such a great photo! What do you say? Let’s run the photo across the entire two-page spread!”

    Gregorio hesitated. “But Bob, these other photos…”     

    I said, “The impact of the one alone will remain in the memory.”

    And Giuseppe nodded. “Bello,” he said. “Beautiful. Let’s try it…”

    And so we ran it across two pages. And it was stunning…

    And that became our trademark…

    Use code Friends25 at checkout to receive a discount and receive a one-year subscription to Inside the Vatican magazine for just $25.00! (Just click on the button below!)

    “Beauty will save the world,” the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky said in his novel The Idiot.

    What did he mean? How can beauty save anything? Does not salvation come only from sacrifice, from suffering?

    The Russian theologian Vladimir Soloviev, who died in 1900, wrote this about Dostoyevsky’s expression (link):

    Dostoevsky not only preached, but, to a certain degree also demonstrated in his own activity this reunification of concerns common to humanity – at least of the highest among these concerns – in one Christian idea.

    Being a religious person, he was at the same time a free thinker and a powerful artist. These three aspects, these three higher concerns were not differentiated in him and did not exclude one another, but entered indivisibly into all his activity. In his convictions he never separated truth from good and beauty; in his artistic creativity he never placed beauty apart from the good and the true.

    And he was right, because these three live only in their unity. The good, taken separately from truth and beauty, is only an indistinct feeling, a powerless upwelling; truth taken abstractly is an empty word; and beauty without truth and the good is an idol. For Dostoevsky, these were three inseparable forms of one absolute Idea.

    The infinity of the human soul – having been revealed in Christ and capable of fitting into itself all the boundlessness of divinity – is at one and the same time both the greatest good, the highest truth, and the most perfect beauty.

    Truth is good, perceived by the human mind; beauty is the same good and the same truth, corporeally embodied in solid living form.

    And its full embodiment – the end, the goal, and the perfection – already exists in everything, and this is why Dostoevsky said that beauty will save the world.

    ***

    We quickly grew our subscription base.

    Then, in the late 1990s, the internet began to be used. And in the years after 2000, many print publications went out of business.

    People were getting all the news — and photos — they wanted from their computers and cell phones. Paper publications still continued, but with increasing difficulty.

    But after 2010, things became increasingly difficult. Older readers stayed with us, but not many younger readers joined us. And then some of the older readers began to say “we are on a fixed budget, and we cannot afford even a $40 subscription.” And so we lost subscribers who loved the magazine, but could not afford it.

    And then, after 2020, things grew more difficult still.

    ***

    Perhaps the age of print magazines, like the age of the horse and buggy, is passed.

    But perhaps there is still a place for a print magazine like Inside the Vatican.

    And that is why I am using an internet letter to try to add subscriptions to a print magazine, so that I can keep printing it and sending it out to readers around the world.

    Here is my request: help me increase the number of subscribers to Inside the Vatican magazine. The cost is not high — $25 per subscription. We very much need to have 1,000 more subscribers. Will you find just one for us?

        All you have to do is click on the button below, put in the name and address of a new subscriber, then enter the code Friends25 in the checkout box, and the new subscription will be billed at the remarkably low price of $25.