THEATRE

The world is struggling to recover from the Great War and the climate of the time is one of tension, dissatisfaction and poverty, heralding a new world conflict. In South America, the Chaco War (1932-1935), with Paraguay and Bolivia as belligerents, is at its height. After a long journey by land and sea, Nazaria Ignacia March y Mesa, a Spanish-Bolivian Catholic nun, was visiting the Vatican, in some administrative office of the Catholic Church, to request pontifical approval for the religious congregation founded in Oruro, originally called the Pontifical Crusade, which would later become known as the Crusader Missionaries of the Church.

In a small waiting room in a building near the offices of Pope Pius XI in Vatican City in 1934, two interesting conversations with Sister Nazaria took place.

• The first was with Lucas, a 25-year-old Vatican Radio worker. In it he talks about young people, their worries, their hopes and discouragements.
• The second, Guillermo Marconi, Marquis de Marconi and inventor of wireless telegraphy. Founder of Vatican Radio and winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics. This dialogue reflects two ways of seeing and understanding life. One, presented by Nazaria, is full of faith in God and commitment to the poorest, as a religious option. The second, presented by Marconi, is a fascist stance, in which power is held by the State – to which everything must be submitted – and women are relegated to second place.

D. Carlos H. Cordero Carraffa produced, directed and presented this play, inviting us to get to know Nazaria from another perspective, but, above all, to put her thoughts in dialogue with others.