ABSTRACT
The radio medium has played an essential role in society around the globe and in particular in South Africa. This chapter focuses on a Catholic Church community radio station known as Radio Veritas (Radio Truth). In the Catholic Church’s context, the radio plays a significant role as a medium for integral evangelisation. Integral evangelisation cuts across religious, as well as political, social, economic, cultural, and educational transformation. The chapter includes a qualitative approach methodology, using interviews, listening to radio programmes, perusing website information with social media interactions, participatory observation, and document analysis. It draws on the theoretical framework of Habermas’s public sphere. Radio Veritas has made considerable achievements in being inclusive and serving minority and marginalised groups that are not served by the mainstream media, such as the elderly, children, the sick, and the poor. We argue that although the radio station acts as the public sphere for the Catholic Church’s imagined community, it is at the same time exclusionary as it does not include people who are not Catholics. The community radio station needs to embrace digital technology platforms more, such as social media, to deepen and maximise its culture of interaction and participation with its publics.
