The stamp alluding to the World Youth Day (WYD) Lisbon 2023 launched on Tuesday by the Vatican which caused controversy in Portugal has been withdrawn from circulation by the Post and Philatelic Services of the Holy See.
The news was advanced this Wednesday afternoon by online newspaper 7Margens, which had asked “a Vatican official” to buy a copy of the stamp.
“At the official post office in St Peter’s Square, the employee who answered said it was impossible to make the sale, due to orders from above, because it would be withdrawn,” the paper adds.
The news of the stamp’s withdrawal from circulation was confirmed by Radio Renascença to the Holy See, which did not offer any explanations.
The Vatican presented on Monday a stamp commemorating World Youth Day (WYD) Lisbon 2023, inspired by the Monument to the Discoveries on the bank of the river Tagus in the Belem district of Lisbon, with the image of Pope Francis in place of Prince Henry the Navigator and with young people in place of navigators.
After the stamp’s image was released, several negative comments were posted on social networks, referring to the graphic imagery of the Estado Novo’s Secretariat of National Propaganda (the regime of Portugal’s former dictator Antonio Salazar) and colonialism.
The design of the stamp, launched together with a commemorative stamp with the WYD logo, is by Stefano Morri.
“In the same way as the helmsman Henry leads the crew in the discovery of the new world, so too on the Vatican stamp Pope Francis leads the young people and the Church,” explained a note published on the Vatican news website, Vatican News.
Questioned on Tuesday by Lusa news agency regarding the controversy generated, Portuguese bishop Carlos Moreira Azevedo, delegate of the pontifical committee for historical sciences, considered the image of the WYD commemorative stamp released by the Vatican to be in “very bad taste”.
For Carlos Azevedo, who works at the Vatican, the stamp “uses a very concocted work” and “epically evokes a pastoral reality that does not correspond to that spirit”.
Also on Tuesday, the organisation of World Youth Day clarified that the commemorative stamp presented by the Vatican aimed only to “promote” the meeting of young people with the Pope, ruling out readings that would identify him with the the regime of Portugal’s former dictator Antonio Salazar, the Estado Novo, or Portuguese colonialism.
Rosa Pedroso Lima, spokeswoman for the WYD Lisbon 2023 Foundation, told Lusa news agency that “the stamp was made by an Italian illustrator, Stefano Morri, who has often worked with the Vatican’s numismatic services” and whose reading for the illustration of the stamp is “an image of the Pope on a Lisbon monument, symbolizing, in a kind of allegory, the barge of St. Peter and the Pope leading young people and the Church into a new era,” explained the Foundation’s spokeswoman.
For Rosa Pedroso Lima, “there will always be several readings of whatever is in a work of art, whether it is a stamp or an illustration. This is the reading that the Vatican does and the objective is to promote World Youth Day”.
The Lusa agency has already questioned the Vatican’s Postal and Philatelic Service to obtain information about the stamp’s withdrawal from circulation, but has had no reply so far.
