A Road to Citizenship ― A City to the World. Infrastructural Changes in the Sanctuary of Divino Amore (Rome)

This presentation will reflect on a twofold change in the infrastructure supporting the Sanctuary of Divino Amore. The Sanctuary is located about 20 km from the city centre of Rome and currently has two churches, one built in 1745 and the other inaugurated in 1999. 1. From Pilgrimage to Procession. The distance to the centre has obviously remained unchanged, but the ‘distance to Rome’ has progressively decreased with urban expansion. Rome had been contained within the perimeter of the Aurelian Walls—and surrounded by the wild Agro Romano—until the unification of 1870. The growth of the modern, contemporary city has meant that for many years it has been possible to get to the Sanctuary using public transport buses, thus remaining ‘inside the city’ also in terms of access infrastructure. This has produced a structural change in the direction of the route. Originally, the shrine was to all intents and purposes a place of pilgrimage (understood as the crossing of an unknown place to reach a sacred centre of power) for the citizens of Rome, but progressively the pilgrimage has been transformed into a procession (i.e., the confirmation of the symbolic possession of that urban territory by the participants). In my presentation I would like to discuss how much this change has impacted on the connection between ‘going to the Divino Amore’ and ‘being recognized as a Roman citizen’. 2. The Globalization of the City. We define universalism as the willingness of any entity to incorporate into itself the difference that comes from outside, and instead globalization as the reverse movement, of exporting one's identity specificity elsewhere. Roman Catholicism is, by definition, ‘universal’, and Catholic cosmopolitanism in Rome has historically taken the form of universalism, not globalization. Rome embraced difference by asking it to surrender and belong, and Roman Catholicism has long maintained its localizing provincialism: come here, foreigner, and become Roman too. By contrast, the second Shrine Church, strongly desired by JPII, has precisely the aim, as an infrastructure, to globalize the Catholic Church of Rome. Built in an entirely de-territorialized style, it resembles the place-less buildings of the starchitects and was designed not as a pilgrimage destination, but as a centre from where to broadcast images and sounds. There are no traces of human bodies (instead indispensable in the first church, overflowing with 'ex-votos') and the whole architecture (from the altar to the baptismal font, from the organ to the shape of the pews for the faithful) refers to a completely deterritorialized idea of the Catholic message, which from such an abstract broadcasting centre can be radiated throughout the world in a uniform way. The presentation will discuss to what extent this project of globalization of Roman Catholicism has proved effective or has had to yield to the resistance of Roman localism