Giacomo Lercaro in Bologna

Abstract

Facing the emergency of building new churches, while Bologna was living a demographic boom in the fifties, Giacomo Lercaro chose to create an integrate system of progress. The ritual form of faith is spatially determined according to the physical peculiarity of the place in which the salvation is celebrated by Familia Dei. This form invokes an aesthetic-symbolic quality, in order to enable the delivery of human and social poverty in coherence with the Mystery. These experiences accompany the hard research of an appropriate place for the form of faith and an adequate faith for the form of the place. Given the absolute symbolic relevance of the ecclesiastical building and the performative capacity of the ritual, every research and intervention depend to personal and pastoral requirement rooted into extra-liturgical area. In fact, fiddling with the ritual means not only tampering the celebratory quality, but reconfiguring the ecclesial identity itself.