Abstract
This article examines two commemorative projects on 20th-century Jesuit martyrs turned into Internet tours. A comparison between the official online tour of the Father Pro Museum in Mexico City, and two unofficial tours through the Martyrs Memorial Hall at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, El Salvador, suggests paradoxes regarding a museum’s online representation and ways in which violence and martyrdom are represented.
Highlights
Social networks and the impact of the Internet have been analyzed from different theoretical lenses, and a growing number of publications can confirm academia’s interest in understanding a phenomenon that in only 30 years appears to have transformed cognitive, social, and information-spreading habits.Virtual museums date back to the 1990s; some authors (Coddy 1997; Jones-Garmil 1997) note that they have been criticized both as museums and educational arenas, and as spaces for memory and commemoration
The goal of this article is to analyze virtual projects created in physical museums—the Monsignor Romero Center and Martyrs Museum at José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, and the Father Pro Museum in
The museums have opted for the preservation of the artifacts, as the placement of glass panels in both museums shows. They impede any bodily contact between the faithful and relics, while at the same time guaranteeing an appropriate behavior by the visitors toward the museum, yet it goes without saying that the visitors might be confused about the separation between the eminently religious and cultural nature of the martyrdom narratives and secular expectations when visiting a museum
Summary
Social networks and the impact of the Internet have been analyzed from different theoretical lenses, and a growing number of publications can confirm academia’s interest in understanding a phenomenon that in only 30 years appears to have transformed cognitive, social, and information-spreading habits. The idea for this article came from a comparative effort between two commemoration projects on 20th-century Jesuit martyrs who have been represented in museums This type of representation is interesting, since a museum is more characteristic of modern, (secular) nation-states than of the Catholic Church. The goal of this article is to analyze virtual projects created in physical museums—the Monsignor Romero Center and Martyrs Museum at José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, and the Father Pro Museum in Mexico City. Both cases represent projects protected and embraced by the Society of Jesus. I have visited both museums, I have chosen to show the readers the images available as part of the virtual tours
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