When Popular Religion Becomes Elite Heritage: Tensions and Transformations at the Shrine of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina

Abstract

Religious sites seem to have always been viewed as profitable and popular loci for heritage and heritage tourism as they are highly affective mediators (between people, places, and the divine) deeply implicated in a society’s cosmology and values, and often attest to important syncretisms and networks of socio-cultural exchange. However, this chapter argues that extreme tensions may arise at the popular level when heritage practitioners attempt to transition a site from a locus of popular religion—with its own specific style of embodied devotion practices—to one of modern heritage and tourism. Tracing the theological and philosophical turns of thought underlying both (pre-Tridentine) popular devotion and (post-Enlightenment) heritage tourism, and based on long-term ethnographic research in Italy, this chapter examines the contemporary difficulties religious site managers in the Italian pilgrimage town of San Giovanni Rotondo have encountered in turning their shrine to twentieth century stigmatic and saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina into a modern cultural heritage site akin to Assisi, which, in the popular imaginary, is more famous for its UNESCO-designated art and architecture than it is of its extremely influential saint, Francis of Assisi. The author argues that, to mitigate such tensions, more ethnographic attention should be paid to the divergent goals and values of popular religion and popular heritage, and to the oft-conflicting ways in which pilgrims and heritage tourists and practitioners discipline their bodies and senses to achieve these objectives.