«Combattere come eroi, pregare come santi!». La via crucis e la Grande Guerra tra fede e propaganda

Abstract

The study of the role of the sacred in European society during the Great War is one of the most modern and exciting frontiers of historical research. The investigation about the use of the Way of the Cross in church rituals, and, more generally, in the religious life of Italian society during World War I aims to examine the involvement of devotional practices, as channels of representation and metabolization of the conflict and as means of religious and political propaganda. The leitmotif of the Christological Passion – renewed both in the sufferings of the people and in the wounded body of the soldiers – it was a real symbolic source for the religious authorities, with the support of political power, in the complex operation of controlling and managing society during the war.