PROGRAM*

In the awareness that the space that the Christian community builds and in which it celebrates cannot but be an image of the spiritual vitality of the Church, DEVOTIO 2026 proposes a reflection on the theme LITURGICAL SPACE: PLACE OF FAITH, CULTURAL GOOD declined within a rich calendar of cultural initiatives.

The architecture built by the Christian community as a place for the Eucharistic liturgy is, throughout the centuries, an image of the desire to imprint in matter the cornerstones of the faith, accentuating from era to era the aspects of the Gospel message that best lend themselves to interpreting the sensibility of the moment.

One can, therefore, ask what expectations, forms and uses the contemporary Church proposes today, both in the spaces that Christian tradition has handed over to it and in the new areas recently created. In particular, Western Christianity today faces an exuberance of little-used church buildings, and there is a need to question what possible transformations and diversity of uses can be proposed without distorting the mission and architectural characteristics of such places.

But, above all, one can ask how the spiritual proposal of the “Good News” can be declined in spatial terms to engage the new generations and those who gravitate to the margins of the community still not attracted by the novelty of Christ's resurrection.

Connected to the theme of liturgical space, therefore, aspects of sacred art, restoration and, for the first time, ample space is devoted to the crucial topic of liturgical music. In fact, the vitality of the action that is “the summit toward which the action of the Church tends and the source from which its energy emanates” (SC.10), cannot prescind from the aspects of song, music and art.

DEVOTIO 2026 does not miss a reflection on the role of the documentary transmission of the life of the Church that takes place through archives, libraries and diocesan museums, just as contemporary ecological sensitivity is addressed with the proposal to the religious realities of energy communities.

EXHIBITIONS*