The debate about the identity of the new churches

The situation in Italy

Abstract

In Italy, in the six decades following the end of the Second World War, before and after the Second Vatican Council, they were built in the shortest time allowed by technology and that the situation required then, an extraordinarily high number of new churches. The reasons that explain such a vast and rapid construction will that, I believe, is unprecedented in other historical epochs, are several: the enormous warlike destructions, recurrent earthquakes (Belize, Friuli, Irpinia, Umbria, Marche, Abruzzo), the remarkable demographic growth, the rapid and deep economic and social transformations that the country has gone through and that have caused an intense and generalized process of urbanization, etc. In the space of sixty years, agrarian Italy has become an industrial country, and later, a post-industrial one. The exact number of churches built in Italy during the second half of the 20th century is not known; the experts estimate that it can oscillate around five thousand. It is a frankly high number, which corresponds to a will equally decided from the project, pastoral and economic point of view.