Baptismal places, reformations and modernity in the central decades of XXth Century

The twin table of Vatican II and the three liturgical focal points in the protestant world

Abstract

Baptism is the most shared sacrament among the various Christian confessions, but at the same time, it presents historically and geographically an almost unlimited diversification of liturgical formalizations and spatial solutions. These differences do not, however, correspond unequivocally with the differences between the different confessions, but they cross the liturgical architecture in a transconfessional way, according to cultural and social, not just ritual, declinations.
This communication proposes a reading of the debate on the place of baptism in the central decades of the twentieth century, comparing the most widespread baptismal practices between Protestant confessions and Catholic experiments conducted during the Second Vatican Council. We will discuss the hypothesis of whether Catholic baptismal practices of the 1960s and 1970s are debtors of the Protestant tradition. In short, the place of baptism can be considered —with the appearance of the various reforms, both in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries— an extraordinary catalyst for experiences, sensitive to the popular dimension of Christianity in all its denominations.