Abstract
Over the past 60 years there has been a general change in the shape of the Catholic place of worship throughout the world. This transformation is usually attributed to the Church’s most significant event of the last century: the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This research wants to approach the Council from the point of view of the place of worship, trying to answer some questions about which much has been written and said in the last decades: did the Council have a concrete idea of how churches should be? Did he intend that liturgical spaces be constructed in a certain way? In the pages of this work, we will focus on the moment we consider key to this process: the period between 1947 and 1970, bounded by Pius XII’s encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) and Paul VI’s Missal (1970). The research adopts a multidisciplinary approach, considering aspects of a historical, theological, liturgical and artistic nature. The most relevant contribution of this study consists in working directly with archival fonds, many of which are unpublished, that will allow us to reconstruct the process of formation of the principal documents of the Church that will be submitted to our examination. In this way, we will be able to tell a story hitherto largely unknown, thus being able to rigorously answer the question about the church-building “that Vatican II wanted”.
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