Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Comunione e Liberazione (hereafter - CL) is an Italian-rooted Roman Catholic-based religious movement that has disseminated globally to 76 countries. In the 1950s-60s, CL developed as an active anti-communist group, inspired by one of the prophesies by the Lady of Fatima regarding the consecration of Russia, and expended their activities to the former Soviet Union. Together with The Russia Cristiana foundation established in Seriate, Italy, in 1957, Italian CL members supported Christians and dissident movement in the former Soviet Union creating a mission in Siberia, which later relocated to the European part of Russia having formed a center in Moscow. CL today produced a new phenomenon within the movement, a “flying community” that embraced members of neighbor countries: Ukraine, Russia and Belarus of different ages and ethnic origins, and Italian long-or-short-term visitors. Its members have different denominational affiliation as Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. The mission in Ukraine has been established through CL activities in Russia, and have a strong presence of Italian-born members. Since 2013, the group members regularly organize events in the different places where they live, mostly in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Minsk; also Lviv, Odessa, Kherson, Gomel and Moscow are for occasional events. I look at CL festivals as translocal places for cultural overlapping (Low and Lawrence-Zún͂iga 2003), and exhibits as spatial tactics and heterotopia as a strategy and/or technique of power and social control with different functions for insiders and outsiders (Foucault 1986, Yeager 1996) where festive are mediators for social change (Picard 2016).