New book chapter just came out in Religion Between Governance and Freedoms (Springer, 2024). Here is the abstract:
This chapter analyzes the pilgrimage that, for the past 25 years, thousands of Sri Lankans have made every first of May to St. Anthony’s church in Padua, Italy, in the largest rally of people from Sri Lanka outside their homeland. The analysis of the structure and dynamics of this pilgrimage, conducted through a long-term ethnographic research based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, reveals the construction of a national unity under the symbol of St. Anthony of Padua, proposed and controlled by the highest members of the Sri Lankan Catholic clergy, through a wise mix of religious, political, and ethnic elements that make the symbol accepted by different groups of Sri Lankans, not only Catholic. The dream of a united and peaceful Sri Lanka symbolized by the saint was suddenly broken in the aftermath of the terror attacks that on Easter Sunday 2019 hit St. Anthony’s church in the capital city of Colombo, as well as other churches on the island. This had highly destabilizing effects on the Catholic attempt to represent cohesion in the highly divided Sri Lankan society through their own symbology. After describing the pilgrimage as it took place from its birth to the 2019 Easter attacks and examining the many faces that the symbol of St. Anthony takes on during its most salient moments, the chapter identifies some of the solutions used by the organizers of the Padua pilgrimage to make this symbolic construction and the imagined community it represents survive.