«Un solo corpo». La dimensione comunitaria del modello educativo confraternale

The protective function of confraternal networks cannot be reduced to the Christian domestication of death in the pursuit of privatised salvation. On the contrary, protection was grafted onto a bond of interdependence between individuals, who were thus introduced to the possibility of being educated to experience the community dimension as a constitutive element of the religious phenomenon. The juridical apparatus of the statutes, the forms of ceremonial and the visual signs generated by the life of the confraternities are a document of this solidaristic implication that drove people to gather in the organic unity of a body.