Istituzioni religiose–militari e assistenza spirituale dalla Grande Guerra alla globalizzazione degli scenari internazionali

Abstract

The presence of military chaplains and religious who follow and provide spiritual assistance to armies in combat represents a fact in the history of relations between national states and ecclesiastical institutions. For many centuries, in fact, religion has been conceived as a state religion, so that no state institution could exceed its control. Therefore, it was unquestionable that military chaplains would follow the armies in arms, without their presence raising astonishment or polemical reactions. This practice has also seen some very particular moments and historical contingencies, connected with the role that single states attributed to religion or ministers of the cult operating in military institutions. In these circumstances, it is not easy to elaborate a complete historical judgment on the coexistence of religious institutions within military institutions. Such a judgment has instead to be formulated on the basis of both different interpretative criteria and different mentalities linked to each period or historical context. Moreover, the forms of religious assistance have always been correlated to the historical conditions and the circumstances, and even the best programs of these forms of assistance may have been contaminated by the environment in which they wanted to be realized. For all these reasons, it is not always easy to make a distinction between a strictly religious activity and its socio-military implications. The present contribution, from this point of view, intends to reconstruct and examine, from a historicalinstitutional point of view, the participation offered by religious institutions to the military ones during the XX century, notably from the trauma of the First World War to the current globalized international military policy scenarios.