Catholic Sacred Places as Liminal and Living Cultural Heritage: A European Overview on Shrines

Abstract

This article presents Catholic shrines as living and liminal sacred spaces possessing an intrinsic vitality that exerts a specific attraction not only for believers and visitors but also for the territory that surrounds them. As a place of devotion and pilgrimage destination, they are a complex system from the social, cultural, symbolic economic, and political perspectives. The essay aims to describe Catholic sacred places are a “detector” of the secular/religious contact in the field of cultural heritage. They are religious spaces that respond to the primary characteristics of heritage production but escape any single consideration in that area. Being sacred places, they get exposed to a continuous movement between immanence and transcendence which is the same movement that characterises the creation of heritage, responding to mechanisms of permanentisation of liminality.