Cosmopolitan spirituality in Mediterranean Catholic religious sites : the case of St John’s Co-Cathedral, Malta

Abstract

The restoration of Catholic religious sites often concerns the materiality of both ‘container’ and ‘content’. More often than not, the original scope, function, and purpose are no longer understood, with knowledge of these aspects potentially lost throughout the years. Indeed, rather than the multi-sensory experience that Catholic religious sites naturally promote, whereby artworks are activated by ritual, aesthetics become the defining value that shapes the experiential dimension of these sites. As Catholic religious sites become increasingly accessible to cosmopolitan audiences, the understanding of Catholic heritage becomes increasingly limited. As space and content are neutralised and detached from original function and purpose, the distinction between a Catholic church and a museum becomes increasingly blurred. This presents a greater challenge for non-Catholic visitors, who are placed at a disadvantage when accessing what can be described as the Catholic scenography of ritual, let alone comprehending the purpose of that scenography as a backdrop for a multisensory, albeit often historicized, experience of faith. This paper explores possible ways of engaging with Catholic heritage sites by evoking the multisensory experiences for which these architectural structures and their artistic contents were initially designed. Using St John’s Co Cathedral as a case study, I propose a framework that broadly identifies forms of activation intended at ‘restoring’ the public’s understanding of the original functions and purposes of Catholic religious sites.