Changing the face of Catholicism in a tourist context: heritage care, ritual dynamics, and the rhetoric of transformation of a religious minority in Greece

Abstract

In Rhodes, the capital of the Greek Dodecanese archipelago, one thousand or so Roman Catholic people are currently settled and deal with the Orthodox Church and with one million tourists during the summer. One of the principal activities of the local priest is to enhance the role played by the Catholic Church in this complicated and negotiated public life. In developing a heritage activity and adapting the liturgy to the tourists, he is also demanding recognition for the work that he is doing to change the image of this religious minority. This paper situates the Catholic community's pragmatic programme within the tourist context of Rhodes. It provides a description of material and conceptual transformations of Catholic memories and places and of the ritual patterns used in engaging with tourists. The aim of the paper is to show how the priest and his closest staff adopt the rhetoric of tourist change and how the changing local context is paradoxically inscribed within an explicit formulation of continuity. The island of Rhodes constitutes a perfect site to reveal the local Catholic Church as part of the wider process of transformation that has taken place on the island.

Keywords:

• Catholicism
• tourism
• transformation
• rituals
• cultural heritage
• Greece

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sofia Sampaio, Josef Ploner, and Valerio Simoni for their useful feedback on this text.

Funding

This work was supported by the Agence National de la Recherche (France), programme ‘Balkabas. Les Balkans par le bas’ [grant number ANR-08-JCJC-0091-01]; École française d'Athènes; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal), programme ‘Religious Memories and Heritage Practices in the Mediterranean. Confessional Coexistence and Heritage Assertion’ [grant number PTDC/IVC-ANT/4033/2012].

Notes

1. The Custody of the Holy Land is the official Catholic organisation which, as part of the Franciscan Family, is responsible for shrines in the Holy Land and the Near East (Israel, Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, and Rhodes).

2. For a comparison with the Catholic Church of Cyprus, see Constantinou (2009).

3. An Italian woman who married a Greek migrant in Italy and settled in Rhodes for her retirement.

4. However, the cult of this saint is shared by Catholics and Orthodox followers in Rhodes, see below.

5. Albanian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino (Tagalog), French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Slovakian, and Spanish.

6. This is a rule set down by the Bishop of Athens and the Latin parts are sung in the Gregorian style.

7. Seraïdari has already noted this kind of dissonance in Tinos. Catholic foreigners comment on the bizarre and remote rituals of the Greek Catholic liturgy (Seraïdari, 2010, p. 156).

8. The cult of Saint Anthony of Padua is easily shared in the Mediterranean (Albera & Fliche, 2012). In Rhodes, I collected few testimonies of common and shared practices which took place before the new programme of Catholic renewal.

9. Two of the three Franciscan Fathers of Rhodes are Polish, and one can usually count around 50 devotees from Poland during each Sunday mass in Saint Francis Church. Karol Wojtila, who later became Pope John Paul II, opened the enquiry for the beatification of Faustina in the 1960s and finally canonised her in 2000.