Communicating Religion in the Age of Emergency

This paper aims to analyse the Humanitarian Corridors project, designed and implemented by the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy, in collaboration with the Community of Sant’Egidio and thanks to the public funding provided by the Italian State to the Waldensian Church, to create legal and safe routes and accommodation in favour of “vulnerable” subjects (in particular refugees and asylum seekers) from war-torn countries. Contemporarily, it aims to examine the Humanitarian Corridors project, promoted and developed later in 2017 by the Community of Sant’Egidio and the Italian Episcopal Conference. This essay, which focuses on the agency activity and the relations existing between the actors involved in both projects, starts from the reconstruction of the legal, political-cultural and religious framework, in which the Humanitarian Corridors are inscribed. Through the examination of their implementing provisions, it explores the role of religious communities in the field of reception of refugees in Italy. At the same time, it aims to verify how these projects represent a case study of a social practice unique in its kind and how the Humanitarian Corridors project, jointly developed by Protestants and Catholics, can be considered also a peculiar form of ‘ecumenism in action’.