Religious Sense and Sense of the Sacred. The Role of Julien Ries' Phenomenology of Religion by "Communion and Liberation"

In recent years, science of religions is profoundly reflecting on its own history and its own social and political function. At the same time, within it gains increasingly ground the sector of Catholic Studies, a sphere little considered in the past. The research project that I propose means to relate those two distinct investigation fields, by stressing on the one hand one of the most successful charismatic movements within Catholic Church, i.e. "Communion and Liberation", founded by the Italian priest D on Luigi Giussani, and on the other hand a well-known historian of religions of religious phenomenological school, the Belgian Julien Ries of the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve. Communion and Liberation's approach to the faith encourages a sort o f "joint venture" with Ries' "religionistic" one. This alliance is realized by an enthusiastic involvement of the Belgian scientist in the intellectual and social life of the movement. The comparison between "religious sense" and "sense of the sacred", ce ntral concepts of Don Giussani's theology and of Ries' science of religions respectively, represents the heart of this study: the sense of the sacred, verified by Ries in the history of homo religious, is actively utilized by the founder of the movement a s a sort of scientific evidence of the plausibility of his own "existential Christianity", based on the religious sense as a thirst for eternity that only the belief in Jesus Christ as a really happened historical fact can satisfy. The questions that this ecclesial and theological "appropriation" of science of religions puts are various: they have to do not only with descriptive aspects - in any case to analyze deeply -, but also with the autonomy of the discipline in respect of such an appropriation as w ell as with the identity and self-perception of the specific religious group that make use of it.