This Sunday, December 15, Pope Francis is attending a symposium on “popular religiosity” in Ajaccio, Corsica, organized at the initiative of local cardinal and bishop François Bustillo. This is a theme dear to the pontiff, who placed it at the heart of his latest encyclical, He loved us (“he loved us,” in Latin), published on October 24. Corsica appears to be a particularly rich laboratory for the study of this form of piety long rejected by the Church, as Angelina Antonetti, a professor and researcher at Corte’s Université Pascal-Paoli, a specialist in the island’s traditions and a symposium participant, explains in an interview with The World.

How would you describe this Corsican “popular religiosity,” which is at the heart of your work and which has aroused the interest of Pope Francis?

Angelina Antonetti: This is a form of religious practice, a set of beliefs that are both very much alive and very old, manifested in rites and symbols that express a certain vision of the cosmos, a repertoire of meaning that goes far beyond the institutional framework of religion, based on an oral tradition that has naturally managed to integrate elements of the island’s previous religions.

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‘For centuries, the Church has denigrated Corsican religiosity, a subtle blend of the sacred and the profane, which the pope is now interested in’