«Con eterna voce al mondo intero ammoniscono fraternità»: i ‘martiri di Kindu’ e il culto dei soldati caduti per la pace

This essay focuses on the issue of martyrdom from a particular point of view, that is the cult of Italian aviators killed in Kindu in 1961. The Catholic world offered an original contribution to the construction of the public narrative of the Congolese massacre and the celebration of its victims. The starting point is the sermon given by Ugo Camozzo, archbishop of Pisa (seat of the brigade to which the military belonged), who spoke of the dead as the actors in a «mission of human and Christian civilization». The analysis sets that sentence into its broader context; in addition to questioning the persistence of national-Catholic frames, it dwells on the contents of the funeral liturgies and the comments appeared in the press, in order to highlight the intertwining of the elements of continuity and the factors of change which shook a church experiencing the Johannine turning point: anti-Communism, the rethinking of the “religious war culture”, the racist and colonial legacy, the emergence of a “new universalism” aimed at claiming on a global scale a profane, and no more hierocratic, Christendom.