ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the sacred journeys as spaces for peace. It explores the three years of data among English- and Italian-speaking pilgrims at the shrines of St Padre Pio of Pietrelcina to argue that the peacemaking potential of a pilgrimage, whether spiritual or secular, exists in the emotional, interior movements that exist above and beyond yet mirror an exterior embodied journey between two or more places. The chapter describes the peacemaking potential of sacred journeys by building on both Catholic principles of communio and pilgrimage, as well as Catholicism-inspired anthropological theories of communitas which, at its base, is a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities'. Recognising the others' diversity and united in a higher purpose, these secular and religious pilgrims create their own society' within the space of pilgrimage, to paraphrase the aforementioned Pietrelcinese priest. Communitas is encouraged by certain elements within the social structure of the travel experience, and evoked in spite of others.
