Immigrant Christianities : Religious Migration from Romania to Italy

Over the past two decades, Romanian immigration to the Italian Peninsula has grown to nearly a quarter of the country’s foreign population, making it the largest Romanian diaspora in the world. This volume is the first to examine the religious dimension of this vast migratory phenomenon from multiple perspectives, including sociology, anthropology, ethnology, history, and theology. The chapters study the patterns and transformations of Romanian Churches and Christian movements in Italy, with particular attention to the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Roman Catholic Church, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church, and the Romanian Pentecostal Church. They also analyze how these immigrant Churches and religious movements engage with Italian society and respond to contemporary challenges. Drawing on the study of the Romanian diaspora and grounded in a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume develops the notion of immigrant Christianities. The latter provides a heuristic framework for highlighting the growing entanglements and transformative dynamics shaping the multiplicity of immigrant Churches and Christian movements in the contemporary world.