Yes! It is possible to think about medievalism and religion: A case study on Pope Francis’s “Urbi et Orbi” mass.

This article is a contribution to the debate emerged in the studies about medievalism: a relationship between religion as a source of reflection and the theory about the appropriation of the Middle Ages in the post medieval period. This article seeks to ponder the difficulty to address themes and objects in the religious ambit. Particularly, the synchronous relationship with time, invoked as an obstacle to the progress of researches concerning medievalism. In the first part, there is an analysis of Richard Utz. We propose a theoretical approach that presents alternatives to solve the possible difficulties of thinking about the relationship between both fields of study. In the second part of the article, we develop a practical application of the initial discussion to analyze Pope Francis’s Urbi et Orbi mass held on March 27th, 2020 in the Vatican. We argue that through categories of analysis like multi-temporality and auctoritas, called upon as possibilities to think about the relationship between medievalism and religion, it is possible to understand the mass as a medievalizing liturgy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]