Confraternities

There are three main Confraternities in Borgo San Dalmazzo: San Dalmazzo, Santa Croce and la Misericordia. Although with different methods, they have had fundamental common traits. They are groups of Christian lay people that developed from the twelfth century and witnessed a complete development and diffusion in the sixteenth century; able to manage themselves, they


Typology Intellectual

Period Before 1380

Accessibility Yes

Visitable Yes

There are three main Confraternities in Borgo San Dalmazzo: San Dalmazzo, Santa Croce and la Misericordia. Although with different methods, they have had fundamental common traits.

They are groups of Christian lay people that developed from the twelfth century and witnessed a complete development and diffusion in the sixteenth century; able to manage themselves, they influence ecclesiastical, social and cultural life. They provide charitable and assistance services to the most abandoned or in need, who join the spiritual journey to care for their churches. These associations were created to connote different sensitivities and different ways of Christian ways of living such as charity, piety, solidarity: assistance to those condemned to death, visits to prisons and hospitals, assistance to the poor, maintaining devotion to a saint.

The Confraternity of San Dalmazzo conserved the tomb and the relics of the first Christian martyr evangelizer of the Cuneo area; the Confraternity of Santa Croce, called La Crusà, looked after the sick and the poor, similarly to that of Cuneo; the Confraternity of San Giovanni Battista, called La Misericordia, which assisted prisoners, those condemned to death, widows and orphans. These tasks were joined by religious services of worship and participation in the solemn liturgical functions, in the main feasts, in processions, in Rogations, in Holy Week, etc. The Confraternities are constituted in a church with a formal decree of the ecclesiastical authority, which alone can modify or suppress them; they have a statute, a title, a name, rules and a particular style of clothes. For example, blue for San Dalmazzo, white for La Crusà and black for La Misericordia. It is a world that ceased to exist around the 1960s and has been reforming over the last period. In Borgo San Dalmazzo, the Confraternities of San Dalmazzo and Santa Croce have merged, having become just one parish, and they are in operation.

Conditions of visit

Evento periodico.

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Additional information

Bibliography

  • Walter Cesana, San Dalmazzo, Santa Croce, La Misericordia, cinque secoli di spiritualità, storia e tradizione delle tre Confraternite borgarine , Primalpe, Cuneo, 2013.
  • Ristorto Maurizio, Civitas Pedona. Cenni storici di Borgo San Dalmazzo, Borgo S. Dalmazzo , Istituto Grafico Bertello, 1970, pp. 53-69.