Abstract

Given the difficulty to define religious cinema on a theoretical level, it is instead convenient to move to the empirical level, and to provide an objective description of religious film as it was conceived during a given period and within a given context. This is possible by referring to the lists of religious movies drafted, between the fifties and the sixties, by one of the most important offices to which the encyclical "Vigilanti Cura" entrusted the control of cinema on behalf of the Catholic Church: the Italian Catholic Cinematographic Centre. The essay proposes a categorization of religious cinema of three different types, and surveys how Italian Catholics involved in the field of cinema interacted with these films.