A New Europe: Erasing the Destruction

Abstract

Monte Cassino became a fitting symbol for post-war recovery efforts. Its lived experiences account for the abbey’s role in the second half of the twentieth century as the binding agent and promoter for a unified Europe. This chapter makes sense of this unique designation by examining the way(s) in which the abbey’s fractured past has been harnessed into this synthetic vision. It asks how Monte Cassino’s ‘destruction tradition’ – that evolving narrative and shared reality from the Middle Ages to the present day – served as an instrument for promoting the abbey’s faith and prosperity well into the twentieth century. It shows how the abbey’s cumulative experiences with death and resurrection were transformed into a secular and religious rhetoric of hope, unity, and essential European identity.