'The Protestantism of the Future?': the Agape Centre and Protestant Catholic Cooperation

A ‘village without a boundary,’ ‘crossroads between cultures,’ ‘school of contradictions’: these are some of the terms used to describe the Centro Ecumenico Agape (Agape Ecumenical Centre), founded in 1947 on the Italian-French border in Prali, Piedmont. The village of Agape was inaugurated in the summer of 1951, but in a sense had already achieved new forms of collaboration through the involvement in its construction of hundreds of young volunteers from Europe and America. The ecumenical and community perspective, youth participation and the progressive, even revolutionary, political vision remained a constant in the history of the Centre, which was perceived (and often self-represented) as ‘the’ place where the Protestantism of the future was to be born.