Sanctuary Theotókos: A Conception

Chapter 5 follows how the Byzantine icon of Theotókos came to be an architectonic model for a new sacred space: the enforced concrete mega Santuário Mãe de Deus (Sanctuary Mother of God) in São Paulo. The chapter tells how, unable to pay off what turns out to be a very costly enterprise of building a space, charismatic media savvy Padre Marcelo Rossi transforms such limits into a theology of the icon. According to this theology, the icon is not in space but is itself spatial. The icon is its operations. To come to the church, to participate in his “aerobics of Jesus,” thus becomes in itself a mode of bodily partaking in the making of space-cum-icon .The practice of bodybuilding explored in the previous chapter is taken to a new level through the analogy between body and building.