4.2.3. Use in the Church context

According to common thinking, the word museum recalls to mind a place separate from present-day life; an unchanged, static, cold and silent place. Rather, the ecclesiastical museum describes itself as an authentic "greenhouse", a living centre for cultural development that can spread and strengthen awareness for the conservation and enhancement of the cultural heritage of the Church. The ecclesiastical museum has the unique task of preserving and displaying historical memories in the living context of the Church as they have been developed in a certain territory through many forms of artistic expression.

In order to reach such objectives, it is not enough to organize intelligent and well-planned exhibit itineraries, where appropriate works are placed side by side to delineate and explain an environmental context and a precise historical reality. The problem that must be tackled is that of how to balance the co-existence of the two primary functions of the Church museum structure correctly:  conservation and display. The criteria for exhibition must in fact contribute to enhancing the connection between the work and the community it belongs to, in order to indicate the ecclesial life of the Christian community of the past. Museum education must then give life to a communicative and formative circuit in order to make visitors aware of today's ecclesiastical lifestyle.

On the other hand, the time allotted for a visit often does not allow one to appreciate the historical and documentary richness of a museum fully. Therefore it would seem appropriate to organize itineraries in a diversified manner in order to offer visitors, contemporarily to an educational visit, relevant materials that can be consulted outside the museum.

The ecclesiastical museum becomes then a centre of cultural animation for the entire community. It becomes alive through the awareness raising of groups. It plans an annual calendar of events in order to insert it within a wider pastoral project of both the particular church as a whole as well as of the individual Church institutions that are part of it. In such a calendar one can foresee: 

- temporary exhibits that can show periods, artists, historical circumstances, spirituality, devotions, traditions, rites;
- lectures in fixed periods of the year according to thematic cycles;
- presentations of books, or new or restored artworks;
- meetings, workshops, debates with artists, restorers, historians and critics;
- presentations of events promoted by institutions or associations that would otherwise not be able to develop within the diocesan environment;
- the organization of catechism classes on the site.

But the best way to understand the value of artworks, and thus the sense of an ecclesiastical museum, consists in teaching visitors to look around for themselves and to connect events, objects, history, persons which in that territory were and remain the living soul present even today. The ecclesiastical museum can then unite past and present in the ecclesial lifestyle of a particular Christian community.