Religion as Communication: The Changing Shape of Catholicism in Europe
Religion as Communication: The Changing Shape of Catholicism in Europe
In many European countries, religion today seems to function as guardian of the collective identity and memory, even as those same societies are becoming more multi-religious. Focusing the analysis on European Catholicism and, particularly, on the new role played by the Catholic Church in the public sphere in two historically Catholic countries — Italy and Spain — the chapter develops the hypothesis that Catholic leaders are accepting the idea that religious power must work more and more as communication. They can longer impose norms, but they can reconstruct a romantic sense of being a society, a collective identity rooted in the Christian pattern of values, projecting unity where there is social, religious, and ideological difference.
Keywords: Catholicism, Italy, Spain, collective identity, communication
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