‘Blogging Sometimes Leads to Dementia, Doesn’t It?’ The Roman Catholic Church in Times of Deep Mediatization

Abstract

The chapter analyzes religious authorities in Catholicism in times of deep mediatization. Like few other organizations, the Catholic Church seems to be caught between the general tendency of deep mediatization and its own reluctance to adapt to a mediatized world and society. One topic that is directly connected to media change is the construction of religious authority. Unlike earlier perspectives on the relation of religious authority and media, the figurational perspective offers the possibility to look at changes in the construction of religious authority and their interrelation with media change on different levels. Those different levels refer to different actor constellations and different media ensembles, as well as to different levels of authority, in other words local and translocal authority. In this chapter, we will explore how official religious authorities in the Catholic Church, namely priests in different positions, deal with deep mediatization. This includes the question concerning how they use media themselves, in which situations they use or don’t use media, how and why they are reluctant; but also how they define their own and other’s authority in a mediatized society and how all of this effects the organization as a whole. We will find out that there are different scopes in which authority is constructed differently: while the degree of mediatization is relatively low on the local scope, religious authorities are expected to go with mediatization in a translocal and global scope.