Scaling the church: the sociolinguistics of Catholic social media

Abstract

This thesis proposes a scalar approach to institutional communication through multi-sited studies of Catholic social media from global contexts via a digital ethnographic approach. The approach demonstrates how scalar dimensions of language function as a macro-structuring device for institutional communication in digital contexts through discursive strategies operating (simultaneously) at varying scale levels, and where the institution at various scale levels is discursively invoked in social media spaces affiliated with global institutions such as the Catholic Church.

The approach encompasses three analyses. The first considers the highest scale level associated with Catholicism; the Instagram output of Pope Francis (@franciscus). I describe two contrasting types of images, images of authority and images of community. This contrast reveals how Francis’ message of mercy and inclusivity is visually enacted through close social relations with (genericized) members of the faithful. The closeness with lay and religious alike is evident through visual strategies of direct gaze and a physical closeness with the depicted subjects. Scale is mediated through degrees of genericization and specification, where specific events are connected to more generic (visual) representations of Christian precepts.

The second level of analysis concerns the Instagram account of the Franciscan Friars of Renewal, a Catholic religious order. Through a multimodal discourse analytic approach, the analysis shows how organizational styling is contingent upon a careful negotiation between identities as contemplative religious living in community (“interior lives”), and the friars’ outreach to the poor and other active ministry work (“exterior life”). This negotiation can be observed via the use of visual strategies adapted to the aesthetics of Instagram, imbuing lifestyle influencer imagery with religious significance. Scale is observed to function in the local depictions of the daily lives of the friars which gain a global relevance appealing to Catholics worldwide more broadly through their popular visual aesthetic.

The final analysis considers a ground-up Facebook group for Catholics in Singapore founded in 2007 by lay Catholics, thus existing at a local scale level. The analysis consists of an overview of categories of posts which can be found on the group, providing an understanding of the group dynamics. Secondly, in a membership categorisation analysis (MCA) of one thread, I show how group members rely upon hierarchies of categories both implicitly and explicitly in their response to the original poster. Scale is demonstrated to function at a micro- interactional level, with scalar hierarchies of categories providing pragmatic structure.

The core innovation of the dissertation is an integration of sociolinguistic and theological perspectives, which is best demonstrated in an analysis of the Vatican’s 2023 document concerning social media use, Towards Full Presence. Using the theological idea of inculturation, I propose the use of the term towards an understanding of how the Church enters into and borrows from digital culture, and where Catholic social media can be observed to exist in the space between Catholic and digital cultures, providing examples to this effect. The most significant finding of the project is that there is an overarching continuity between online and offline modes of communication, evident through the lens of scale analysis which I demonstrate to be important at both micro- and macro- levels. My project contributes to our understanding of institutional communication by global organizations through a demonstration of the contingence of communicating the global significance of local events through connections between different scale levels. Negotiation between multiple scale levels of the institution emerges as the overall discursive strategy across the research sites, with groups highlighting both local and global dimensions of institutional affiliation.