6 - Engaging with other Catholics

Summary

Catholics who focus on relational issues act differently from those who think of the Catholic institution in more abstract and generalized ways. In this chapter, we explore those situation movement states, understood as experiences of power relations, where individuals explained their situation mainly in terms of their interactions with other Catholics. There are two SMSs – Problem and Spin-Out – incorporating the narratives of thirteen people in all. As in the previous chapter, I will outline the main patterns of interviewees' cognitive, emotive and spiritual moves and examine the ways they reflected on and re/enacted the Catholic gender regime. At the end of each SMS I will provide summaries of those power relations using the five dimensions of experience: body; feeling and emotions; dispositions; perceptions; and motivations/volitions.

This chapter focuses on the “self-relating-to-others” scenario, in which the person is relating to other individuals, learning about others, comparing self to other and connecting or disconnecting with others (Dervin & Clark 1993: 116). The kinds of communicative strategies people report depend on where they focus cognitively. In the cases discussed in this chapter, participants focused on specific Catholics known to them, who contributed to their respective blocking situations. Therefore, their ways of describing conflict were distinct from those in the first group, “self-relating-to-collectivity” where there was a generalized reflection on the tacit and formalized rules of the institution as being a large part of the problem.