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Pastoral Criticism, Structural Collaboration: The Role of Ecclesial Power Structures in Modernization and Economic Individualization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2022
Abstract
This article analyzes the complex processes of modernization and individualization, as well as how the church has structurally fostered individualization despite its public criticism. First, the article demonstrates how modernization and individualization have gradually restructured human self-understanding into an economic image of humanity: the human person as homo oeconomicus. Second, this article examines the church's relation to modernity, and specifically its critiques of liberalism and economic individualism. However, the church has often generated the conditions and structures for individualization, and by extension the processes of acceleration and economization of the life-world that it criticizes. Three areas in intra-ecclesial discourse that foster individualization are examined: the interiorization of faith, ecclesial centralization and clerical bureaucracy, and the promotion of corporatism and digital immediacy. The article concludes by examining recent papal efforts at structural reform and the degree to which they address previously entrenched problems and point toward a renewed, non-economic anthropology.
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References
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115 Section 101 of Querida Amazonia goes on to portray the role of women within a “classical” high-modern maternal Marian paradigm, which is itself a heavily restricted view of women. Women are portrayed as “quiet caregivers,” whose presence and “tender strength” preserves the integrity of a community (QA 99, 101). In section 101, the gender of the priest is brought to the fore as “the figure of a man who presides as a sign of the one Priest. This dialogue between the Spouse [Christ/the priest] and his Bride [the church] …” See also QA 107.
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