Comunità cattoliche del XXI secolo

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to furnish a framework for the organizational analysis of the New Religious (Roman Catholic) Communities which arose in the wake of the Vatican Council II. Three issues of particular importance are addressed. The first concerns the criteria with which to construct a typology able to comprise the extreme variety of the New Communities in existence today. Adapting a classic distinction drawn by Weber, the paper introduces and discusses a model which distinguishes among communities according to the twofold criteria of ascetic and mystical, and inner- and other-worldly. The second issue concerns the connection between the missions of New Communities and their internal organizations. The paper argues that this connection is in many respects the result of unexpected contingencies interpreted by the founders of communities as signals of divine will. From this it follows that comparative examination of communities should focus, not on their static features, but instead on the existence of “homogeneous sets of fortuitous events” to which the leaders of the communities themselves have given especial importance. The third issue concerns the recognition that the New Communities are able to obtain from the Catholic Church. It is argued that such recognition often involves negotiations made lengthy and tortuous both by the controversial nature of the institutional, organizational and liturgical innovations adopted by the Communities, and by the existence within the Church of several sources of legitimating authority. Torn between the duty to disavow excessively radical innovations and the desire to prevent open conflicts, the ecclesiastical bureaucracy often resorts to forms of ambiguous legitimation, where it is not clear whether the Church’s silence amounts to tacit condemnation or tacit approval of the New Communities. The paper concludes by warning that the three issues identified may prove to be interwoven and interdependent when field research is conducted.