Abstract
In recent years, the Catholic Church has been forced to change its attitude towards social communication and mass media. It has had to face not only religious but image challenges. Worldview matters, contemporary problems regarding the institution of marriage or pedophilia in the Church are constantly being debated in mass media, thus creating dangers in terms of critical public reception. This situation has also been occurring in Poland in recent years. The observed progress regarding opening the Church to media relations and the use of rich instruments of social communication have their reasons rooted not only in the history of the social and political events of the past several decades but also in the changes in the sphere of mass media and social communication. This article is an attempt to generate a peculiar typology of determinants regarding the development of social communication within the institutional church in Poland. Within our framework of methodological conditions, a literature query with available statistical analyses and observations of current events was applied. Our conclusions show the current attitude of the Catholic Church in Poland regarding issues related to the marketization of faith and the medialization of religion.
Highlights
The relations between the Catholic Church and mass media have evolved over centuries, ranging from detachment and criticism to acceptance, approval and conscious use of the media in evangelizing activities
The reform of the Second Vatican Council significantly changed the attitude of the institutional church to reality, opened it to changes and accepted a number of actions and activities that did not have the consent of the Holy See and church hierarchies by that time
The Second Vatican Council is indicated as one of the key events that changed the attitude of the Catholic Church to mass media, requiring the latter to adopt an attitude of openness to public opinion (Łecicki 2012; Redden 2016; Shawchuck et al 1992)
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Interer Mirifica, being the first church document of this rank, determined the attitude of the Church to the development of ways of communication and the evolution of mass media. The effects of these documents are witnessed today in both the Holy See and local churches Karol Wojtyła’s reflections, expressing full approval of the media, were filled with wise, critical attitude, including his meetings with journalists, speeches to various media groups and associations His television activity was continued by Benedict XVI (Laskowska and Marcyński 2016) and by Pope Francis (Maibach 2015; Narbona 2016; Slatinek 2017). This is qualitative research which, through the use of data collection and analysis techniques, allows us to solve scientific and practical problems (Stake 1978; George and Bennett 2005)
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