Ghost in the Machine: Preaching in the Structurationally Divergent Catholic Church

Jennifer E Sigler, Purdue University

Abstract

The Catholic Church is a unique blend of charismatic, patrimonial, and bureaucratic structures developed over different periods of the Church’s history. Given the typically divergent “rationalities” (Weber, 1978/1922) of such structures, it is expected that such a combination may create structurational divergence (SD). SD is “a widespread organizational problem, manifesting as recurrent cycles of unresolved conflict rooted in incompatible meaning structures” (Nicotera, Mahon, & Zhao, 2010, p. 362) and divisible into two primary components: (1) an “SD nexus” (p. 362), created by the conflicting structures themselves, and (2) an “SD cycle”, which is a “downward communication spiral stemming from the SD nexus” (p. 363). Signs of SD in the Catholic Church—such as low job satisfaction of Church workers, high turnover, high stress among clerics, etc.—have been reported in scholarly literature for decades. This study argues that preaching in particular is an especially likely site for the Church’s SD cycle to play out, because preaching is particularly prone to pressures from the Church’s various structures. To explore whether this is in fact the case, the study asks three research questions: (1) How are priests’ experiences of preaching work shaped by—and how do they themselves shape—the Church’s patrimonial–bureaucratic structure? (2) How are priests’ experiences of preaching work shaped by—and how do they themselves shape—the Church’s charismatic structure? And (3) how do priests identify, frame, and negotiate tensions between the Church’s patrimonial–bureaucratic and charismatic structures in their preaching work? It presents answers to these questions derived from interviews with 39 Catholic priests, analyzed using thematic analysis and yielding nine major themes, twenty-two categories, and four cross-theme and cross-category “threads”. It concludes that priests’ experience of preaching work is shaped largely by the patrimonial–bureaucratic structure of the Church via strong pressures from rationalistic patrimonial teaching and bureaucratic work conditions. And although it finds the influence of patrimony somewhat “adulterated” by the powerful influence of an informal culture of preaching in the Church, the dominance of the patrimonial–bureaucratic structure is nonetheless powerful enough to cause serious tensions with the charismatic structures that surround preaching. Results indicate that how priests frame these potential tensions largely determines how well they negotiate them, and thence also to what extent they both suffer from and contribute to the perpetuation of the Church’s SD cycle. As such, this study concludes that personal frames or orientations to divergent structures may be as critical to resolving cases of SD as dialogic communication (Nicotera et al., 2010). Additionally, it complicates the relationships between agency and SD and between boundary-spanning (Aldrich & Herker, 1977; Keller & Holland, 1975; Leichty & Springston, 1996) and SD, at least as these have been presented in the SD literature thus far. Finally, it provides a series of empirically grounded recommendations to various stakeholders in the Church with interest in improving Catholic preaching.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Buzzanell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Religion|Communication|Organization Theory

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