ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the major shift that has occurred from one transnational religious regime to another, from the regulated transnationalism of the older Church to the deregulated transnationalism of communitarian movements within the Church. It outlines some of the structural features of the decomposition and recomposition process that make religious modernity an essentially mobile reality. The chapter focuses on the shift from one transnational regime to another, from the regulated Catholicism of a bureaucratized Church to a deregulated Catholicism resting on the diffusion of emotional communities and affinity groups. The capital of symbols and Christian references has become available for extremely diverse individual and collective appropriations which are renewing the internal pluralization of the Catholic universe. In the postwar era, the practical effects of modernization have done more to undermine the parish civilization than the ideological offensives of secularization have done.