ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on online dimensions of ‘religious language’ associated with mediatised representations of Catholicism, highlighting the importance of studying Christian practices in online contexts which often function as extensions of offline communities and where religious language exists in secular spaces. The chapter begins with a review of existing work in the area, before presenting how sociolinguistics is particularly relevant to furthering understanding on ways that the Church becomes incarnate on the internet via my empirical data. Each empirical section is centred upon a theoretical concept—1) ‘Organisational Styling’ which can be observed in various institutional social media accounts belonging to the Vatican and religious orders, as well as individual accounts belonging to priests and lay Catholics, 2) ‘Communities of Practice’ where I focus on groups of Catholics who congregate online along geographical, ideological, and topical lines. These linguistic issues arising from digital practices illustrate ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ perspectives related to global Catholicism at various scale levels, thus demonstrating the key role of online discourses in (re)shaping ecclesiological notions of authority and community both on- and offline through an account of the emergence of a digital ‘Catholic imagination’.
