RT Article
T1 Pastoral Criticism, Structural Collaboration: The Role of Ecclesial Power Structures in Modernization and Economic Individualization
JF Horizons
VO 48
IS 2
SP 367
OP 403
A1 Minch, Daniel 1986-
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1806135531
AB This article analyzes the complex processes of modernization and individualization, as well as how the church has structurally fostered individualization despite its public criticism. First, the article demonstrates how modernization and individualization have gradually restructured human self-understanding into an economic image of humanity: the human person as homo oeconomicus. Second, this article examines the church's relation to modernity, and specifically its critiques of liberalism and economic individualism. However, the church has often generated the conditions and structures for individualization, and by extension the processes of acceleration and economization of the life-world that it criticizes. Three areas in intra-ecclesial discourse that foster individualization are examined: the interiorization of faith, ecclesial centralization and clerical bureaucracy, and the promotion of corporatism and digital immediacy. The article concludes by examining recent papal efforts at structural reform and the degree to which they address previously entrenched problems and point toward a renewed, non-economic anthropology.
K1 Catholic Social Teaching
K1 Ecclesiology
K1 Economics
K1 Hierarchy
K1 Individualism
K1 Liberalism
K1 social acceleration
K1 Theological Anthropology
DO 10.1017/hor.2021.53