Global Catholicism, gender conversion and masculinity
2020
This chapter discusses the relation between gender and global
religion at two interrelated levels. On the one hand, it explores
how membership in a transnational Catholic movement produces changes
in gendered family relations and in models of masculinity, in
particular. On the other, it draws attention to the peculiar role
played by men’s conversion to principles such as chastity,
vulnerability and family sacrifice in the spreading of a new global
model of Western-centred Catholicism. It takes as a case in point
the European Catholic reformist movement known as the
Neocathecumenal Way (henceforth NCW), focusing specifically on laic
missionary men within the movement. The chapter argues, first, that
the project of creating a reformed global (Catholic) society through
missionary activities rests on a gender conversion. Both men and
women are required to undergo a deep transformation in terms of
their identity and their family relations, and to make this
transformation publicly visible and debatable. Second, it suggests
that men’s transnational missionary activities foster a
specific model of globalization. In this model, globalization
appears less as a multi-directional process that opens up spaces for
syncretism and cross-cultural religious understanding, and more as a
centre-periphery expansion from a (European) centre to countries
that are considered geographically and substantially
‘distant’ from normative Catholicism.
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