Polarization and the Production and Reception of Liturgical Change in the U.S. Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council

Audra Dugandzic, University of Notre Dame

Studies of the production and reception of cultural objects typically focus either on production or reception, and further, assume a one-way, linear process from producers to audiences. In this study, I ask, how does the recursivity of the production and reception process shape a cultural object? In other words, how do audiences act back on producers? To answer this question, I examine a case in which the neat division between producer and audience is blurred, namely, the process of implementing the new Catholic Mass in the United States after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Different styles of the Mass emerging after this time period have come to be associated with “liberal” and “conservative” Catholic identities, and “liturgy wars” continue to rage, constituting one of the most important sites of polarization among U.S. Catholics. I analyze official statements, newsletters, meeting minutes, correspondences, worship materials, and newspapers from three U.S. dioceses, as well as statements by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Vatican, spanning the years of 1965-1995. I argue that, in what was already a time of social upheaval and political realignment, ambiguity in Vatican liturgical directives and in decision-making authority fostered intractable disagreements between competing religious logics at the parish and diocesan levels. These competing logics, in turn, manifested in differing liturgical styles. The inability to fully surveil and discipline Catholics – lay, clergy, and religious, at all levels of the Church – meant that competing religious logics, and thus liturgical styles, flourished and diffused, which in turn affected future Vatican directives. The findings also reveal how organizational processes and cultural objects are implicated in polarization.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 178. Politics and Social Change in Catholic Contexts