From God to Caesar

Negotiating authority in the current media ecosystem

Abstract

This article investigates how the Catholic Church’s presence, authority, and legitimacy are negotiated within Italy’s digital public sphere. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of public religion and digital religion, and adopting an agenda-building perspective, the study examines how social media platforms reshape both the actors involved in public debates about religion and the issues through which religious institutions gain visibility. The Italian case is particularly relevant given the Catholic Church’s longstanding influence in public life and the growing challenges to its authority in contemporary media environments. The analysis is based on a large-scale dataset of 75,959 Facebook posts published during the first six months of 2018 and 2019 - two pivotal years marked by national and European election campaigns and a renewed political instrumentalization of religious symbols. Data collected via CrowdTangle are examined through a mixed-methods approach. Findings show that social media platforms foster a marked expansion and diversification of actors engaging with the Catholic Church. Alongside institutional voices at the national level, local parishes, clergy, religious orders, associations, citizens, media outlets, political actors, and even disinformation sources all contribute to shaping the Catholic Church’s public visibility. This plurality of voices fragments institutional authority and undermines the possibility of a unified communicative narrative. At the same time, the Catholic Church’s online presence extends beyond traditional political or moral controversies to include a wide range of strictly religious content - such as prayers, liturgical life, and ecclesial news - that had previously received little attention in legacy media. To conceptualize these dynamics, the article proposes and empirically tests a typology of the Catholic Church’s presence in public debate based on two dimensions: the type of actor and the type of issue. The resulting four categories capture the hybrid and contested nature of religion’s visibility in contemporary digital media ecosystems.