Forming Catholic Identity in Young People:
Contingency, Agency and the Power of Family Life

Abstract

This thesis argues that the formation of Catholic identity is not exclusively an institutional nor an innate process, but is co-produced by families and young people in a complex relationship with the institutional Church. It highlights the expertise and labour of Catholic families to contextualise catholicity within specific family, social and cultural settings; the agency and persistence of participants as they seek out the relational, affective Catholicity required to maintain their identity; and the ambiguous role of the institutional Church in balancing forces of innovation and tradition. The study reveals the processes of inheriting or choosing, normalising, enacting and imagining this identity in cycles of adaptation and innovation. Drawing Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Orsi into conversation to examine the interrelationship of structuring structures and improvisation in the data, I sketch three styles of Catholic parenting: spiritual apprenticeship, enforcing, and enabling. I then outline the range of participants’ responses and the surprising role of ambiguity and paradox in their religious lives. A capacious catholicity is revealed, centred around a loving relationship with God, capable of withstanding
the shocks and challenges of adolescence, and more concerned with the doxa of their families and communities than the orthodoxy of the institutional Church. I argue that these daily micro-innovations contribute to Catholicism’s ability to adapt across time and space, raising questions about the complex role of the Church in managing processes of change while remaining recognisably Catholic. Developing an emic, non-normative Lived Catholicism approach during the research, I have argued that Catholic identity is far more contingent, diverse and locally produced than either sociologists of religion or the Church itself usually acknowledge. This research contributes to the wider discussion about the production of religious identity in young people, the future shape of the Catholic Church, and the complex relationship between religion and secular culture.