The Making of contemporary papacy: manufactured charisma and Instagram

ABSTRACT

Recent research highlights the growth of alternative religious leadership on a global scale. In response, social media have emerged as platforms to compete for religious primacy. Accordingly, the study asks how is online religious authority constructed, re-affirmed and implemented by religious organizations? We contend that through online means, religious organizations are nowadays working to construct a public image to spark charismatic attraction towards institutional leaders. To investigate, we developed a grounded study that captured the full Instagram production of Pope Francis’ official account (429 images). Drawing on construal theory, findings demonstrated the strategic management of social, spatial, affective and hypothetical distance, simultaneously corresponding with uncovered facets: hierarchical positioning; geographical locales, haptic engagement, and leaders’ visual focus. Thus, we suggest introducing a concept of image-mediated-charisma, and its theoretical framing through digital distance. Concepts that were observed in the religious realm yet can be extended and applied to political or cultural leaders.

KEYWORDS:

• Instagram
• charisma
• leadership
• digital religion
• Catholic Church
• religious authority
• Pope Francis

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments as well as Daniel Barnett for his reflective aid in editing this manuscript. In addition, deep gratitude is offered to Aarif Badarny for his support in gathering data and overall support of this study. We further wish to offer thanks to Ori Eyal for his reflective assistance on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Finally, the authors wish to acknowledge support from The Israel Science Foundation [grant number 624/17].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Oren Golan is a faculty member at the Faculty of Education of the University of Haifa. His work focuses on communities and the ways they are impacted by new media with an emphasis on religious and bounded societies; Golan is a PI at the Israeli LINKS initiative and leads a NetLab on Communities, New Media and Education.

Michele Martini is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Technologies in Education (University of Haifa). A PhD graduate from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), Martini’s research focuses on socio-cultural dynamics connected to online video–sharing platforms (e.g. YouTube), with an emphasis on visual communication. More recently, he focuses on the design of media platforms and their strategic use to shape cultural and religious identities.

Notes

1 Published on the Vatican Insider news website 18 March 2016. http://www.lastampa.it/2016/03/18/vaticaninsider/eng/news/vigan-instagram-will-help-recount-the-papacy-through-images-KXQw7nYCF9PIFjHoUVzD6H/pagina.html Retrieved 12 February 2018.

2 Pope Francis has often been noted for promoting a discourse of austerity, well reported in the press, that is also expressed through his selected attire, which contrasts with those chosen by his predecessors (Vallely, 2013).

3 It should be noted that the official political aspects of the papacy are rarely represented on Instagram; the images emphasize a direct personal connection between the pope and his followers, rather than other forms of leadership.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation [grant number 624/17].