Kolloquium Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften - Bernhard Spielberg & Team

For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church regarded itself as a world church – and was seen as such: as a global provider of patterns for a distinctive religious lifestyle, designed in Rome, with local agencies even in the smallest villages on every continent (without Antarctica).

This image of the world’s biggest religious institution with its 1,2 billion members is still popular – but wrong. It is not only the cultural background of the pope that changed in the last five decades. The Church itself has changed. The different cultures Christianity (in its catholic version) dives into shapes the organization, brings up new questions and shows that it will not be going on like it did before.

The research group “Global Transformations of Catholicism” focuses on three elements that show the change in fundamental elements of Church life: the strategies communities developed to deal with plurality, the role models of priest and the perceptions of God.