Determinants for the Development of the Activity of the Catholic Church in Poland in the Field of Social Communication

Abstract

In recent years, the Catholic Church has been forced to change its attitude towards social communication and mass media. It has had to face not only religious but image challenges. Worldview matters, contemporary problems regarding the institution of marriage or pedophilia in the Church are constantly being debated in mass media, thus creating dangers in terms of critical public reception. This situation has also been occurring in Poland in recent years. The observed progress regarding opening the Church to media relations and the use of rich instruments of social communication have their reasons rooted not only in the history of the social and political events of the past several decades but also in the changes in the sphere of mass media and social communication. This article is an attempt to generate a peculiar typology of determinants regarding the development of social communication within the institutional church in Poland. Within our framework of methodological conditions, a literature query with available statistical analyses and observations of current events was applied. Our conclusions show the current attitude of the Catholic Church in Poland regarding issues related to the marketization of faith and the medialization of religion.