Dissertation Fellow 2002-03
Slavica Jakelic (Sociology of Religion)
Boston University
A Comparative Study of the Roman
Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia:
Religion and Collective Identity
The secularizing waves of modernity did not produce
only ‘secularized minds,’ secularized societies and private
religiosity, but their antipode as well. At the beginning of the third
millennium, in traditional and in modern societies, one may trace the
stubborn presence of religious values, beliefs and institutions in the
public sphere, and the continued importance of religion for people’s
collective self-understanding.
The collectivistic trait of religion particularly survived
in some former communist societies. While that phenomenon may be attributed
to communist heritage, the latter hardly explains why religion remained
relevant only for some and not for all ex-communist countries. In order
to reach a more systematic explanation about the character and role
of religion in the modern world, and in former communist societies in
particular, one needs to go beyond recognition that religion maintained
public and collective features—one needs to ask why that happened.
In this historical and sociological study of the Catholic Church in
the Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovenian societies, I raise some of the
‘why’ questions. Specifically, I ask why there is a relationship
between the religion’s public character and its salience for group
identities, and why Catholicism has or has not remained central for
how the Bosnian Croats, Croatian Croats, and Slovenes, understand themselves
today.
The study is organized as a sociological investigation in historical
perspective, and as such is a foundation for addressing the conceptual
link between religion, collective identity, and social order/social
change, and for revisiting the connection between Christianity, individualism,
and collectivism.
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