The Catholic Church and the Media: A Text Mining Analysis of Vatican Documents from 1967 to 2020

ABSTRACT In the last two decades, mainstream religious institutions have progressively incorporated ICTs in both their organizational infrastructure and their devotional practices. Stemming from digital religion scholarship, the present article aims at investigating how the official discourse of the Catholic Church around media has transformed during the long transition from the mass to the digital media era. To this aim, the entire production of papal Encyclicals, Apostolic Exhortations, and World Communication Day addresses from 1967 to 2020 have been analyzed. First, texts were analyzed through a text mining software to identify and quantify the terms under scrutiny. Subsequently, an in-depth study around the evolution of the term “media” was conducted, including the selection and categorization of the term’s correlates and their ethical characterization. Data resulting from this double-layered analysis offer insights on the evolution of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the fast-changing world of media.