Reacionary cassocks and the digital crusades

When a limping catholicism arrives to the present time

Abstract

In the history of the present time, the process of virtualization of life through social networks involves the totality of social life and, in it, a reactionary-clerical form of Catholicism. The digital world has gone from the utopian promise of freedom and equality to the wilderness of the algorithm. In this environment, I inquire into the meanings of Catholic traditionalist action on the networks, especially YouTube. I hypothesize that the reactionary resurgence in digital platforms occurs, among many causes, as a result of the re-inscription of its modus vivendi in a double context, one social-economic (financial capitalism), the other, political-cultural (machinic subjectivity). In the context of financial capitalism, as a mode of organization of life and total communication, semiotic inflation and semantic deflation involve the religious actors in the networks. In the activity of this clerical-reactionary Catholicism, the sign becomes hypertrophied, the ability to interpret well vanishes, dereferentialization reigns and connection overrides conjunction. I highlight as one of the results of this process the transformation of the cassocks into a machinic expression, maintained by algorithmic communication and pathological narcissism. The “digital crusade” produces fascist political-behavioral moralism and fuels far-right political-parliamentary discourse. Left to this limp Catholicism is the bitterness of a lost war against the modern world.