Kościół w sferze publicznej: Natanek, Nergal, Boniecki. Wybrane studia przypadków
The Church in the public sphere: Natanek, Nergal, Boniecki. Selected case studies

Author(s): Adam Warzecha
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Theology and Religion, Sociology of Religion
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Roman Catholic Church; Public Relations; PR; Critical Discourse Analysis; CDA; discourse; Natanek; Darski; Nergal; Boniecki
Summary/Abstract: Relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the public sphere in Poland have played an important role in socio-political life since the dawn of our statehood. Recently, however, the Church’s situation has become more complex. Its social position, until recently almost unchallenged, gradually decreases. The book is an attempt to answer questions about the causes of this situation. Readers can learn from it about the Church’s functioning in the Polish public sphere, especially in terms of communications (how is the public relations’ social practice recontextualized in it) and discursive strategies utilized. The study employs Critical Public Relations (CPR), the original and interdisciplinary research method presented here for the first time, combining conceptual devices of Public Relations (PR) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It is used to analyze manifestations of communication semiosis of the PR-type established in the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. Through the said analysis, the answer is given to the question of how this semiosis materialized in the multiple “hard” Church social structures (institutions, posts, functions, strategies, procedures, etc.) and how it is operationalized in “soft”, impermanent, though specific and dynamic, communication events in which the Church took part. To this purpose, case studies of Rev. Piotr Natanek, Adam “Nergal” Darski and Rev. Adam Boniecki are carried out. They are considered representative due to the nature of the public debate accompanying them, as well as the quantity of available research material. The events in question are reenacted based on the corpus of texts and audiovisual records from 2007–2017, thoroughly analyzed using a process-oriented case-study method. Interdiscursive analysis facilitated precise identification of various discursive strategies (including semantic shifts, vague relationships, exclusion from discourse, scandal and viral communication), and above all, the struggle of these strategies for hegemony within and outside the Church organization. This indicates the applicability of the proposed analytical approach to future studies of various border areas in the humanities, especially when such interdisciplinarity poses a number of methodological concerns.

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