Global Catholicism, Gender Conversion and Masculinity

This chapter discusses the relation between gender and global religion at two interrelated levels. On the one hand, it explores how membership of a Catholic transnational movement produces changes in gendered family relations and in models of masculinity, in particular. On the other, it draws attention to the peculiar role played by men’s conversion to principles such as chastity, vulnerability and family sacrifice in the spreading of a new global model of Western-centred Catholicism. It takes as a case in point the European Catholic reformist movement known as the Neocathecumenal Way (henceforth NCW), focusing specifically on laic missionary men within the movement. The chapter argues, firstly, that the project of creating a reformed global (Catholic) society through missionary activities rests on a gender conversion. Both men and women are required to undergo a deep transformation in terms of their identity and their family relations, and to make this publicly visible and debatable. Secondly, it suggests that men’s transnational missionary activities foster a specific model of globalisation. In this model, globalisation appears less as a multi-directional process that opens up spaces for syncretism and cross-cultural religious understanding, and more as a centre-periphery expansion from a (European) centre to countries that are considered geographically and substantially ‘distant’ from normative Catholicism.