A digital Catholic imagination: Towards Full Presence in dialogue with contemporary social media

Towards Full Presence represents the first official Church document that addresses the use of social media in its entirety. In this paper, I provide a reflection on three themes emerging in the document in relation to my empirical, sociolinguistic research into Catholic social media sites. These three themes are 1) Gaze and ‘God’s style’, 2) Semiotic Silence and 3) Space for Communities, which I illustrate with examples from my case studies of Pope Francis’ Instagram account, the social media output of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and a Facebook group founded and run by lay Catholics in Singapore. In doing so, I put the Vatican text in dialogue with contemporary examples of social media use. I extend Greeley’s notion of a Catholic, sacramental imagination to a digital context, describing a digital Catholic imagination as one which positively views social media as a space where a real presence is possible.