Studying Facebook as a Facilitator of Community in Catholic Congregations

Abstract

The current wave of digital religion searches to understand where the online and the offline meet and how they influence one another. The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between the online and offline communities to demonstrate whether the former facilitates the latter. This research investigated three public self-identifying Catholic Facebook groups. Data was gathered through three waves, textual analysis, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews, to understand the influence offline communities have on offline communities. The data was analyzed through six elements of virtual analysis, to evaluate the evidence of virtual community in the three groups. In the end, this paper found that although these Facebook groups are indeed virtual communities, their ambiguity demonstrates their online community is more an extension of the offline life than something that influences it. Further analysis is needed to investigate the relationship between online and offline religious communities.