Talk:Identity Catholicism

POV or hit job

The current state of the article appears to be highly non-neutral, at best. Without having a section called "Identity and openness" to define and contrast these two movements in modern Catholicism, or defining the term other than as pejorative (which it is not), the largest section in the article is given over to a critique of why the term is meaningless or illogical or a poor choice of words, in the article section named § Ambiguity of the opposition between "identity" and "openness" (here, opposition is a calque of the French term, which means "contrast" and not "opposition" in this context). Even the smaller section supposedly defining the term is called § Attempt at definition, implying, I guess, that the definitions failed, qua Cuchet's critique in the Ambiguity section. The four citations to Cuchet's single treatise double the citations to all other sources combined, with zero citations to early academic users of the term, and to Portier's paper which defined it, afaik. Either the article was created started from the critique end, and abandoned before getting around to defining what it actually is and what proponents and other analysts say about it, or it's a hit job. In its current state, it is heavily devoted to a critique by a single author, and little else (other than the "Attempt" at a definition).

For starters, one should simply pick up the first three paragraphs from fr:Sociologie des religions#Catholicisme d'ouverture, catholicisme d'identité, and translate them; that would make a good, new defining section for this article. (The fourth paragraph in the French article and the sole paragraph of the Ambiguity section mirror each other.) After that, there should be more about Portier's work, which is central to the whole analytic view of Identity Catholicism. Mathglot (talk) 02:22, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Article conflates two different topics

Currently, the article conflates two different topics, Identity Catholicism and Identitarian Catholicism, as seen, for example, by the two French Wikipedia articles, fr:Catholicisme identitaire, and fr:Sociologie des religions, which has a section on fr:catholicisme d'identité and catholicisme d'ouverture. The first sentence says:

"Identity Catholicism" or Identitarian Catholicism appeared in the 1980s to describe a movement of Catholicism, supposedly in opposition to an "open Catholicism".^[1]

but this represents a conflation of the two bolded terms, which are related concepts with different meanings, origins, usage, and timelines. (The sentence used to be worse before, defining it as a a poorly defined pejorative expression, but neither term is poorly defined or pejorative, so I removed that in this edit.)

Bits and pieces of these two different concepts are mixed in the article, starting with the first sentence which calls them synonyms when they are not, and refers to a 1980s start (that's identity Catholicism, not identitarian Catholicism), but the second sentence mentions popularization with La Manif pour tous (that's identitarian Catholicism, not identity Catholicism). This conflation continues in the body as well.

The only thing to do now, is to figure out which of the two topics we want the article to be about, and then strip everything out that is about the other topic, possibly merging it somewhere if there is a good target for it, or perhaps creating a new article for it. The title is 'Identity Catholicism', and per WP:AT policy, that defines the topic, so unless there is a consensus otherwise, that should be the topic, and material about identitarian Catholicism should be removed. Mathglot (talk) 05:04, 30 June 2024 (UTC)