Catholicism or Post- Catholicisms? The Effects of Catholic Liturgical Reform Considered in the Light of Roy A. Rappaport's Theory of Ritual

From an anthropological and religious studies point of view, the Catholic liturgical reform in the wake of Vatican ii is a highly intriguing event and/or process. The type of change to the ritual represented by this reform raises the question of its impact on Catholicism. This article proposes to look at this problem from the perspective of Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual, primarily in terms of the ritual stabilisation of meaning. The breakdown in terms of the semiotics of immutability that resulted from the reform, and the far-reaching shift towards verbal communication that this brought about in the post-conciliar liturgy, seem to have been the main factors responsible for destabilizing the Catholic universe of meaning as regards its relationship to "truth." As a result, instead of just one Catholicism, today we can speak of many "post-Catholicisms."