Reforming sacred institutions, part II: the Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church compared

George W. Breslauer

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2019, vol. 35, issue 4, 338-357

Abstract: The Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church are conceptualized as hierocratic institutions that faced analogous challenges of adaptation to a changing world from the 1950s onward. Building upon an earlier publication in Post-Soviet Affairs, this article identifies four strategies of “selective inclusion” chosen by these institutions as their leaders sought to reduce the pre-1950s levels of sectarianism: hierocratic reformism; hierocratic managerialism; messianic revivalism; and anti-hierocratic radicalism. Parallels in the adoption of these strategies, and common features of a legitimacy crisis they both came to face, reveal the causal strength of common features, while possible differences in their institutional durability suggest the likely causal impact of differences between them.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2019.1620977

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