I can’t hear you: barriers to communication in the Roman Catholic culture

This article reports findings from a larger study entitled Catholics' meaning-making in critical situations (Coco, 1998) and is based on interviews with forty informants. Analytically, I have combined the Sense-Making Methodology's concept of situation movement state and a typology of communicative strategies to describe how and why participants negotiated dissonant situations with respect to their Catholic faith. One particular situation movement state, wash-out, is analyzed in detail and a summary compared with summary findings of three other situations. Catholics were unable to mobilize such communicative strategies as mediation and consensus. This meant they withdrew physically, emotionally and/or spiritually from stress causing situations. It was found that participants were re-defining what it means to be Catholic.