Abstract

Digital media allow the diffusion and discussion of religious contents and sentiments going beyond the doors of the Church, changing the ways in which religious institutions interact with their communities, realizing the mediatization of religion. The use of social media contributes to redesigning the authority of religious institutions and the expression of the affective publics. The aim of this paper is to investigate the range of emotions of the Twitter’s hashtags of Pope Francis and Benedict XVI, in order to reconstruct the emotional range linked to resignations and elections events in 2013. This events are treated as a case study, which requires multiple analysis techniques: textual data analysis, content analysis, sentiment analysis. The analysis show how has been generated a set of conversations that contain elements related to secularization and that, at the same time, act as a testimony of a process of desecularization that participate in the construction of a context of banal religion.