New-evangelization discourse in ELF immigration encounters: a case study

This paper investigates how the 'New Evangelization' process in the Roman Catholic Church is enacted through ELF by the Italian clergy offering spiritual and practical assistance to non-western immigrants newly-arrived in Italy. A case study explores how religious discourse reflects the two contact groups' different typological-syntactic, semantic and sociopragmatic features transferred to their respective ELF usage, as well as their different knowledge sustems and community values associated with the religious experience. It is argued that misunderstanding occurs when the clergy's culture-bound patterns of Possible-World Semantics, characterizing the counterfactual logic of their religious/metaphysical discourse in ELF, fail to account for the divergent ways by which non-western immigrants make religious sense of their existence. The conversational analysis shows how the New-Evangelization discourse requires from immigrants the activation of the two 'bimodal' cooperative maxims of 'suspension of disbelief', epistemically inducing them to believe that possible-world representations can be true, and 'experiential pliability', deontically compelling immigrants to adapt their actual-world experience to such counterfactual constructions, even though for the cultures of some African countries which immigrants come from religion is intrinsically connected with the referential domain of the actual world. Recognizing divergent ways of expressing the religious experience in different cultures may help 'new evangelizers' find alternative, 'hybrid' ways of conveying the Word of God through ELF, thus fostering true ecumenical communication.