This article addresses a new religious movement within one of the oldest ecclesiastical organizations in Christendom—the Catholic Church. The Catholic New Evangelization (NE) is an intra-ecclesial movement articulated and inspired by the late Pope John Paul II. Our analysis of this movement focuses on the emerging tensions between the contrasting individualist and communalist orientations of what we call “Vatican II Catholics” and “NE Catholics,” respectively. We examine responses to NE rhetoric and its implementation in the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit's central services, the archdiocesan seminary, and two local Detroit parishes. At these sites, the NE rhetoric, especially in its emphasis on having a “personal relationship with Jesus,” has intensified individual versus community tensions among Catholic professionals and lay leaders in the Detroit area.

This article suggests that analysis of ideographs is useful within specialized contexts. The authors analyze the emergence of the <new evangelization> as an ideograph in the Roman Catholic Church at international, national, and local levels – metropolitan Detroit in particular. With its remarkable plasticity and power, <new evangelization> rhetoric has come to galvanize the leadership of the Catholic Church even as varying or conflicting ideas are advanced under that rhetoric. The <new evangelization> operates as a specialized ideograph that remains primarily internal to the Catholic Church but has implications beyond it. The authors suggest a continued and extensive application for analyzing ideographs in culture.

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