Paper short abstract:

Using the theory of bricolage this paper delas with how members of the Roman Catholic Church created new forms of services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main used concepts are: privatized religion, digital religion and imagined communities. The data were obtained in two stages in 2020 and 2021.

Paper long abstract:

This paper delas with how Czech members of the Roman Catholic Church celebrated services during coronavirus pandemic and describes how participants experienced these alternative forms of worship and what it meant to them. In principle, each of the interviewees created their own ceremony format, which indicates a significant privatization of religion, which was, however, the result of a unique pandemic situation. The paper views this personal creation of ceremony as an individual bricolage.

Claude Lévi-Strauss characterizes the theory of bricolage as a form of DIY practice, in which individuals create new things and have to make them with the resources they already have. These resources do not have to be only material, but also intellectual concepts or theories. This paper views individual creation of worship as bricolage and considers the concept of privatization of religion, which appears in all informants, as well as digital religion and imagined communities as the "resources of creation".

I obtained research data in the form of in-depth, semi-structured interviews. I spoke to each respondent twice, the first time at the beginning of the pandemic, in May 2020, and I did the second round of interviews in May 2021 when church capacity was still somehow limited. For analysing the interviews, I chose biographical analysis, in order to better preserve the individual approach of each of the interviewees.