Healing as a process of subjectivation: Catholic spirituality, suffering, and mental health in contemporary settings
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51660/ripie62479Keywords:
religion, religious belief, religious practice, religious experience, mental healthAbstract
This doctoral research in Social Studies of Religion examines how Catholic healing is configured in pilgrimage settings, within a context marked by a contemporary crisis of meaning, psychic suffering, and social acceleration. Through a case study of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Hope (Soracá, Boyacá), and drawing on a poststructuralist approach that combines discourse analysis, ritual observation, and genealogical, archaeological, and cartographic methods, the study examines how patients/parishioners articulate illness, pain, and faith. The findings show that healing is not reducible to physical recovery, but constitutes an integral process of re-signifying suffering: bodily, emotional, spiritual, and communal. Practices such as prayer, mass, pilgrimage, and testimony foster relief and subjective transformation. The sanctuary is thus understood as a symbolic and relational apparatus that intervenes in how human fragility is confronted. These results broaden the understanding of mental health by incorporating the spiritual dimension, without replacing medical or psychological care. The study further opens lines of interdisciplinary dialogue among the social sciences, theology, psychology, and public health around the contemporary search for meaning, care, and hope in Latin America.
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