A Matter of Trust: The Voice of the Faithful and the Pursuit of Change in the Catholic Church Prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

We argue that a neglected element in the analysis of contention and collective action is the dynamics of betrayal and trust. A fully relational analysis between all relevant actors should account for the ways in which betrayal can be the impetus for action, and trusting a necessary process for what challengers deem a successful outcome. In this paper we focus on the development and maintenance of trusting as a narrative process. Trusting is a process that involves engagement with other actors despite acknowledged risk. We argue that actors build the capacity to face uncertainty with others when they can recurrently articulate to themselves and others how and why exercising bridging has demonstrated faith and paid dividends. Trusting depends on emplotting actors within a familiar storyline that provides intersubjective confidence in ongoing relations. We draw on our ethnographic study of a chapter of the Catholic change organization, the Voice of the Faithful, to illustrate our argument. We demonstrate how this chapter constructed trusting narratives through which they could reimagine their relationship with some Church authorities after their sense of enormous betrayal produced by the 2002 priest sexual abuse crisis in Boston. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]