Walking Together. A Semiotic Analysis of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Journey to Canada as a Multimodal Construct
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intercultural and interreligious dialogue and the importance of nurturing memory as an antidote to social inequalities and conflict are known to be at the center of Pope Francis’ pontificate. A salient and particularly significant moment is undoubtedly represented by the Pontiff’s apostolic journey to Canada (July 24 to July 30, 2022), described as a “penitential pilgrimage” to “implore from God forgiveness, healing and reconciliation” for the suffering inflicted by the policies of assimilation and enfranchise- ment. Starting from these premises, this paper examines the semiotic articulation of the apostolic journey, understood as a complex multimodal construct made up of a multiplicity of languages, symbols, texts and discourses, to account for its symbolic efficacy, within the framework of the distinctive traits that characterize the figure of Francis, intend- ed as a peculiar charismatic leader. It is against this backdrop that the paper will examine, in addition to official texts and speeches of Francis’ apostolic journey to Canada, gestures and behaviors that proved capable of generating wide interest in the media and public opinion, helping to deepen the semiotic analysis of an “apostolate of the ear”, focused on the importance of “listening with the ear of the heart”. Using the approach of structuralist semiotics in dialogue with the semiotics of culture, the article sets out to demonstrate how the penitential pilgrimage proves to be a paradigmatic case of a process of memory reactivation aimed at strengthening intercultural dialogue, where the possibility of shaping a collective actant capable of overcoming the wounds of a trauma long kept silent can only be based on overcoming the separation between cosmology and theology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".