Translating Catholic identity in a Muslim-majority society: how Catholic schools communicate faith, hospitality, and belonging in Indonesia

Catholic school identity is often discussed in relation to secularisation, declining religious affiliation, and the diversification of historically Catholic student populations. Indonesia presents a different problem. Religion remains highly visible in public life, yet Catholics constitute only a small minority within a society in which 87.15% of the population is Muslim. This study examines how Catholic secondary schools communicate institutional identity under these conditions. Using comparative qualitative document analysis, it analyses public-facing mission statements, institutional profiles, student handbooks, government records, and school-specific empirical studies relating to eight Catholic schools located in Muslim-majority provinces: Banda Aceh, Padang, Jakarta, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Mataram, and Makassar. The findings identify a recurrent pattern of communicative translation rather than simple concealment or dilution. Catholic and charism-specific language remains visible, but it is frequently articulated alongside publicly shareable vocabularies of Pancasila, service, justice, solidarity, human dignity, ecological responsibility, professionalism, and respect for difference. Evidence from Padang and Yogyakarta further shows that hospitality becomes educationally meaningful only when symbolic openness is accompanied by institutional accommodation and space for non-Catholic students to sustain their own religious commitments. The article develops the concept of communicative Catholicity to describe a layered identity in which confessional anchoring, civic translation, hospitable accommodation, and reciprocal belonging operate together. The Indonesian case therefore challenges the assumption that openness necessarily weakens Catholic distinctiveness: in a religiously majoritarian environment, distinctiveness may be sustained precisely through translation into a common moral and civic grammar.