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The Contribution of Sociology to the Catholic Church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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Attitudes towards sociology displayed by some leading authorities in the Catholic church today are, to put it mildly, ambivalent. They vary from suspicion and sometimes overt hostility to feelings of relative pleasure depending on whether or not the findings of sociological research can be used to support their pastoral intuitions. Pope Paul, for instance, has been reported as claiming that the turbulence and dissent in the Roman Catholic church today ‘tends to be produced with a new method, that of the sociological survey’. At the same time that he made this remark he was sponsoring one of the largest socio-religious surveys to date within his own diocese of Rome. In England, in his address to the Church Leaders’ Conference in 1972, Cardinal Heenan viewed with alarm the number of university students now opting for courses in sociology and what he saw as the almost certain consequence of requests for fresh surveys. He continued by doubting the value in planning future pastoral strategy of such surveys as that recently completed for the Church in West Germany. In the same year he was accepting one of the ‘findings’ of an extremely unrepresentative survey carried out by the Laity Commission on behalf of the hierarchy, that priests working in parishes should make themselves more available to their parishioners. Yet he was not reported as welcoming another ‘finding’ in the same survey that the laity accepted the principle of optional celibacy for priests. Thus it would appear that some church leaders are selective in their acceptance of sociological findings.
We would now like to suggest there are at least four reasons for the suspicion of sociology. In the first place it is quite possible that sociology is connected in the minds of many with revolutionary social change. The student unrest of the late 1960s which was thought to be seeking such change occurred in universities such as Berkeley, Nanterre and tlw London School of Economics, all with strong faculties of sociology.
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- Copyright © 1975 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 This article is a slightly modified version of the editorial chapter in G. Dann and M. P. Hornsby‐Smith (eds.), Towards the Whole Truth, which is to be published shortly by members of the Surrey Unit for Socio‐Religious Studies.
2 ‘Pope Blames Sociology for Dissent in Church’, The Times, 4th December 1969, p. 7. No evidence for this extraordinary hypothesis was offered.
3 Cardinal I. C. Heenan, The Roman Catholic Church Today and Tomorrow, The Tablet, 16th September, 1972, 892‐5. See alsoEdwards, D. L., The British Churches Turn to the Future, S.C.M. Press, 1973Google Scholar, espec. pp. 25–30.
4 Brech, R., The Church: Joint Venture of Priests and Laity, Laity Commission, 1972Google Scholar.
5 Examples include the discovery of informal norms in small work groups in the Hawthorne studies; the failure of expansion of educational provision to promote equality of opportunity; the persistence of poverty in the affluent society and the refutation of the claim that ‘we are all middle class now’; relative deprivation and the perception of social injustice, etc.
6 See, for example, Ward, C. K., Priests and People, Liverpool University Press, 1961Google Scholar; Brothers, J., Church and School, Liverpool University Press, 1964CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hickey, J., Urban Catholics, Chapman, 1967Google Scholar.
7 See, for example, Sherman, L. W., Uses of the Masters, The American Sociologist, 9 (Nov.) 1974Google Scholar, 176–181: Giddens, A.. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: A Study of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, C.U.P., 1971CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Thus in Gaudium Et Spes: the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other. We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its expectations, its longings and its often dramatic characteristics ‘ (Section 4) in W. M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II, Chapman, 1966, 201‐2. We believe sociological research to be essential to any attempt to’ recognize and understand the world in which we live.
9 For recent estimates see A. E. C. W. Spencer, Demography of Catholicism, The Month, 8 (4), April 1975, 100–105.
10 These three areas were identified in the section on Education in The Church 2000: Interim Report of the Joint Working Party Set Up to Discuss the Preparation of National Pastoral Strategy for England and Wales, 1973, p. 34.
11 H. McCabe, ‘Comment’, New Blackfriars, 54, July 1973, 290‐1. See also M. Richards, ‘Priorities’, The Clergy Review, 58 (8), August 1973, 577‐9.
12 Winter, M., Mission or Maintenance: A Study in New Pastoral Structures, Darton, Longmann & Todd, 1973Google Scholar.
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