American Parishes

Remaking Local Catholicism

Gary J. Adler, Tricia C. Bruce, Brian Starks, Gary J. Adler, Jr., Tricia C. Bruce, Brian Starks

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823284368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Religionssoziologie

Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the numerous forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes, like leadership and education, and ongoing parish struggles like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological re-engagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic re-engagement with sociological analysis. Contributions by leading social scientists highlight how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change affect the inner workings of parishes. Contributors: Gary J. Adler Jr., Nancy Ammerman, Mary Jo Bane, Tricia C. Bruce, John A. Coleman, S.J., Kathleen Garces-Foley, Mary Gray, Brett Hoover, Courtney Ann Irby, Tia Noelle Pratt, and Brian Starks

Part I: Seeing Parishes through a Sociological Lens

Anyone who has ever put on a pair of prescription glasses for the first time is familiar with that feeling of seeing things anew. Suddenly, you notice the leaves on trees, numbers on license plates, and countless details that you hadn’t even realized you’d been missing.

The sociological imagination is like that, too. Our task in the pages ahead is to help readers see Catholic parishes, Catholicism, and the many facets of society that they interact with through a new lens. We began the Introduction by explaining what a parish is and introducing a new way of looking at parishes sociologically. Chapter 1 provides a history of other studies that have looked at parishes sociologically, and Chapter 2 situates the study of parishes within the context of studies of all religious congregations.

Suggested Additional Readings

Ammerman, Nancy T. 1997. Congregation and Community. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Ammerman, Nancy T., Jackson W. Carroll, Carl S. Dudley, and William McKinney, eds. 1998. Studying Congregations: A New Handbook. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press.

Baggett, Jerome P. 2009. Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bruce, Tricia C. 2017. Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church. New York: Oxford University Press.

________. 2018. “Forum: Studying Parishes in Studies of American Catholicism.” American Catholic Studies 129 (1): 1–26.

Gamm, Gerald. 2008. Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Wind, James P. and James W. Lewis, eds. 1994. American Congregations (Vol 2): New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1 A Brief History of the Sociology of Parishes in the United States

TRICIA C. BRUCE

Not long before American Catholics’ Mass attendance peaked in the 1950s, sociologist-priest Francis J. Friedel remarked in his address to the American Catholic Sociological Society (ACSS) that the parish resides among the most fertile “fields of research that lie open to the Catholic sociologist” (1942, 132). Parishes, after all, were the hubs and incubators of Catholic life in a predominantly Protestant America, filling both religious and social functions among an ethnically diverse Catholic populace. But the young ACSS and its corresponding journal had produced little by way of research on the Catholic parish. Graduate programs likewise evidenced scant study of parishes. Sociological examination would, in Friedel’s estimation, “be of tremendous value to a parish.”

That this agenda-setting assertion would come from a Catholic priest-sociologist and apologist of the faith set the tone for sociological research on American Catholic parishes. Then and now, the sociology of parishes posed a “dual-constituency value proposition”: good for the academy, good for the Church. Sociologists could benefit from understanding social life as manifested in and through the parish; Catholics could benefit from a sociological assessment of their most integral organization. Not surprisingly, it was Catholic sociologists who were mostly likely to heed this call—and to endure the consequences that accompany a scholarly look at one’s own tribe.

The trajectory of parish studies—from its early years, to its interface with changes introduced by Vatican II, to its current state—constitutes the focus of this essay. I confine my examination to studies with a fairly explicit focus on parishes, although of course studies about many varieties of Catholic experience likewise intersect parishes.1 As goes the parish, so (often) goes Catholicism. Here, I generally limit my purview to studies conducted by sociologists (or in some cases, social historians) who employ the methods of social science, exempting those by theologians, journalists, or researchers from other disciplinary vantage points. This bracketing carries the explicit agenda of seeing—and foreseeing—what distinguishes the sociological study of the Catholic parish in particular. The essay proceeds chronologically, examining parish studies during three periods: (1) before the Second Vatican Council (roughly 1940–1961); (2) Vatican II and subsequent decades (1962–1989); and (3) the most recent quarter century (1990 to the present).

Parish Studies before Vatican II

An American sociology of the parish emerged alongside an American sociology of religion in the postwar era. Embattled and isolated in their own discipline, sociologists of Catholicism at the time found themselves defending their parochial focus as often as their empirical methodology. The parish (and Catholicism, and even religion) required justification as an arena worthy of sociological attention (see Smith et al. 2013). Sociologists did so by advancing the idea that the parish constitutes the basic unit of social organization in the Catholic Church. “It is unnecessary to recall to Catholic sociologists that the parish is the primary community for Catholics,” wrote Archbishop Edwin V. O’Hara in a 1945 issue of the American Catholic Sociological Review (23). From family to schooling to social mobility, parishes coalesced Catholics and operated as key sites for institution building. Nevertheless, O’Hara’s pitch ran counter to the slow pace of research being conducted on parishes at the time.

The sociological study of the parish developed largely as a study of parish “problems,” revealing deep pastoral roots. Friedel (1942), for example, contended that the burgeoning field could reveal data on topics such as interfaith marriage, childrearing, education, and disaffiliation. Parishes had problems; sociologists could name them. This orientation stemmed jointly from the positionality of researchers (mostly priests or other religious), and the view of sociology as a novel scientific tool for unpacking social realities. Professors offered classes in Parish Problems at the Catholic University of America and the University of Notre Dame. Publications frequently concluded with impassioned assessments of parish weaknesses and troubling areas worthy of attention. Far from a neutral enterprise (especially for Catholic “insiders” whose own training would have been paid by Church funds), sociology was principally a skillset in service of a greater Catholic good.

Scholarship in the 1940s, for example, produced a handful of parish case studies highlighting themes such as the influx of new immigrant attendees, blended church communities, Catholic youth, and concerns about defection from the faith. The tone used to present parish findings in these early publications is decidedly practitioner-oriented. For example, Brother Gerald J. Schnepp’s 1942 article, which, in the course of examining tensions in a mixed Irish, German, and “American” parish, expresses sincere concern over parishioners’ average fertility rate of 2.1 children per family, deemed too low to “assure future strength for the Church in America” (160). Studies at the time posed the questions and set an agenda imbued with intentionality and praxis. A sociology of the parish should better the parish.

The 1950s introduced a more strident claim to a formal sociology of the parish as a defined field. Writing in 1950, John Donovan of Fordham University lamented the “remarkable fact that despite the organizational role which the parish plays in the total structure of the Catholic Church and in the religious and social life of its members, no attempt to describe or analyze it in the scientific terminology of the social sciences exists” (66). Heeding the call personally, he suggested that thinking of the parish primarily as a place obscured its realities as a social organization with statuses and roles. His argument resonated during an era of sociology dominated by functionalism and its emphasis on “systems within systems” (Parsons 1937). Donovan further articulated the primacy of the institutional character of the parish: parishes cannot exist autonomously, apart from the Church. Accordingly, he devised a brief definition:

The Catholic parish must be conceived of as a real social group composed of the Catholic clergy, religious and laity within certain territorial boundaries who share a unity founded on common religious beliefs and who participate in socio-religious relationship[s] institutionally defined by the parent organization of the Church. (Donovan 1950, 69)

Parishes, in other words, were more than the sum of their parishioners and different than autonomous congregations. His was an attempt to articulate a grand theory of “the parish”—a Weberian ideal type, operational across all contexts of pre–Vatican II American Catholicism.

A 1951 symposium and resulting volume titled The Sociology of the Parish signaled an optimistic trajectory for sociological parish studies. Editors C. J. Nuesse and Thomas J. Harte (both professors of sociology at the Catholic University of America) critiqued prior attempts as “the products of individual interest rather than of concerted effort” (1951, 12). Empirical studies of the parish—both statistical and descriptive—were key to understanding what happens in parishes. The book’s chapters consider parishes’ historical development, organization, methods of research, and pastoral implications. Contributors’ attention to the dynamics of race, setting, structure, and methodological technique would have enduring relevance were it not for the book’s near-extinct status today.

The influence of The Sociology of the Parish might have been greater had it not come on the heels of another now-infamous book. Sociologist-priest Joseph H. Fichter published the first volume of his Southern Parish series, Dynamics of a City Church, in 1951. It represented the first book-length sociological look at a Catholic parish, its data stemming from a yearlong field study of a single New Orleans parish. Fr. Fichter sought to understand “in what ways, and to what extent, does the informal practice of Catholicism differ from the formal expectations of the official church” (1973, 32). The parish offered a natural place to explore how closely official Church teachings overlapped with lived behavior. Granted permission from the local bishop (in New Orleans) as well as the pastor, Fichter and ten research assistants set out to conduct extensive field research, interviews, and surveys. “They were everywhere, watching everything, talking with everyone,” Fichter later recounted (1973, 39).

Southern Parish revealed that Catholics’ lived behaviors did not always align with official Catholic teaching. Further, parishioners’ compliance with institutional rules generally mirrored their frequency of Mass attendance. Mass attendance acted as a proxy for strength of Catholic identity, setting a precedent for what is now commonplace in assessments of Catholic identity. Fichter developed a typology of commitment, with points along the spectrum from nuclear (“the most active participants and the most faithful believers”); to modal (“the normal ‘practicing’ Catholics easily identifiable as parishioners”); to marginal (“conforming to a bare, arbitrary minimum”); to dormant (“who have ‘given up’ Catholicism, but have not joined another denomination”) Catholics (1953, 22). The sociology of the parish had divulged Catholics’ deviance from the norms of the Church.

The revelation of a less-than-perfect overlap between precepts and behavior incensed the pastor of the parish Fichter studied. Sociology had thus far been framed as scholarship in service of parish betterment, especially when conducted by priest-sociologists. Southern Parish appeared to threaten this dominant paradigm, even as it relayed empirical findings drawn from scientific research. The perceived disjuncture between social science and parish betterment led Fichter’s Jesuit provincial to permanently suppress the subsequent volumes (two through four) of Southern Parish. Fichter recounts the saga in detail in his book One-Man Research (1973). He reveals a highly politicized arena, all the more so given that the vast majority of parish studies were conducted by priests, brothers, and to a lesser extent, sisters and laypeople. The weight of episcopal oversight was even backed by canon law (see Morris 1989). Early parish sociologists—in particular, those whose personal vows tied them to their topic of study in ways others’ positions did not—encountered limits to scholarly freedom and pastoral reception.

Tensions between sound scholarship and perceived fidelity to the Church contaminated an otherwise promising research trajectory for the sociology of the parish. Setting up sociology as a problem-naming science concurrently set up sociology (and sociologists) as problem generating. Social science did not map neatly onto parish betterment. The discipline’s postwar narrowing to a positivist orientation (Steinmetz 2008) seemed incompatible with pastoral sociology. Furthermore, with parish research being done almost wholly by those in the Church and framed with an applied orientation to the Church, studies were often isolated from broader disciplinary conversations. Protected spaces such as the ACSS safeguarded “religious sociology” from general sociology, while exacerbating outsiders’ skepticism (Reed 1982). Set up as a dual-constituency value proposition, neither the Church nor the academy seemed to value sociological studies of the parish.

Even so, an early sociology of parishes successfully pioneered the notion that parishes are places where Catholics live out juxtapositions between authority and individualism—juxtapositions that have come to characterize Catholicism in modernity. One measure debuted in early studies, for example, compares census data in a given parish territory to the number of regular Mass ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction: What Is a Parish? Why Look at Catholic Parishes?
• Part I: Seeing Parishes through a Sociological Lens
• Part II: Parish Trends
• Part III: Race, Class, and Diversity in Parish Life
• Part IV: Young Catholics In (and Out) of Parishes
• Part V: The Practice and Future of a Sociology of Catholic Parishes
• Conclusion: Parishes as the Embedded Middle of American Catholicism
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List