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In this article, the author describes how Leo Pfeffer, the author of the paper entitled, "Issues That Divide," has contributed among other things a unique, highly useful, and systematic cataloguing of the principal issues around which Catholic-non-Catholic tensions and conflicts have developed and exist in America today. This brief postscript to his paper is intended to highlight some of the sociological and social psychological implications of what he has to say on this subject. As it is implied, the essential nature of Catholic-non-Catholic conflict makes it unlikely that such conflict will disappear in the natural course of events in the foreseeable future. Its control requires a more adequate understanding of its process than the social sciences can supply at present.

The full time religious professional in a religious collectivity occupies a strategic position in the social system in which he is professionally involved. The multifarious tasks in which he engages are to be seen as due, in part, to the diffuseness of his responsibilities, a diffuseness which is characteristic of leadership roles in any social system. The coordinating and harmonizing facets of any leadership role demand this kind of generalized or diffuse role definition. While this diffuseness is characteristic of any leadership role in any social system, goals or objectives of the social system which sustains the full time professional religious leader are themselves more diffuse and less amenable to rational evaluation than are the goals of most organizations in this society. In its own understanding, the church exists to cure souls, to save souls, and/or to witness to God's saving act in Jesus as the Christ; hence, as conceived internally, its ultimate goal transcends moral, cognitive and emotive goals or objectives, although dimensions of each goal are involved in the objectives of the social system that constitutes the church and in the theological understanding that informs these goals.

The study of religious experience provides an example of those strange discontinuities which seem to beset the social sciences. The present paper Is intended as a beginning of this conceptual task. There is an attempt to develop some basic sub-types and ordering dimensions for organizing the variety of experiences to which men attach religious definitions. The conceptual scheme has been informed by data from a sample of Protestant and Roman Catholic church members residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. These data include both quantifiable and qualitative information on the religious experiences of respondents. Where appropriate, these data will be introduced both to indicate the relative frequency of different forms of religious experience and to illustrate how people perceive such experiences. Following many previous writers, it has been suggested that the essential element characterizing religious experience, and distinguishing it from all other human experience, is some sense of contact with a supernatural agency.

In this research religious affiliation is taken as an independent variable and an examination is made of the voting behavior on abortion reform legislation of members of two sessions of the slate legislature of a western state which has large groups of Catholics, Mormons, and Protestants religious groups with differences on the abortion issue. As expected, knowledge of the religious affiliation of the legislators allows better prediction of such voting behavior than constituency, party. or age, and controlling for these three variables affects the size of the association only slightly and occasionally. The effect of the religious affiliation variable is particularly dramatized in the shift of Mormon lower house members votes from 1967 to 1969, a time period during which the Mormon Church made official statements against abortion reform legislation. Ramifications and alternative explanations of the data an presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious experience of Christians was viewed as an interpersonal relationship between believers and God. Six aspects of that relationship appeared as orthogonal factors in responses obtained from a random sample of adults in metropolitan Detroit. All six were found in three sub-samples: black Protestants, white Protestants, and white Roman Catholics. Compensatory and evolutionary theories of religious experience were found to be of little use in explaining the variance of respondents' scores on these factors. Hypotheses derived from a sociological perspective on religious experience showed greater power in explaining that variance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men have committed themselves to both, religion and science, with singular passion. For many centuries science and religion were so interlocked as to be practically identical. During more recent centuries they have been separated and quite frequently at war. In the last decades there have been considerable attempts at rapprochement not, it must be confessed, altogether successful, yet the attempts are likely to continue. Even though Roman Catholics are no longer warned by departmental chairmen that they will not be able to continue to submit to the discipline of their church and expect to be competent positive scientists, the vast majority of academicians are still not sure how one can make a commitment to some kind of "supernatural" belief system and still be committed to scientific investigations unless one engages in a mammoth effort at compartmentalization. Historically, the reasons for this situation are obvious enough. Science emerged as an independent discipline only by breaking with religion.

This article focuses on religious structure in Mexico, and presents a study's report in this regard. To some observers, Catholicism in Mexico is purely a matter of superstition and ignorance. Such superficial interpretations of Mexican religious practices are easily come upon because genuine religious conviction is difficult to evaluate. The continuum from formal Catholicism through nominal and cultural Catholicism to folk Catholicism enables one to examine variations in belief and practice without obscuring their complexity. The article author expected that folk Catholicism had little relationship with the main church, but upon closer scrutiny, he found that this is not true. The study, conducted by the author led him to conclude that what seemed on the surface to be an indigenous folk Catholicism centered in the barrio chapels is in fact no different from what occurs when townspeople attend to their religious duties in the main church. In the matter of family attitudes toward the Church, the author found that among formal Catholics all members of family practice the faith; among the nominal group both husband and wife as well as the children attend Mass regularly, but greater effort is made by the women.