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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.

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 articles comments on social deprivation and religiosity. This research report adventitiously ignores its heritage in another respect, which is not uncharacteristic. It is by now a common and established finding that measures of religiosity are correlated with sex especially among Catholics, age, and education. The selection of indices of deprivation and to a lesser degree, of religiosity, is adventitious. This is attributable in part to the fact that this is a secondary analysis, but the difficulty arises frequently even where this is not the case. What is the validity for using age, femaleness and less education as an index for perceived state of deprivation. A rationale is indeed offered in the paper, as is not always the case and the authors are to be commended that they have recognized that this is indeed a question to be answered. The rationale that older age, femaleness and less education are indices of deprivation is plausible. But equally plausible would be the rationale that the young, males, and the more highly educated are likely to perceive greater deprivations.

This paper focuses on celibate priest, author and sociologist Andrew M. Greeley's contributions to theory in the sociology of religion, one of two substantive areas in which Greeley has chosen to write extensively on. The other being the sociology of ethnic groups in the United States. The author has discerned and chosen to discuss four substantive themes in Greeley's writings, roughly in chronological order research in the "Protestant Ethics," the sociology of Roman Catholicism, the secularization thesis and denominational membership in society. As early as 1964, Greeley felt justified in calling for a moratorium on the Protestant Ethic research in society. In need achievement, occupational success, income levels and educational attainments, Protestant-Catholic differences were either unproven, insignificant, or in some instances, slightly reversed from the conventional hypotheses. This overall judgment has been sustained by subsequent researchers. Besides clarifying the impact of Catholic elementary, high school and college education on specific Catholic adult religious behavior, Greeley has contributed seven books and numerous articles on the Catholic Church itself. According to the author Greeley is much more convincing as an applied sociologist analyzing critical problems in the changing church than he is as a theorist of Catholic higher education.

Factor analysis is designed for ordering the interrelationship of a number of variables by constructing a smaller number of variables that will adequately account for the correlations among all the original variables. The factors extracted may be viewed as more basic variables that underline the relationships among the manifest variables actually studied. In the original paper, the author examined the concomitants of three dependent variables: family-size preferences, birth intervals, and fertility-planning success. Three factor analyses were performed and reported, one each for samples of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The objective of the paper was to elucidate the structure underlying the concomitants to the three "fertility" variables. On the other hand, the selection of items that have first-order relationships to the fertility variables should tend to emphasize the development of factors with the fertility variables as central items. This should occur since redundant items have been eliminated and the likelihood.

This paper examinee the sustained attempt by Félicité Lamennais to solve the perennial ethical problem of the rapport between liberty and authority. An early apostle of the Romantic reaction of the early 19th century, Lamennais, in his deep-seated yearning for the harmony and religious unity of the medieval world, sought to reconstruct the principle of authority in religion, and, therefore, in society on a broad philosophical base. Using this same philosophical groundwork, he later emerged as a champion of the modern liberties evolving out of the rise of liberalism and the French Revolution. How did such a remarkable transition from theocratic authoritarianism to Catholic liberalism take place? Such themes as tolerance, religion, society, authority, liberty, and history-inter-related elements of political reality--are pieces of the mosaic which Félicité Lamennais labored to bring into being as a major synthesis of theology and philosophy. The originality and the magnitude of the Mennaisian effort had a powerful impact on the subsequent history of Roman Catholicism. The fundamental question of social coexistence, heading in turn to a basically metaphysical reflection upon the nature and sources of society and social being, was the basic issue for Lamennais. The crucial and very contemporary character of the question of unity and plurality within the modern world makes it quite evident that a constant study of the problem, its historical development, and ultimate implications, is readily justifiable and worthwhile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This paper reports findings of a study dealing with some factors associated with religious and political affiliation in a college population. Specifically, relationships between religious affiliation, belief and participation, political orientation and socio-economic status are examined. The influence of religion on secular activity has long been of interest to sociologists. The classical works of sociologist Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Among college populations, the study provides the most comprehensive body of empirical data on students' religious values and their correlates. The article reports that religious belief is widespread but that commitment is rare. Substantial differences are found among major religious groups. Catholic students score highest on a scale of religiousness and Jewish students score lowest with Protestants falling in between. This article also deals with the relationship between parents' religious orientation and the students' religious beliefs.

In the article, the author presents a critical analysis of Rodney Stark's article "On The Incompatibility of Religion and Science." The author views that the issue raised by Stark in his paper are important ones both for the future of religion and of religious education. The data he has presented should force educators in church affiliated schools to take a long, hard look at the facts that Stark has assembled and which give support to the polemic literature on the dichotomy between religion and science. The author thinks that it is necessary to distinguish between the belief system or ideational content of a religion and the institutional embodiment of this content in organizational structures. The tact that Catholic institutions of higher learning have been as unproductive in the field of religious and theological scholarship as they have been in the field of scientific scholarship should lead one to beware of too facile a generalization on the incompatibility of religion and scientific scholarship. Religious affiliation and attendance at worship services are measures of religious involvement. But, in testing for the incompatibility of scientific and religions values, especially in the case of Catholicism, if it is not necessary to penetrate beyond mere external criteria of involvement.

An apparent inverse relationship between intellectualism and attendance at religious services is examined in a secondary analysis of cross-sectional data collected in 1963-1964 in a sample of New York City residents. There is no relationship between intellectualism and attendance when religious group is controlled. Jewish respondents, in particular, displayed decreasing rates of religious attendance and increasing rates of intellectualism when analyzed by generation. A decreasing rate of attendance by generation was more characteristic of Jews low on intellectualism than those high on intellectualism. Among white Protestants, attendance diminished across generation for those low on intellectualism, while it increased for those high on intellectualism. Data are also reported for white Catholics and for blacks of all faith. The differences are among generational categories at a single point in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the result of the research stimulated by Lenski's The Religious Factor? This research testing hypotheses derived from Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis focused on Protestant-Catholic differentials in social status and mobility, in achievement motivation, and in educational and scientific performance. Most of the data were nonsupportive of, or contradictory to, the hypotheses derived from the Weber thesis. None of the research was adequate to the task of causal inference which is required by the logic of the hypotheses. Moreover, the independent variable -differences in religious belief-was not adequately operationalized. Finally, the researchers arc criticized for the simplistic derivation of poor hypotheses from the analytically rich work of Weber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Sixty-eight Catholic priests requested the resignation of the archbishop of the San Antonio, Texas archdiocese in 1968. Their dissidence involved a significant confrontation with church authority. In interviews the dissidents expressed "liberal" attitudes in regard to authority, on theological matters, and on racial and ethnic minorities. Outlines of a "psychotherapeutic ethic" are discernible in their orientation to man and society. This orientation clarifies and is clarified by their self-images as derived from the Twenty Statements Test (TST), a device developed in G.H. Mead's tradition. The psychotherapeutic ethic needs close scrutiny. The particular dissidence of the priests suggests larger questions about dissidents. The possible emergence of a special personality type is also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious patterns of conversion are shown to differ depending upon whether the spouse was a Catholic or a Protestant, a wife or a husband. Patterns of conversion were mediated to some extent by the social status of the husband as suggested by the occupation of the husband. The decision to convert or not to convert involves a confrontation between two religious systems, and it may also represent a clash between religious constraints and non-religious constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of the Baha'i World Faith consistently differed from Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and non-affiliates in the structure of religious behavior and its relation to personality. By factor analysis of 35 religious behaviors of 112 Baha'is, five facets or components of their total religious life were found: Cognitive, Experiential, Self-defining, Administrative, and Meditative. Evidence suggesting possible psychosocial functions of these components was considered. Strength on all five components at once--total, balanced religious activity--was found only in the Baha'i group. This unique Baha'i pattern in the religious realm was correlated with a personal orientation composed of Worldminded, Spontaneous, and Adaptive behaviors, which was found only in the Baha'i group. A deviation from total religious participation is associated with disruption of the unique personality pattern, and vice versa. These findings are also discussed in terms of a concept of community. [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.

In this article measures of achievement-orientation, achievement anxiety, religion, sex, social class, grade point average and subjective probability of success in college were obtained from 577 students at the University of Michigan and 342 students at Drake University. As expected, relatively higher levels of achievement-orientation were found for Jews. Achievement-orientation showed an unexpected trend to higher scoring for those of higher social class. An interaction between religion and sex was found on the achievement anxiety measure. Protestant women were relatively high in anxiety while Protestant men were relatively low. Women had generally higher grade point averages than men with the most pronounced difference between Catholic men and women. Such findings were interpreted to mean that sex roles may vary systematically with religion. Social class differences were also found on the grade point average (GPA) where GPA tended to rise with social class, but dropped sharply at the upper class.

Studies the psychological treatment of Roman Catholics. Elements of paranoia with regard to analysis in general and non-Catholic analysts in particular; True, living faith that may underlie superstitious beliefs; Need for the tendencies to be understood and uncovered by analyst and patient alike for the analysis of the parent archetype to be effective and for treatment to proceed satisfactorily.

This article presents information on religious affiliation and juvenile delinquency. The literature bearing on the relationship between religion and juvenile delinquency is on the whole inconclusive. Two major types of studies have been conducted in this area. The first considers the relationship of religiosity or intensity of religion with delinquency. Concentrating mainly on church attendance among delinquents and non-delinquents, these studies suggest little or no systematic relationship. Studies along these lines vary in quality of the sample selected, and most of them contain only a superficial assessment of religious intensity. The second emphasis in the previous literature has been upon the relative frequency of delinquent acts among various religious groupings. Typical research findings indicate that the lowest rates of official delinquency occur among Jewish populations and the highest among Catholics, with white Protestants occupying an intermediate position. Few systematic studies of this type have been completed. This condition reflects the difficulty of obtaining data on the "risk" population, since decennial censuses and recent Current Population Surveys have not included information on the number of persons or the age structure of religious groupings in the United States.

This article presents a memorandum by author George A. Lundberg to social researcher Paul Hanly Furfey on the place of supra-empirical statements in sociology. Lundberg concedes that there is a similarity between the interest area of Furfey and his own. Both have shown their interest in the possibility of a scientific sociology. He has admitted the differences raised by Furfey but contends that these differences do not preclude the use of the methods of natural science in studying social phenomena, however different they may be in all other respects. The author distinguishes between a text, especially an introductory text, and a scientific monograph. The author says that the state of affairs that exists as between Catholics and non-Catholics in the other sciences cannot also exist in sociology. That is to say, certain radical differences in supra-empirical postulates may be allowed because they have to do with questions lying outside of, or in any case not affecting, the procedures through which the conclusions of natural science are reached.

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.

The article reports that the extraordinary rates of natural increase in Latin America in the past decade have heightened interest in the possible role of Catholicism in motivating or sustaining high fertility. Catholic resistance to "artificial" means of birth control and a tendency on the part of Church leaders to extol the large family are among the explanations frequently advanced for high rates of fertility, as well as for justifying pessimistic outlooks for the future of fertility in Latin American cultures. In most of the countries in Latin America, Catholics satisfy neither of these conditions. The aim of this article is to distinguish three gradations of religious observance according to frequency of receiving Communion. The first group will be termed "nominal" Catholics, defined as those women who declare themselves to be Catholics but who fail to receive Communion once a year. The second group will be designated as "marginal" Catholics, those who achieve but do not exceed the minimum standard. The third group termed "devout", receives Communion twice a year or more frequently.

The data analyzed in this study come from an inquiry conducted with 838 young couples who were chosen at random out of the total number of first marriages contracted in Belgium in 1962. The interviews were taken during the first months of 1965; both husband and wife were questioned during the same session. The results, which seem to be in conflict with the findings of Westoff and Potvin, indicate clearly that the influence of religiousness and Catholic education on fertility values is real, although the mutual contamination of both factors seems to be great. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which discussed mixed marriages in Australia. The author said that Australians think of interfaith marriages as Catholic-Protestant marriages. On the grounds of Catholic loyalty and the objection of priests to interfaith marriages, one would expect Australian Catholics to marry less outside the faith than the adherents of other religious institutions. A reason why the in-marriage statistics are so high may be that in a population of immigrants, a person can expect the married couples to be uniformly Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian.

The author discusses a report on the evaluation of 1966 World Conference on Church and Society. He discusses the issue whether the Conference gave enough attention to the theological questions or just slighted them. He explains the role of the Church in answering current issues on societal transformation. Particular focus is also given to the collaboration between the World Council and Roman Catholic in studying social questions.

The Children's Social Desirability (CSD) scale was given to three groups of children: 426 Catholic parochial schoolchildren in this country, 154 children in a Norwegian village where the residents belonged to the regular State Lutheran Church, and 159 children in another Norwegian village where the residents comprised a strong fundamentalist Lutheran sect. These CSD data were analyzed along with those from 735 U.S. non Catholic public schoolchildren of comparable ages used in a former study. Children of greater religiosity (Catholic parochial and fundamentalist Lutheran) had significantly higher CSD scores than those of less religiosity (non-Catholic public school and State Lutheran), and these differences were also significant between the two groups of greater and less religiosity within each of the two countries. It was tentatively suggested that the stronger social desirability tendencies of the more religious groups might be accounted for by their more frequent use of denial or repression defense mechanisms. Age (grade) and sex differences in social desirability previously found in the non-Catholic public school group were replicated in the data of the three additional groups in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the article, the author presents a critical analysis of Rodney Stark's article "On The Incompatibility of Religion and Science: A Survey of American Graduate Students." The author pointed out some of the handicaps of Stark's article. According to the author, Stark does not explain how the Ellis-O'Dea-Kane-Knapp theory of Catholic anti-intellectualism can be reconciled with the fact that one-fourth of his arts and science graduate students are Catholics; the same proportion in which Catholics are found in the general population. He does not seriously consider the possibility that the lower levels of religious practice among scientists may result from the fact that many young people Who have rejected the traditional religions are attracted to science as a functional substitute for religion. Stark definition that those who go to Church regularly will score high on the "index of religious involvement," looks very definational to a great extent, as Catholics go to Catholic schools and church regularly. Therefore a considerable number of those who by definition are low on one index will by definition be high on the other. This proves nothing more than that Stark's definitions are consistent.

The article reports that the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII on economic, social and political problems "Mater et Magistra," will rank with the similar pronouncements by Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII as forward-looking statements deserving of the most careful consideration by all men and women who accept their individual responsibility for judgment and action upon the crises of present times. One cannot agree with the Catholic sociologists in Rome who held that the document was not distinctive for new ideas, but was rather a codification of Catholic social thought. It does contain new ideas, and sound ones. Pope John's encyclical, by its insistence upon the rights and needs of the individual, has set up a system of ideas which will be powerful weapons in the fight to keep the individual person from becoming automation's automaton. In certain respects, the encyclical is disappointing. The right to the earth which each man shares, and which is denied by absolute ownership and monopolistic control, is too well established in a tradition that extends from the Fathers of the Church to the modern democratic philosophers to be contravened by confusing statements. This matter will have to be clarified by interpretation.