Paper City and Southern Parish: American Catholics in Postwar Social Science Research

Paper City and Southern Parish: American Catholics in Postwar Social Science Research William D. Dinges B y the post-World War II era, the situation of much of the Euro-American Catholic population of the United States was in significant transition. Although on the surface Catholics appeared ensconced in a unified and “triumphal ” Church, the slow but inexorable workings of broad social and cultural forces were reconfiguring the parameters of the Catholic engagement withAmerican culture.1 The trajectory of Catholic assimilation in the United States through the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century paralleled the emergence of the modern social and behavioral sciences. During this same period, scholars in fields such as psychology, sociology and anthropology finessed older theoretical perspectives and generated new ones (functional, conflict/consensus, interactionist). More sophisticated research techniques that imitated the methods and goals of the natural sciences developed as social science practitioners strove to become more value neutral in theory and method. By the 1920s, sociology, in particular, was moving away from a close alignment with liberal Protestantism and its impetus to ameliorate the social problems of an urban, industrial, and increasingly bureaucratized nation.2 One genre of early twentieth century social science research focused on American community studies. Scholars such as W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki,3 W. Lloyd Warner,4 Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd,5 H. Richard Niebuhr,6 Elin Anderson,7 45 1. See, for example, Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: Past and Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); John McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter With Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 2. Arthur Vedich and Stanford Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejection of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1985). On the general process of “methodological secularization ” see also George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Establishment of Non-belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 150-166. 3. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927). 4. The Social Life of a Modern Community (“Yankee City Series” Vol. 2) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941). and Liston Pope,8 along with a host of lesser academic luminaries, produced an array of studies on America’s diverse but slowly homogenizing community life. Many of these studies addressed the role of religion. They typically emphasized social stratification in churches and how religion served different functions for different social classes. Variations in belief, practice and religious experience were also explored, as was the interplay of church/sect/denomination dynamics within and between religious organizations. Although American Catholics were visible in some of this early scholarship, notably in ethnic and immigration-related studies, substantive social science research focused specifically on Catholic parish and community life did not emerge until after World War II. While some of the early studies of American Catholics employed rudimentary social science methods, most lacked theoretical and analytical sophistication . Their inspiration came, instead, from concerns over Church “leakage,” declining birth rates, and mixed-marriages.9 Nor were the American hierarchy enthusiastic about promoting in-house empirical research—in spite of calls among the first generation of American Catholic social scientists stressing the “harmonious” interests between such research and the Church’s pastoral needs.10 Paper City and a Southern Parish Two of the earliest and most important post World War II sociological studies of American Catholics were Kenneth Wilson Underwood’s Protestant and Catholic: Religious and Social Interaction in an Industrial Community (1957) and the Jesuit Joseph H. Fichter’s Southern Parish: Dynamics of a City Church (1951). Although published in the 1950s, the research for both projects was undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the war (1947 and 1948 respectively) and during a period of significant change and adjustment in American culture. 46 U.S. Catholic Historian 5. Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1929). 6. The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian, 1929). 7. We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937). 8. Millhands and Preachers...