Firmness and Accommodation: Impression Management in Institutional Roman Catholicism

Abstract

This article examines institutional Roman Catholicism, particularly in the United States, as a complex organization seeking to maintain survival and relevance among constituents while preserving hierarchical power and traditional teachings. The limited change and accommodation to the modern world initiated at Vatican II, yet curtailed in recent years, serves to inoculate the organization from further and more drastic changes in Church structure ard teaching. The Church's response to issues of sexual morality on the official and local pastoral levels provides an example in which the organization attempts to manage impressions among the faithful and to forestall further institutional accmmodations to internal and external social forces. Through official pronouncements from Rome and bishops' conferences, as well as pastoral ministry on the local level, the institutional Church seeks to maintain organizational stability. First, Church leaders maintain a firm hold on organizational power and the production of Church teaching, particularly in the area of moral theology, while allowing controlled and limited participation in decision making by lower level clergy and laity on the local level. Second, while moral pronouncements are legitimated with values mandated by the Church's charter, that is, its official values and goals (Dingwall and Strong, 1985),1 they also are framed in language that suggests that the Church is to the modern world and to the perspectives advanced by the natural and social sciences. The Roman Catholic Church, like other institutional religious organizations, may be described as an open system (Benson and Dorsett, 1971; Scherer, 1980), in that it is an organization constantly responding to changes within its host environment. Yet, as Seidler (1986) maintains, organizational change within the Church occurs as contested accommodation. He states that the Church has attempted rapprochement with the wider culture, but also seeks to maintain social distance. While social forces pressure the Church to change, other forces within the Church resist accommodating to the host environment (see also Harris, 1969). It is conflict, Seidler argues, that initiates reform and