Global Catholicism in the Age of Mass Migration and the Rise of Populism: Comparative Analyses, Based on Recent World Values Survey and European Social Survey Data

Abstract

Our data are from two sets of such reliable and regularly repeated global opinion surveys: The World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Social Survey (ESS). Our statistical calculations were performed by the routine and standard SPSS statistical program (SPSS XXIII), and relied on the so-called oblique rotation of the factors, underlying the correlation matrix. In each comparison, we evaluated the democratic civil society commitment of the overall population and of the practicing Roman Catholics, i.e. those Catholics who attend Sunday Mass regularly, the so-called dominicantes. Our main population-weighted global research results rather caution us against the view that the Catholic global rank and file will follow the Church’s substantially weakened leadership in endorsing a liberal asylum and migration policy. 13.40% of Roman Catholic dominicantes reject neighbors of a different religion; 19,60% are openly anti-Semitic as defined by the admittedly limited and restrictive World Values Survey item about rejecting to have a Jewish neighbor (six decades after the Second Vatican Council), and 48.05% are for a tough migration policy. Dominicantes constitute only 45% of the population-weighted total of Roman Catholics on earth. The top 10 Catholic superpowers are the Catholic communities of Mexico; Brazil; Philippines; United States; Italy; Poland; Colombia; Nigeria; India; and Peru (in descending order of size) which in between them share more than 70% of global dominicantes. Based on European Social Survey-based criteria that include pro-immigration attitudes, Euro-multiculturalism, the rejection of racism, personal multicultural experience, and the rejection of right-wing culturalism, it is fair to suggest that in not a single European country, practicing Catholics were more liberal in their attitudes towards immigration than overall society. Only in Germany, there was any relevant active Catholic support for liberal attitudes, as measured by our index, while opposition to them was especially strong in Ireland, Slovenia and Austria. The global country-based evidence based on the World Values Survey also indicates that only in a limited number of countries, Catholic dominicantes are at the forefront of a democratic, open society.Our overall assessment, however, produces not only pessimistic results. One of our hypotheses is that the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council and its commitment to inter-religious tolerance in many ways paved the way for the high degree of societal tolerance in predominantly Catholic Western countries over many decades, irrespective of the fact whether Catholics in those countries live a secular or a more religious life. We also found that at lower levels of socio-economic development, active Roman Catholicism indeed is a countervailing force of humanizing societies, but it fails to influence developments at higher “stages of development”. We finally show the different indicators for the major denominational groups in the United States of America. By far, Judaism is at the forefront of the positive value developments, our work and its indicators attempt to capture. Unfortunately, Roman Catholicism in the United States still lags behind Judaism and Protestantism concerning its value development of its rank and file, but still, the overall value development indicator is higher than that of the average of United States society.