The Brief Career of Catholic Sociology

Abstract

This article traces central elements in the three decade history of the American Catholic Sociological Society in order to determine the specific intentions of its creators and subsequent members as well as examining both those factors that underpinned the creation of the society and those that culminated in the redefinition of the organization's raison d'etre in the late 1 960s. Of particular interest is the issue of whether or not the purpose of the Society was to create a Catholic sociology. From the nineteenth century, Catholic intellectuals have had to develop responses to modernist thought, and for those in America, given their status as a minority religion in a Protestant empire, they have also had to articulate a self-identity (Moore, 1986:48-7 1; Halsey, 1980). American Catholic social thought was thus in fundamental respects a reaction to both modernism and an Americanization movement stemming from a proselytizing Protestantism. Up to World War 1, Catholic thought moved like a pendulum from outright rejection to efforts at reconciliation and reconstruction, predicated in varying degrees upon the shifting pronouncements of papal encyclicals, changes in the American environment, and changes within the Catholic community itself. Between the Wars, however, Catholic intellectuals - especially those identified as liberals - took a more consistently conciliatory stance, seeking not simply a reconciliation with the larger intellectual environment, but attempting simultaneously to preserve central elements of Catholic tradition. To accomplish this, they accepted and participated in the neo-Thomistic or neo-scholastic revival (underway for a half century in Europe) that served to provide an intellectual grid that permitted Catholic intellectuals to chart a theologically appropriate response to their various academic disciplines. It provided a distinctive frame of reference for Catholics in a variety of intellectual endeavors. Thus, neo-Thomism was the ideological undergirding for a multiplicity of organization-building endeavors. The proliferation of organizations concerned with the promotion of scholarship