The Contribution of Sociology to the Catholic Church

Abstract

Attitudes towards sociology displayed by some leading authorities in the Catholic church today are, to put it mildly, ambivalent. They vary from suspicion and sometimes overt hostility to feelings of relative pleasure depending on whether or not the findings of sociological research can be used to support their pastoral intuitions. Pope Paul, for instance, has been reported as claiming that the turbulence and dissent in the Roman Catholic church today ‘tends to be produced with a new method, that of the sociological survey’. At the same time that he made this remark he was sponsoring one of the largest socio-religious surveys to date within his own diocese of Rome. In England, in his address to the Church Leaders’ Conference in 1972, Cardinal Heenan viewed with alarm the number of university students now opting for courses in sociology and what he saw as the almost certain consequence of requests for fresh surveys. He continued by doubting the value in planning future pastoral strategy of such surveys as that recently completed for the Church in West Germany. In the same year he was accepting one of the ‘findings’ of an extremely unrepresentative survey carried out by the Laity Commission on behalf of the hierarchy, that priests working in parishes should make themselves more available to their parishioners. Yet he was not reported as welcoming another ‘finding’ in the same survey that the laity accepted the principle of optional celibacy for priests. Thus it would appear that some church leaders are selective in their acceptance of sociological findings.We would now like to suggest there are at least four reasons for the suspicion of sociology. In the first place it is quite possible that sociology is connected in the minds of many with revolutionary social change. The student unrest of the late 1960s which was thought to be seeking such change occurred in universities such as Berkeley, Nanterre and tlw London School of Economics, all with strong faculties of sociology.