The Measurement of Traditionalism among Roman Catholic Priests: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

A certain shift in the cultural ethos of current society has resulted in many aspects of the structure of the Roman Catholic Church coming to appear outmoded. The Second Council of the Vatican (I963-5)1 could be said to have been a modernizing influence, yet traditional attitudes and ways of acting still persist within the Church. Of particular interest is the juxtaposition within the priesthood of both 'adaptive' and 'traditional' attitudes and behaviour. In other words, an occupational group which has been united in belief and practice since the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation was enshrined in the teachings of the Council of Trent, can now be said to be disunited in its response to rapid social change. We suggest, therefore, that the widely acknowledged organizational and human problem of tension in the post-Conciliar Roman Catholic Church (expressed in terms of the departure of an increasing number of priests from the active ministry,2 the debate over celibacy, birth control, and other such issues) can be examined sociologically in terms of the attitudes and behaviour of a sample of its priests. We are not suggesting that theological and moral issues may be reduced simply to organizational problems, but rather contend that they can be said to express themselves in organizational attitudes and behaviour, and are therefore able to be analysed on this level. Some priests appear to conceptualize the Church as being in a state of equilibrium, while others appear to conceptualize it as being in a state of motion. For the purpose of this study, we labelled the static view of the Church 'traditional', and the dynamic one 'adaptive'. In other words, we are suggesting that the large amount of empirical information that would give content to these views can be summarized conveniently in advance by the construction of two polarized ideal types of attitudes and behaviour likely to be found in the priesthood. Our continuum is a heuristic device with which to reduce the wide variety of priestly orientations to rapid social change to analytically manageable proportions.3 Thus, in theoretical terms, we distinguished two system states with regard to the Church. We considered it to be static when