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Looking Back: A Sociologist and the Church

As the years roll on and one seeks to draw smidgens of wisdom from reflection on life experiences, one seeks out patterns of events in the successes and failures, joys and sorrows, triumphs and frustrations, hopes and disappointments which have marked a large number of decades. In this mini-memoir, I will try to reflect on my experiences as a sociologist in service of the Church. In summary I found the sociology fascinating and rewarding. As far as the service of the Church, I should have stayed home. The Church did not need a sociologist and in fact did not want one. Not only did the hierarchy and the clergy know all they needed to know about the Catholic condition so did the intellectual and quasi intellectual laity on the fringes of the institution—academics, intellectuals (such as these may have been), editors, commentators, reporters, and experts of one variety or the other. In this respect the Church differs little from other human institutions that, while they take refuge in “studies,” don’t like them very much. Who needs a sociologist who reports facts when you already know what the facts are and that the sociologist, should he report different facts, is wrong? I know that now, but I didn’t know it when I started as a sociologist. Hence I was astonished by the reaction to my work, even when it presented what I thought was good news—Catholics can become intellectuals, Catholic schools work, one cannot drive American Catholics out of the Church, most priests are happy in their work. Despite the good news, my own archdiocese has never asked me to do research or to comment on my field of expertise—Catholic education. I have directed only one study sponsored by the national hierarchy and that became a disaster for all concerned, never to be repeated, though it contained considerable good news. Some of the resistance to and dismissal of my sociology must be attributed to my own personality. In grammar school, I was called a “walking encyclopedia,” at the