Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology by Will Herberg

Author:Will Herberg [Herberg, Will]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307817587
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

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In 1953 the Catholic Church in America39 counted about 31,500,000 members in 105 dioceses and 26 archdioceses. They constituted some 20 per cent of the American people and nearly 33 per cent of the country’s church-affiliated population. The hierarchy consisted of four cardinals, 29 archbishops, and 166 bishops; some 30,000 churches were cared for by a priesthood that numbered more than 45,000. Nearly 180,000 were in religious orders (154,000 sisters), most of them engaged in teaching and other activities in the world.40 American Catholics had always tended to be urban and had become more so in the course of the past century, reflecting the increasing urbanization of the nation.41 The great centers of Catholic strength were the cities, some of which (Buffalo, Boston, New York) showed an actual majority, or very nearly a majority, of Catholics, and others very strong minorities. It was weak on the countryside, particularly in the South (except for Maryland and Louisiana), but taking the country as a whole, it was far and away America’s largest single denomination. As late as 1908 the church in the United States was still part of the missionary field, under the jurisdiction of the Roman Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith; today it is the richest, most powerful, and one of the most numerous divisions of the worldwide Roman Catholic communion.

The Catholic Church in America operates a vast network of institutions of almost every type and variety. The social and recreational activities in the Catholic parish—from baseball teams to sewing circles, from bowling leagues to religious study groups—are only a beginning. Every interest, activity, and function of the Catholic faithful is provided with some Catholic institution and furnished with Catholic direction. There are Catholic hospitals, homes, and orphanages; Catholic schools and colleges; Catholic charities and welfare agencies; Catholic Boy Scouts and War Veterans; Catholic associations of doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, and philosophers; Catholic leagues of policemen, firemen, and sanitary workers; Catholic luncheon clubs and recreation fellowships; there is the Catholic Youth Organization, with some six million members; there is even a Catholic Audio-Visual Educators Association. This immense system constitutes at one and the same time a self-contained Catholic world with its own complex interior economy and American Catholicism’s resources of participation in the larger American community.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this vast institutional structure is the system of Catholic education that the church has developed in the past century. Walter J. Ong is not far from right when he says that “never in the history of Christianity, including the height of the Middle Ages, has the church as such been charged with an organized educational program which even remotely compares with that in the present United States.”42 There are today in this country nearly three million pupils in the church’s elementary schools—about half of the Catholic children of elementary school age—over 600,000 in secondary schools, and about 300,000 in Catholic universities and other institutions at the collegiate level.43 In many communities the church’s educational system constitutes a substantial, if not predominant, part of available educational facilities.

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