American Catholicism in the Mid-Eighties: Pluralism and Conflict in a Changing Church

Abstract

The decade of the 1970s saw continuing changes in American Catholicism as Catholics' religious beliefs and practices persisted in a decline that began in the mid-1960s. In the 1980s, issues of personal morality are salient among indicators of declining belief, particularly such issues as birth control, divorce with remarriage, and premarital sex. Yet there are signs of vitality in other respects: Catholic schools have grown in enrollment, charismatic and pentecostal groups have increased, and lay participation in liturgical functions is now a familiar feature of Catholic worship. The institutional church, as represented by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, has adopted a critical stance toward American nuclear war strategy and recently toward the American economy for its neglect of the poor and unemployed. These stances occasion conflict both within the church, as Catholic groups organize to oppose them, and between the church, as represented by the bishops, and policies at the national level. A pluralistic model of the church in the 1980s would predict continuing individualism in religious beliefs and practice, and conflict on the institutional level, with considerable cost to the authority of the Catholic hierarchy.