Conscience First, Tradition Second: A Study of Young American Catholics. - book reviews

From 1964 to 1984, roughly 40 percent of the nation's Catholic high schools closed. Patrick McNamara is interested in what survives. What is happening to the Catholic "tradition" among the next generation? Is it possible for those schools that survive to "produce" graduates whose upward mobility does not coincide with religious decline? "St. Martin's" is a Catholic high school somewhere in the Southwest that recruits very intelligent girls and boys (especially after 1983 when admission test scores went up and some measures of religiosity went down). St. Martin's tries to show its students how to get into the better colleges, how to understand the Catholic tradition, how to be better human beings, and how to act more justly. McNamara surveyed (with both fixed and openended questions) and interviewed 2,295 graduating seniors from 1977 through 1989. He also interviewed their religion teachers. Interviews with fifty-four alumni/ae a decade after their graduation round out his data.

St. Martin's students have a head start in becoming smart and successful while remaining Catholic. Most of them, especially after 1983, come from affluent homes, almost one-half attended Catholic primary schools, and another one-third attended CCD. In order to get into St. Martin's they had to pass a competitive entrance exam. Hispanic students are 28 percent of this sample, and another 12 percent are from AnglO-Hispanic homes. On almost all items measuring social justice and the importance of religion, Hispanic students who speak English at home are closer to their Anglo classmates than to those who speak Spanish at home.

McNamara's statistical analysis is straightforward and by reading the three appendices full of frequencies, bivariate cross-tabs, and multivariate analysis, readers can be their own sociologists. What would you do with the following? Most seniors attend church weekly. Most say their religion is important to them. Fifty-two percent disagree that premarital sexual relations are immoral; 35 percent agree that more sexual freedom is a good thing. St. Martin's girls are less certain (although convergence can be discerned) than its boys about the morality of premarital sexual relations. Fifty-nine percent of the girls doubt that more sexual freedom is a good thing. Males and females with the highest grade point average are the most likely to say that premarital sex is immoral and the least likely to say more sexual freedom would be good. Those with primary school contact with Catholic teaching, those who say religion is important, those who rate their religious instruction highly, and those who are frequent church attenders are likely to affirm traditional sexual morality. Those most likely to reject the traditional Catholic sexual ethic are most likely to be St. Martin's boys with low grade point averages, no previous Catholic education, and infrequent Mass attenders. McNamara does not speculate much about the causal directions in these patterns.

Interestingly enough, only 18 percent of all students agree that abortion is acceptable if a baby is likely to have serious birth defects. Huge majorities agree that they should listen to the church's teaching but should also make up their own minds. Only 11 percent thought that "no authority has the right to influence the formation of anyone's conscience."

The general reader of a nonsociological bent will find a relatively uncluttered text. He or she might even appreciate McNamara's first chapter summary, "From Ghetto to Suburbs," of earlier sociological studies and fictional recollections about the loss of an innocent and optimistic Catholicism with its clear direction and clean definitions.

McNamara is particularly interested in whether St. Martin's students are receptive to the themes of social justice and peace found in Vatican II documents and the pastoral letters of American Catholic bishops, The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All. But his measures of "social sensitivity" seem too "soft" to me: "It is my responsibility to share what 1 have with those who have less" (86 percent agree); "If some practice in society is unjustly harmful to people and I do nothing to oppose that practice, then I share responsibility for the harm done" (74 percent agree). Questions added in 1987 seem sharper: "It is the church's business to help Catholics form their consciences on the moral dimensions of economic decision making, for example, in areas such as unemployment, poverty, immigration policy, national spending priorities, etc." While very few seniors say the church has "no business" in these issues of justice and peace, McNamara found that seniors are far more likely to agree when church positions mesh with the dominant liberal discourse. Ninety percent affirm a teaching role for the church regarding world hunger, racial discrimination, and nuclear arms. But just over 50 percent agree that the church should "help Catholics form their consciences on the moral dimension of economic decision-making... in areas such as poverty, immigration policy, national spending priorities."

McNamara concedes that he does not have to invent new terms to characterize these findings: "selective Catholicism" and "theological and moral individualism" might do. Indeed, McNamara's survey data (apart from the seniors' comparatively high church attendance and their reservations about elective abortion) echo the dominant American upper-middle class moral culture: Religion is acceptable when it is tolerant, compassionate, not too vocal about injusties, and mostly quiet about sexual morality. McNamara "is tempt[ed] to wonder whether tradition has simply yielded to the culture." But he has been paying attention to St. Martin's for more than a dozen years and is reluctant to rush to a dismissive judgment. His tone helps: "These seniors," he writes, "do not 'come off' as self-centered and uncaring of others." They are, he observes, receptive to the church's social teachings and do not reject a church role in the formation of conscience about sexual issues.

His account of how St. Martin's religion teachers describe their work in the required four years of theology is both sympathetic and intelligent. They seem deeply aware of both maturational and ideological factors at work in their students. These teachers know what the sociologist knows, that dominant patterns of our individualistic and secular culture shape and thus distort all religious norms. They realize that before gaining acceptability all doctrinal teaching and moral norms must pass through the gates of experience and relevance.

The last chapter asks students and teachers "to speak for themselves." Pretty clearly lots of Catholic sensibility seems to have gotten through. Most of the fifty-four graduates interviewed ten years after graduation recall that at St. Martin's they felt part of a "community" where they gained an ennobling sense that life is more than "making it" and a confidence that critical open-mindedness to other beliefs should make one more "catholic." Twelve percent of these alumni/ae said they were either alienated from the church or had "serious doubts about Catholic teaching and/or moral precepts." A little more than one-half attended Mass at least monthly; 17 percent said they never went. Since about 20 percent of them did not complete college, we might say that the 1978 and 1979 graduates of St. Martin's fail the school's Catholic vision about as often as they failed the American dream.

If we were to decide to accept St. Martin's as broadly representative of trends in Catholic secondary school education, what would we conclude? Hard to say. First, we should avoid nostalgia rooted in an imagined golden age of American Catholic high schools run by nuns, brothers, and priests that routinely produced heroic and attractive Catholics. For those schools, and the sermons that went with them, often promoted self-improvement and American citizenship. Second, the stakes offered by the post-Vatican II church are higher, more interesting, and far riskier. Encouraging critical judgment is now one of the major works of American Catholicism. But it's not easy for teachers and students to be critical about the enveloping society and then turn it off when they talk about the church. Third, the paradoxical and theologically trained among us certainly will point out that it is the tradition itself that first teaches us "conscience first." We can call the relationship between conscience and tradition "dialectical" if we want, but in real life, as this volume shows, it is a tricky business.

McNamara's findings will settle no arguments between disturbed conservatives and confident progressives, to say nothing of those among us unclear about whether we want to be "pre-modern" or "post-modern," who are sometimes confident and sometimes disturbed but certainly disagreeable when anyone labels us one or other rather than "all of the above." We will have to do our own interpretative work here since McNamara devises no neologisms that transcend the usual church and cultural polemics. He himself wonders if he has simply uncovered another instance of "selective Catholicism." But finally, he does not stand among the pessimists, inviting the reader to move with him among the hopeful. Does his evidence support this move? Or is it just his temperament to be optimistic?

Although the methodological logic of McNamara's survey framework, which has "actors negotiating meanings and outcomes," suggests an "ethnographic" study of students and teachers grappling with issues of "conscience" and "tradition" in the sweat and confusion of closely observed everyday life, "all" we and the author have got to go on are thirteen years of survey answers by graduating seniors, some written-in comments, and several dozen thirty-minute structured interviews. This makes it hard to tell how much selectivity from how much tradition is rooted in an informed but dissenting conscience and how much is simply "expressive and utilitarian individualism."

In the next edition will St. Martin's become St. Assimilatio and the book be retitled, Me First, Conscience Second, and Tradition Third--for Marriages and Burials ?

Between editions, for most people the real life-test of McNamara's judgment might be their answer to the question: "Would you send your child (or a kid you didn't actively dislike) to a place like St. Martin's?" I found myself checking the annual tuition (in 1987-8, it was $2,075) and wondering if the basketball team was about to recruit a tall and agile center. It also occurred to me that while Catholics during their long and winding pilgrim history have built just about everything from cathedrals to brothels, they have never willingly built their own catacombs. Besides giving us things to remember, maybe a tradition is also important in reminding us of what we never learned and why we never did. While we'll never, Bork-like, penetrate the original intent of Jesus and the Gospel writers, we'll always know at least this powerful negation-affirmation: They did not aim to become the world's biggest sect. It takes a whole lot of wise patience to keep a teleology afloat in what now appear to be permanently stormy seas.

James R. Kelly is professor of sociology at Fordham University.

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