The Catholic Family

To many a non-Catholic eye, Roman Catholics in the U.S. have never been so well off. In numbers they have grown to 32 million (from 18 million in 1925). In social prestige they stand high. The old stigma of being an immigrant church is largely a thing of the past. But these gains have exacted a steep price from U.S. Catholics. They face the same problems of modern living as everyone else, but the problems are harder to handle within Catholic doctrine. With integration, the old ethnic units are breaking up, mixed marriages are on the rise, and the social sanctions which a minority needs to maintain its traditions are weakening.

The cost of the gains has been totted up in an important book published this week. The American Catholic Family (Prentice-Hall; $7.65), the result of five years' work by Jesuit Father John L. Thomas, 45, assistant director of the Institute for Social Order at St. Louis Uni versity, is the first detailed study of Catholic family life in the U.S.

The places where U.S. culture rubs hardest against the Catholic family, says Father Thomas, are these: CJ Sex. "What has happened is the toleration of every form of 'sex-tease' in a society which is incapable of developing uniform norms." Children are not only subjected to constant reminder of the physical aspect of sex, but "society permits intimate and unsupervised relationships between unmarried [youth] of both sexes," during which "they are expected to display a reserve under excitation which their elders would probably be incapable of exercising." The "sex-tease" affects married couples as well, leading them "to regard each other as sexual objects."

P:Contraceptives. Aside from the temptation presented to Catholics to use forbidden methods of planning parenthood (a temptation reinforced by such factors as the high cost and close quarters of modern housing), contraception puts an extra strain on a union by disassociating sexual pleasure and responsibility in marriage, Father Thomas suggests. "We cannot simply assume that physical union restricted to mutual gratification produces the same stabilizing and unifying effects as normal intercourse."

P: Divorce. Instead of treating marriage as a social institution, let alone a divine one, U.S. public opinion "tends to regard marriage as a private affair." As divorce becomes more and more accepted as a solution to marriage failures, Catholics tend to feel more and more hardship in denying divorce.

P: The "open class" system. The absence of class barriers of which the U.S. is so justly proud, says Thomas, works against man and marriage when it leads to what he calls "normless striving." How does a man know when he has reached "success"? "In such a system the only recognized symbols of success are material--the make of car you drive, the size of the home you own, the quality of the clothes you wear . . . the grade of liquor you serve, indeed, even the size of the screen on your television set." Marriage and even children tend to become units in this endless U.S. competition and "it encourages only shallow relationships with others," eventually even between man and wife. Sex at School? If the Catholic minority is to enforce its standards of family behavior in such a society, its members must first of all know what those standards are, Father Thomas explains, but dissemination of appropriate knowledge is harder than it sounds. Catholic schools cannot properly carry the full burden of sex instruction, and many children tend to lump the religious teaching they get at school with the other rules and regulations, to be abandoned when they grow up. Parents are better sources, says Father Thomas. But more than a fourth of Catholic marriages are mixed, and even in unmixed marriages parental authority has seriously weakened, parental knowledge of the Catholic family pattern is far short of what it should be.

Father Thomas concludes that the job is up to the clergy. The priests must not only lay down the law, but explain the foundations on which the law, from Mass every Sunday to fish on Friday, is based. They must go further and explain why the "objectionable practices in the dominant culture" (such as birth control and divorce) are objectionable from a Catholic point of view.

Jesuit Thomas writes with his clerical collar off; he keeps a cold sociological eye on the explosive material he deals with, without lapsing into polemics, apologetics or handwringing. This makes his book a new source for all his fellow sociologists. Says Protestant Herbert Blumer, head of the department of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley: "The book is good scholarship and is of value irrespective of the religious denomination of the college."

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