The Meaning of Belonging to Experimental Parishes: an Exploration in 'Grounded Theory'.

Abstract

The evolved meaning systems of the members of the small quasi-experimental parishes which developed within the Roman Catholic Church in Detroit during the 1960's evidenced that the individual participants relinguished a rigid religious reality construct and formed a cognitive minority with a unique religious world view. The question, What is the meaning of belonging to a Floating Parish to the participant? was the unifying element of the qualitative inquiry and analysis. The inquiry is founded on dual paradigmatic assumptions. The "Sociology of Knowledge" of Berger and Luckmann('1) posits that reality is the result of a dialectic interaction between the individual and his society. It is this socially shared and taken-for-granted knowledge that allows the individual to move through everyday life. Religion normally serves as the best means to maintain the reality of the socially constructed world. The method of inquiry is based on Glaser and Strauss'('2) Grounded Theory. It is a process of data collection through the interview method and the qualitative analysis of these data. The data build a theory rather than their utilization to verify a preconstructed hypothesis. Sixty-five participants were interviewed, comprising a representative number of role and non-role members, active and former members. The interviewees were highly homogeneous: Catholic background and education, very active in their parish churches, in professional or business occupations, and of an average age of 33. The data indicated that the floating parishes did not employ sufficient commitment mechanisms to form true communities. Rather they remained close groupings of like-minded individuals. Membership to the participants interviewed meant: (1) They were attracted by the liturgy of the Floating Parishes, a sense of close interpersonal friendships and an interest in relevant social action. They wanted the interest but rejected the notion of the community's being committed to a particular action. (2) In the process of participation, the participants grew in a sense of personal freedom and developed hopes for the future of the church. (3) Finally, from these hopes and because of their freedom, the participants constructed a new sacred cosmos; externalized it; objectified it and finally internalized it. The new sacred cosmos was apparently so effectively constructed by the participants that those who opted to return to a conventional parish as well as those who opted for no religious expression experienced a dissonance between their sacred cosmos and their new milieu. The upshot of this study is that individuals, because of their socialized religious world view, responded to the currents of the day both religious and secular. They found a religious maturity and engaged in the enterprise of world view construction. When their world view was met with rejection, they formed cognitive minorities to maintain their views. In so doing they developed their new sacred cosmos which endured beyond the life span of the maintenance vehicle itself. ('1)Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967). ('2)Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1967).