INTRODUCTION

The distinction between the associational involvement and the communal involvement of a Catholic derives ultimately from Tönnies' contrast between Gesellschaft (or Society, characterised by public impersonal forms of association) and Gemeinschaft (or Community, characterised by private, intimate social relationships) (Tönnies, 1957). In his study of socio-religious groups in Detroit, Lenski used the frequency of attendance at corporate worship services, for Catholics the Mass, to measure associational involvement, and marital endogamy and commensality, that is the restriction of friendships in the main to members of the same socio-religious group, as measures of communal involvement (Lenski, 1963: 23). The importance of Mass attendance was considered above in the development of a typology of English Catholics in chapter 3 and variations between marriage types were reported in chapter 5.

In table 9.1 a number of measures of the declining communal involvement of Catholics have been given. In the past half-century the proportion of Catholics in England and Wales appears to have grown from around 7% before the Second World War to around 11% now, as indicated by the Gallup omnibus survey in 1978. From the data reported in Roman Catholic Opinion (Hornsby-Smith and Lee, 1979) it appears that the proportion of Catholics marrying other Roman Catholics has declined from over 70% before the war to around 30% now. Comparing the estimates of different age cohorts there have been significant reductions in the proportions of Catholics reporting that half or more of their friends were Roman Catholics both now and in retrospect when they were aged 17.