THEME AND HYPOTHESES

In the Introduction it was noted that the starting point for our programme of research into the changing nature of English Catholicism was the hypothesis that as a result of post-war social and educational changes in Britain, the English Catholic community, with its largely low-status Irish immigrant social origins, was likely to have experienced to a significant degree a social ‘mobility momentum’ (Bode, 1970) relative to the rest of the population. In the first place this was likely to be reflected in the growth of a sizeable first-generation ‘new Catholic middle class’ in professional, managerial and administrative occupations as a result of the expanded educational opportunities created in the post-war period. Secondly, it was also likely to be reflected in geographical movement not only from the old centres of traditional Catholic concentration in the north-west to the new areas of economic growth especially in London and the south-east and in the Midlands, but also from the inner-city parishes to the new suburban estates.

In England and Wales, the Oxford Mobility Study of men surveyed in the early 1970s had shown that there was evidence of considerable intergenerational mobility with no decline of intra generational mobility over several decades. Given the expansion of the ‘service’ class in recent years it was perhaps not unexpected to find little evidence of strategies of exclusion, though some evidence of strategies of solidarism among the working class was reported (Goldthorpe, 1980: 38–67).