On this blog, there have been numerous posts in the last couple of weeks about the new Mass Translations issued last Advent.  As we already know, many Catholics have had difficulty adjusting to the change.

I remember learning that a new translation was coming actually a couple of years ago from college seminarians who talked about the “great Roman Missal Three.” Their excitement puzzled me – I was unsure what the need for a new translation was – my 20 ish years of Mass experience made me think that our current version seemed to work just fine.
Continue reading →

The e-mail updates button on our sidebar has now been fixed.

If you would like to receive e-mails with the daily posts from The Catholic Conversation, just click on  “e-mail updates” (on the right) and sign up.

The RSS is for people who use readers, such as Google Reader, and you can subscribe via most readers (no clicking of the button for RSS).

If you have any problems, please let us know!

Tomorrow, I will post our first contribution from Lucas Sharma, a graduate student at University of Loyola-Chicago.  He will be suggesting how we might take a cultural sociology approach to liturgical studies.  So, look for that.

In keeping with the theme of my last post, I thought some of you might be interested in examining visually what the increase in the Hispanic population looks like across dioceses in the United States.

As the maps illustrate the increase has impacted almost every diocese in the nation– but the largest increases and the largest overall population are in dioceses in the Southwest.

These maps reflect the % of the overall population that is Hispanic not the % of Catholics that are Hispanic. Because the census does not ask about religion accurate aggregate level information is difficult to find.

If your diocese keeps track of the ethnicity of parishioners tell us what your pews look like (demographically speaking) in the comments!

As Carol Ann recently mentioned, it can be hard to select which books to read on a topic.  And sometimes it can be hard to even know what books are out there.  Here’s a resource to help solve both issues.

For people wanting to read all things Catholic, Pierre Hegy’s “Catholic Books Review” is a great place to start.  The website has hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of book reviews written over the years by professional academics. Pierre estimates that 80-90% of the reviews are by professional theologians, while many of the rest are by professional sociologists.

To give readers a flavor of the books reviewed, here is a short list of some of the recent titles that caught my eye (which tilts the list a bit more towards sociology):

True and False Reform in the Church by Yves Congar, reviewed by Patrick Hayes

The Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World by Laura Hartman, reviewed by Marie Conn

Faith and Money: How Religion Contributes to Wealth and Poverty by Lisa Keister, reviewed by Matthew Loveland

Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith with Kari Christofferson, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog, reviewed by Patricia Wittberg

Spiritual Writings. by Gustavo Gutierrez. Selected and with an introduction by Daniel G. Groody, reviewed by Andrew Prevot

Faithful Revolution: How Voice of the Faithful is Changing the Church by Tricia Bruce, reviewed by Melissa Cidade

Check it out!  http://catholicbooksreview.org/

Why did Obama anger Catholics?  A straightforward response to this question has been provided by E.J. Dionne—the Obama administration’s failure to acknowledge Catholic universities’ and Catholic hospitals’ unique circumstances and exempt them from requirements related to contraceptive coverage was viewed as a betrayal.

In this post, however, I want to present this question as a puzzle.  In hindsight, as with most historical events, it may seem obvious that the issue would blow up the way it did.  After all, it IS what actually happened.  But I want to problematize that view by exploring why Obama MIGHT have thought that Catholics in general and, at the very least, liberal Catholics would have let this particular issue slide.
Continue reading →

Often I find myself with the desire to read all available books on a given topic but with the time to only read one. Under such circumstances I hope to get a recommendation from a friend or colleague about where to start and I try to do the same for my sociology colleagues when they find themselves with a passing interest in religion. For those with an interest in the relationship between Hispanic demographic changes and American Catholicism, I’ll be recommending Timothy Matovina’s new book Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church.
Continue reading →

I received this picture in an e-mail from my sister-in-law.  I’m not sure who deserves credit for creating it, but I loved it!  I have had exactly that feeling after nailing “my lines.”  Now, I just need to find a corresponding D’Oh picture for when I don’t do so well!

Saul Alinsky is all over the presidential election this year. This despite the fact that he’s not running or consulting with any campaign—he died forty years ago, after all.

But Alinsky’s name has a particular symbolic meaning in American politics. The power of Alinsky’s reputation, decried by some Catholics, is only possible because of Alinsky’s outsize success sponsored by—you guessed it—Catholics. His early organizing work was made possible through financial and vocal support of Catholics in Chicago and his followers helped train Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

The Alinsky that critics object to is a stereotyped image in which power-at-any-costs disregards a concern for humans at the root of social structures, sacrificing a concern for a robust common good for a tactical win in the arena of politics. (This is the not-so-subtle message that is meant to be attached to Barack Obama, given his background in community organizing.) This version of Alinsky might exist in some organizations and movements, but then again these same organizations might not last or be effective for long with this style. Alinsky, his legacy, and his importance to the Catholic Church is a bit (actually a lot) more complicated. Continue reading →

Here’s a key point from Mark Gray’s post (which I linked to in my earlier post):

Did Catholics Come Home bring people back to parishes? One indicator of interest from Alexa is that nearly one in five who visited the CCH website (18.3%) went looking for a Mass time by immediately visiting masstimes.org. Seven percent of CCH visitors go to divorcedcatholic.com for their next site. Also, since writing a previous blog on this topic, the CCH YouTube channel has increased its subscribers by 10% and its video views by 16%.

httpv://youtu.be/YI12UT5Ebuc

Continue reading →

An initial read on the Catholic Come Home (CCH) advertisement push by Mark Gray at CARA:

Did Catholics come home?  We have no Mass attendance polling or headcount data. Yet, it is clear by some measure that the national Catholics Come Home (CCH) television advertisements had an impact in December. Evidence of the number of Catholics seeing the CCH videos, connecting with the CCH website and then some following through with seeking out parishes and Masses jumped up last month.

via Nineteen Sixty-four: New Year, A Bit of New Research.