Word: thorman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sociologist Caporale, who reports that similar underground churches are rising in Europe and Latin America, argues that a major weakness of the movement is its introverted quality: unless the cells maintain some connection with the official church, they may turn into inbred holiness clubs. Publisher Donald Thorman of the National Catholic Reporter, however, is convinced that the movement will not soon disappear, largely because so many clerics have become involved. "There have been innumerable unofficial movements within the church before," he says, "but they came and went rapidly because they lacked the unifying factor of a priesthood and a liturgy...
...convinced that Donald Thorman's pessimistic prognosis of Catholicism's future in America [Sept. 16] needs a qualifying footnote, for it underestimates the experience of insecurity which attends the exercise of private judgment in religion. Emma Lazarus' "huddled masses" are still huddled, and will go right on huddling, whether on a campus or within a ghetto of Cuban refugees. Catholicism knows this, and it presents a power structure that makes it not only difficult to question the divine nature of the Church but dangerous as well. As a Protestant, I have often wanted this assurance. But each...
...faces "a cultural crisis of the first order of magnitude." Understandably, Catholicism's hierarchical leaders are uncertain as to how to deal with this new, nothing-sacred, questioning attitude. While the instinct of many bishops is to return to the traditional methods of control, suppression, denunciation and excommunication, Thorman points out that such a tactic cannot be applied to Catholic intellectuals who no longer fear authority. Yet church leaders fear that total freedom to question and doubt is to open Catholicism's doors to a plague of heresy and half-truth. It is a dilemma that seriously concerns...
...Donald Thorman, publisher of Kansas City's yeasty National Catholic Reporter, sums up this attitude of selective faith and dogmatic iconoclasm as an "age of unbelief that has finally begun to hit the church in America." Somewhat gloomily, Thorman foresees the possibility of an era of what he calls "Uncatholicism, in which large numbers of the faithful will live their religious lives apart from official Catholicism-not fully leaving the church, but not really participating in its life either." Chicago's priest-sociologist, Father Andrew Greeley, co-author of a major study of religious attitudes in parochial schools...
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