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Catholic Schools, Liberalism and Strategies for the Formation of Catholic Identity

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Abstract

Current UK debates about faith schools include questions about whether these schools can promote liberal values while upholding the values and doctrines of their religious traditions. These debates are worked out in education policy, legislation and the media, and typically attend to macro- and meso-level generalisations. This chapter argues for attention to micro-level interactions to create a more nuanced understanding of the day-to-day negotiations of faith school communities. To this end, it considers information gathered from an ethnographic study in a London Catholic secondary school. Employing a Bourdieusian framework, it assesses processes of transmission and the means by which staff guide students to develop a habitus in which liberalism and Catholicism are not in tension with one another. This process involves the employment and transmission of particular strategies for negotiating experiences of tension between membership in the Catholic Church and the progressive liberal society in which the community is understood to be located.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more detailed critique of the structuralism of Bourdieu’s theories, as well as suggestions for correcting it, see Brubaker (1985), Dillon (2001), Urban (2003), Verter (2003), Rey (2004).

  2. 2.

    See also Henderson et al. (2007) on the influence of competency in young people’s pursuits of capital.

  3. 3.

    For more on individual production of meaning-making, see McGuire (2008) on lived religion; Hutchings and McKenzie (2016) on material religion.

  4. 4.

    CITE outsider status, ethnography, etc.

  5. 5.

    For an assessment of the ways in which conversations at the macro- and meso-level overlook the micro-public sphere, see Hanemann (2017, Chap. 1).

  6. 6.

    The concept of re-evaluation is similar to revisionist thought in the Catholic Church. However, I have decided not to co-opt the term, as ‘revisionist theology’ refers to a specific approach that, while similar, is not exactly what is being done here. The term ‘re-evaluation’ is also used in Mandes and Rogaczewska (2013) to describe the means by which Polish young people work within, against, and around Catholicism to make life choices.

  7. 7.

    More information about the Church-wide campaign can be found at http://www.laici.va/content/laici/en/media/notizie/100-dias-paz-riojaneiro.html.

  8. 8.

    See Bourdieu (2007, 2008, pp. 89–91, 100) for further definition of a cleft habitus, the circumstance of being ‘inhabited by tensions and contradictions…[a] coincidence of contraries’.

  9. 9.

    This booklet is used to guide LCC’s teaching on a number of subjects, including homosexuality.

  10. 10.

    See, for example, Clarke and Woodhead (2015) on the ‘nod and wink’ culture around church attendance requirements in enrollment in faith schools.

  11. 11.

    See Riis and Woodhead (2010) for an assessment of the construction of an emotional regime and the means by which participants in religious ritual can be encouraged toward certain emotional responses. Chapter 6 of Hanemann (2017) discusses this process in LCC in detail.

  12. 12.

    This understanding of Catholicism as transformative not simply limited to LCC. Indeed John Sullivan explains that, through the sacraments, ‘we find ourselves changed in a positive way through each of our encounters; through them we are healed, transformed and renewed’ (2001, p. 66).

  13. 13.

    In addition to Bourdieu’s (2007) concept of cleft habitus, consider Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), Heelas and Woodhead (2005) on the project of self.

  14. 14.

    For more on the effects of age and life course on religiosity, see Wilson and Sherkat (1994), Argue et al. (1999) and Wink and Dillon (2002). Predictions of increased future engagement on the part of students were also seen in Guest et al. (2013).

  15. 15.

    See also Day (2010) for examples of young people who reconcile being Christian with dissent; Guest et al. (2013) for subjectivity and focus on personal experience among university Christians in the UK.

  16. 16.

    For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Chap. 1 of Hanemann (2017), here far greater textual analysis support is provided.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kent University, Canterbury, UK

    Rachel W. Hanemann

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  1. Rachel W. Hanemann
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  1. Heythrop College, University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Sean Whittle

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Hanemann, R.W. (2018). Catholic Schools, Liberalism and Strategies for the Formation of Catholic Identity. In: Whittle, S. (eds) Researching Catholic Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7808-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7808-8_9

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