Sacred vs. Profane: A Conversation with Patricia Ewick

Q: Congratulations on your fellowship. How will this award impact your research?

PE: Personally, it was terribly moving to receive this honor because it is really an award from my colleagues. I'm one out of what I'd call a tremendously talented group of faculty members at Clark. I'm honored.

And the award is not just honorific. It comes with $4,500, which is a lot of money in terms of what it has enabled me to do. It happens that I'm just beginning a new project and my sabbatical, so the award couldn't have come at a better time. It has provided me with some seed money to do a little traveling, buy the books I need, and, hopefully, to hire some undergraduate research assistants who will help me with some of the interviewing and transcription work for my project.

I also used some of the award to buy a new computer. This is actually the first time I've taken my sabbatical at home. When I've taken previous sabbaticals I've always had a child at home. But now that one son is in college and the other one is in school during the day, I'm able to work at home. Now I have my very own computer.

Q: Tell me about your new project?

PE: The project I'm starting now addresses the Catholic Church sex scandal. I'm not trying to find out why the scandal happened, but rather why there has been a historically unprecedented response from the lay community to use the law to assert their rights against the church.

As a result of the scandal in the early 2000s, there has been an upheaval among Catholic lay in the Archdiocese of Boston. In the past three to four years this lay population has used the criminal law and civil courts to sue the church. They are invoking property and ownership rights against the church by occupying church buildings. Finally, as a result of some of the organizations that have emerged around the scandal, lay groups have sponsored legislation to extend statutes of limitations and require higher levels of financial scrutiny of the church.

What makes this enormously interesting for me is that there's a large body of research that shows that highly religious groups tend to avoid the law, indeed they have the lowest use of legal agencies or mechanisms. The Amish, for example, will very rarely call the police against one another. When you think about it, religion and law are two social institutions that both claim a certain kind of moral authority. So in highly religious communities, turning to the state for that moral authority against a church or fellow church members is unlikely. Yet it's happening. As a sociologist of law who studies law as a social institution, I want to understand the "legal consciousness" of this lay population. In other words, I want to try to understand how Catholic laypersons think about and use the law. Given centuries of history of a dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, what did these laypersons have to overcome to be able to invoke the law against the church in relative short time?

Q. How will you gather your data?

PE: The preliminary work I'm doing now is really immersion and observation. There's a lot of historical reading, going over archives and newspapers.

I'm also talking to people at Voice of the Faithful. The organization actually began in Wellesley, Mass., and in the past four years has grown to 30,000 chapters worldwide. It's an interesting organization because they are challenging the church and want to change the structure of the church to support the sex scandal victims, but they define themselves as good Catholics and want to remain within the Catholic tradition. I've been attending weekly meetings at one of their Massachusetts chapters and interviewing some of their leaders. I will probably talk to some of the individual members of the chapter as well.

I'd also like to interview Catholics on the other side of this issue, who support the Archdiocese and the Catholic Church. I'm sure there are some Catholics who have abandoned the church as a result of the scandal, and it would be interesting to talk to some of them as well. Right now, I'm in the early stages of refining my questions so this is really an unfolding project.

Q: Are there other areas you will need to explore for this project?

PE: I need to learn about Cannon law since the church has its own parallel legal system. The American Sociological Association's Section on the Sociology of Religion offers some meetings on this topic. I'm hoping to use some of the award money to attend one or more of those meetings.

I'm lucky to have the time to do this research this year. And to have the award resources to help with that research is fabulous. I'm very grateful.

Learn more about Professor Ewick's research

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