The Concept of "Community" in Catholic Parishes

Abstract

Ever since Ferdinand Toennies ([1887] 2004) first divided societies into Gemeinschaften and Gesellschaften, sociologists have been studying, and usually advocating, the characteristics and effects of "community." For a seemingly simple word, however, the meaning of "community" is, and has always been, unusually ambiguous. Hillary (1955) counted 94 different definitions of "community" in the academic literature of his day. Abercrombie et als' (1984) dictionary of sociological terms dismissed "community" as "one of the most elusive and vague [terms] in sociology, [which] is by now largely without specific meaning." More recently, Vaisey (2007: 851) complained that "few concepts have generated as much theoretical speculation and as little scientific payoff as 'community.'" The 1987 president of the ASA section on Community and Urban Society actually recommended that her colleagues stop using "the C word" altogether - it was too vague and too emotionally freighted to be of any scholarly use (Lofland 1987).