Two studies used random sample surveys to test the “contact hypothesis” on intergroup attitudes of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. In Study 1, archival data from two different surveys in 1989 (N = 310 Catholics, 422 Protestants) and 1991 (N = 319 Catholics, 478 Protestants) showed that contact was positively related to attitudes toward denominational mixing. Study 2 (N = 391 Cath...

Article: In the 1984 elections in the United States some of the candidates were criticized for advocating public policies that conflicted with the teachings of their churches. Chief among such targets of this criticism were Catholics, such as Geraldine Ferraro and Mario Cuomo, who defended permissive abortion laws while maintaining that in private they regard abortion as morally wrong. The purp...

Fr. Morrisey is professor of canon law, Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario. Aclear distinction is to be made between "Catholic works" and the "works of Catholics." The former are undertaken "in the name of the Church" (canon 116), with all the guarantees of the church behind them. On the other hand, works of Catholics are undertakings of Catholics that might have an ecclesial relationship o...

Many studies on the fertility differential by religion have considered both Catholics and Protestants to be equally homogenous groups. Contrary to these studies, we contend that Protestant fertility must be studied in the context of heterogeneous groups. Specifically, conservative Protestantism, with its beliefs about artificial birth control mirroring Catholic teaching, should be examined sepa...

Catholics have long been an important force in American electoral politics. Once a vital and loyal component of the New Deal Democratic coalition, Catholics in recent decades have shifted their political loyalties away from the Democratic Party to more of a partisan equilibrium. Indeed, by 2012, the White Catholic vote had become predominantly Republican, even in a year in which a Democrat was ...

Religion frequently indicates membership of socio-ethnic groups with distinct health behaviours and mortality risk. Determining the extent to which interactions between groups contribute to variation in mortality is often challenging. We compared socio-economic status (SES) and mortality rates of Protestants and Catholics in Scotland and Northern Ireland, regions in which interactions between g...

Are Catholics more motivated by guilt than Protestants? I tested this hypothesis via self-determination theory's concept of introjected motivation, in which behavior is only partially internalized (Deci & Ryan, 1991). Study 1 found that 1409 Catholic undergraduates were higher in introjected motivation than 1261 Protestant undergraduates. Catholics were also lower in identified motivation, in w...

Attribution theory has long enjoyed a prominent role in social psychological research, yet religious influences on attribution have not been well studied. We theorized and tested the hypothesis that Protestants would endorse internal attributions to a greater extent than Catholics, because Protestantism focuses on the inward condition of the soul. In Study 1, Protestants made more internal, but...

Marital Fertility and Religion: Recent Changes in Spain Since the onset of democracy in 1975, both total fertility and Mass attendance rates in Spain have dropped dramatically. I use the 1985 and 1999 Spanish Fertility Surveys to study whether the significance of religion in fertility behavior – both in family size and in the spacing of births – has changed. While in the 1985 SFS family size wa...