Sociology and Religion

This paper is from a catholic feminist’s perceptive that the church, as an institution, is structured as a pyramid modeled on the patriarchal family with the custom of father-right. The patriarchal decision-maker has the power to shape, form and control the “poor of the world” (McCormick, pg. 240) mirroring the aspect of the conflict theory. The poor of the world are the people who work for the institution of the Church controlled by the patriarchal power elite. These established masses of people feel no control, which cause anxiety and they continue to perform their means of production as a formed unit. The power elite’s fear of being overthrown by the poor of the world is fueled with sheer determination and consistency to stay on top. In the article “Sociology and Sexuality” women and women’s sexuality is stated to be oppressed with the poor of the people and is examined through human rights, religious desacralization, religious sacralization, women’s human rights and social conditioning.

The concern for human rights is for the two-thirds of the people who live below the level of endurance but have the knowledge of the lack of social relations in the world of distributing goods. The poor is aware of their civil rights to take part in decisions that will affect their lives such as developing resources of places where they would live instead of having those resources used in the interest of the powerful nations of the world and multinational corporations. The right to life of these people is systematically denied in social systems. Liberation Theology is a direct approach in being freed from this structure. This is where people mediate on the Gospel in company with the poor and by the mandate of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World to help and work with the poor for their own liberation. This movement aroused the re-ordering of priorities for the structure of the church, which was visible in the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the church to where the people of the church are first priority rather than the hierarchy structure in serving needs. With this structural change, people are beginning to see the need to change and recognized the development of human beings and not on the rule of elite’s in the model of fathers over children. Self-representation is part of the process of the development of people.

Pope Paul in the Development of Peoples and again in The Eightieth Year Letter on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum called Christians to initiate action on this transformed structure that eliminated the injustices of exploiting the two-thirds of the world. In turn, religion started to desacralize as the patriarchal family modeled for business firms, industry, government, educational systems and other organization because the un-represented people were learning that the people who make decisions for others make them against nonmembers. Religion and science affirmed the sacredness of hierarchy and theocracy but today the amount of exploitation by elite in government and industries question these affirmations and instead of father-right it is human right with the inferior groups claiming what is theirs. Human rights create equal opportunity available for all races. The more inferior groups realize and recognize the presuppositions of superiority through social conditioning then the more they can do to demand changes for their civil rights.

The human rights cause in the rise of desacralization of religion relies also on women’s roles and significance in religious sacralization, which was developed out of fear of human extinction while serving the elite. Women were encouraged to bear children for existence and the church reinforced sexuality as the common ethic of Western society. Now, since there is an immense population base with advances in science proving to propagate the race through methods such as cloning, there is no longer the fear of human population dying out and women are no longer encouraged to bear children as