In his new book, The Catholic Social Imagination: Activism and the Just Society in Mexico and the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Georgetown University Assistant Professor Joseph M. Palacios seeks to answer the question, “What is it about Catholicism that unites followers from different cultures across the globe?” The answer, says Palacios, is a sense of being Catholic – a social imagination that motivates followers to promote justice and build a better world.
 
“Catholics have a powerful and complex social imagination that operates in a wide social space both in the Church and in the world,” writes Palacios. “As Roman Catholicism continues to grow in a complex global society, we can expect that the Catholic social imagination will play a significant role in shaping social justice possibilities in the face of increasing income disparities, social inequalities, political crises, migration, and other experiences of injustice.”
 
Studying the practices of similar Mexican-migrant parishioners in Oakland, Calif., and Guadalajara, Mexico, Palacios reports both similarities and differences in the way the two groups of Catholics receive and act on a church doctrine that emphasizes social justice. He looks specifically at how ideas and doctrines matter in the development of a religious and social imagination that can help or hinder Catholics to address social injustices that they and others experience.
 
Palacios finds that for Catholics to become committed to the social doctrine of their faith, their environment must offer experiences that can trigger a social or public awakening and elicit commitment in the civic and political spheres. He also observes that among the two communities, the single key factor for mobility in the institutional structures of the Church is education; the key leadership group of the Church in both countries is the priesthood, composed of men from mostly working-class and middle-class backgrounds; and, the activists at the parish and diocesan levels, in national offices, and in civic associations had sufficient educational attainment to read, write, analyze, organize, and lead. He also finds that a key difference in the two countries is the way faith-based social justice can enter political society, and highlights the obstacles facing Mexican society in this area due to historic church-state tensions in the political culture.
 
Palacios also identifies four approaches of the Catholic social imagination based on case studies of the and Mexican Catholic churches: the ecclesial, Christian-inspired, social ministry, and faith-based citizen approaches. Each approach represents certain opening or constraining elements coming from within the Church itself or from the larger society, and represents a social justice cultural milieu with its own threshold of engagement with society that keeps the Catholic social imagination within its centralizing normative and strategic dynamics. 
 
“In this fine-grained ethnographic analysis, Joseph Palacios reveals how the teaching of the Catholic Church on poverty, human rights, immigration, and labor rights is brought to bear on different societies,” says author Richard Wood. “He shows how differing civil society structures and divergent historical experiences of the Catholic Church in and the explain the contrasting patterns of church-based public engagement and societal influence in the two countries.”
 
Joseph M. Palacios is assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Georgetown University. A faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Palacios teaches courses including social theory, social justice analysis, religion and society, and Latino sociology. He is also part of the graduate faculty of the School of Foreign Service’s Latin American Studies Program, specializing in political culture and religion in Latin America, and serves as director of the Georgetown Summer Program at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, where he teaches “Religion y Sociedad en America Latina.” Since 1996, Palacios has done ongoing research on the Catholic Church in Mexico and the United States. 

Source: Office of Communications (July 23, 2007)