The Persistence of Religious Identity among College Catholics

This paper reports that the manifestations of Catholic identity among undergraduates at a private, nondenominational, northeastern university replicate the patterns of communal loyalty evident for Catholics as a whole. The study focuses on the ways in which church attendance differentiates moral and sociopolitical attitudes and values, and also examines whether gender is a significant source of cultural variation. The data used in the analyses are based on a self-administered mail questionnaire sent to a rep- resentative random sample of the student population. The findings show that all Catholic respondents are selective in their acceptance of church authority. Regular church attenders, nevertheless, are significantly more likely than less frequent attenders to endorse the Church's teaching on sexual morality, and to iden- tify the influence of their Catholic upbringing.