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This article presents a study on the typology of English Catholics. In order to explore the extent of heterogeneity among English Catholics secondary analysis has been carried out on the data from the 1978 survey of Roman Catholics in England and Wales. The sample comprised 1001 self-identifying Catholics together with a further twenty-two who, though no longer identifying themselves as Catholics, reported that they bad been baptized as one. In order to obtain a representative sample of Catholics aged 15 and over quota controls for age, sex and Mass attendance frequency were applied at each of 105 sampling points throughout England and Wales. The quotas were based on the findings of ongoing Gallup omnibus surveys. Random sampling was not possible in this first national survey of the dispersed Catholic minority because it would have been prohibitively expensive. In the event the achieved sample overrepresented the higher status groups and those with longer educational experiences. In the analyses which follow these have been allowed for by weighting the data according to the Gallup omnibus Mass attendance and socio-economic status data.

This paper explores the relationships between religion, environmental and other values and voluntary activities using the data from the 1990 European Values Surveys (EVS). Previous work on these data had suggested that environmental concern is much more influenced by demographic characteristics such as education and income than by religious values. The way in which religious identities and convictions and, particularly, interpretations of scriptural passages are related to environmental concerns is a controversial one. Various sources suggest that the relationship between religion and environmentalist views among the populations of advanced industrialist societies is unclear. The 1990 EVS provides the opportunity to explore some of these relationships. This paper examines, using path analysis, the strength of both an individual Roman Catholic identity and a Roman Catholic national context on environmental values and propensity to appropriate action in pursuit of environmental concerns. It shows whether Catholics have internalized a sense of stewardship, which is reflected in higher levels of environmental concerns, in contrast to Protestants who place greater emphasis on economic growth, production as an end rather than a means, and mastery over nature.