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In this paper we will report some of the findings of a study of the rise and fall of the Young Christian Worker movement in England and Wales. From its origins in the industrial north in the 1930s, the movement reached its peak in the early 1950s. Since then it has declined and yet many of the current generation of Catholic activists were strongly influenced by its ideology, ecclesiology, and inductive approach to finding Christian responses to social issues. We explore from a social movement perspective what social factors contributed to its early growth. The context for its decline in recent decades are the major post-war social and post-Vatican religious changes which have transformed English Catholicism. We argue that the two stages of the decline correspond closely to the passage through adolescence and the young adult years of two successive generations in the post-war years, the 'baby boomers' and the 'baby busters'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.