“Her Place in the Church: Gender, Power, and Authority in Contemporary Catholicism”

Gender has long prescribed the roles of men and women in the Catholic Church, refereed formally via ordination and informally via social norms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Sociologist Dr. Tricia Bruce compares the prospects and parameters of women’s leadership at two moments in the Church: following Vatican II (six decades ago) and today.

Tricia C. Bruce (PhD, University of California Santa Barbara) is a sociologist of religion with expertise in Catholicism and the contours of organizational, attitudinal, and generational change. Her award-winning books and reports include Parish and Place; Faithful Revolution; American Parishes; Polarization in the US Catholic Church; and How Americans Understand Abortion. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal; Time Magazine; Science Advances; Review of Religious Research; U.S. Catholic Historian; and more. She is President-Elect of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Section, and an affiliate of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society.

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