The Managerial Class in the Catholic Parish

Yet as the professional middle class’s own self-understanding and self-representation has shifted over the last three decades from staid conformist to breezy rebel-part of the broader corporate cooptation of cultural rebellion that Thomas Frank has dubbed “the conquest of cool”-so the matrices of the laity have shifted from IBM, the Great Society, and the underground church to the Starbucks chain, the consumer dreamland of infinite choice and abundant lifestyles. Most of the sea changes that have transpired in American Catholicism since the midsixties-in liturgy, gender conventions, sexual mores, and priest-laity relations-have been variously initiated, scuttled, or corrupted among the college-trained, technoburban, consumerist enclaves of the flock, and it seems likely that these zones of professional and managerial culture will become only more powerful in the twenty-first century.

-Eugene McCarraher, "Smile When You Say Laity"