ORa.CL.E · Organising, Classifying, Evangelising. Production and Circulation of Knowledge in Rural and Independent Catholic Action (Belgium-France, 1931-1986)

The ORa.CL.E project aims to shed light on overlooked producers of knowledge about society specialised Catholic Action (CA) and explore the hypothesis of the circulation of religious militant-based knowledge to academic sociology. Social classifications were the essence of the project of the so-called specialised CA movements, which proposed selective pastoral approaches according to life milieus. This segmentation was not simply a strategy imposed by the episcopates from above, but was a continuous process of differentiation and identification by class and by gender at all levels. Assuming that CA specific forms of organisation produced social categories and knowledge that might have circulated to the field of academic sociology, ORa.CL.E offers an innovative reinterpretation of the history of specialised Catholic Action, from a sociology of science perspective. The project transcends the traditional monographic historical studies of CA, by developing an original comparative methodology based on the analysis of five understudied CA movements for adults from rural and independent backgrounds in France and Belgium from 1931 to 1986. ORa.CL.E provides new insight on the role of religion in social distinction and offers new perspective on the relationship between science, religion and civil society. Such a renewal is essential in the current European context, where experts and the media often present religious experience as an individual phenomenon, autonomous from social structures. In consultation with actors from present-day CA education movements, the project will provide tools to better understand the circulations between religious ground knowledge and academic knowledge, which will help in the future to make better use of the former and improve the social relevance of the latter.