The increasing number of Roman Catholic women who have been to college is something of a parish problem, according to Jesuit Joseph H. Fichter, visiting professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Writing in the Jesuit weekly America, Father Fichter sketches a portrait of the "educated Catholic woman."
She is "residentiary more mobile" than her less educated sisters and more anxious to climb in the social scale. In this form of upward and onward, Fichter points out, the church is no help; "from the point of view of status, the doors are closed to the laity. It is the clergy...