In 1946, the Jesuit seminarian John Carroll and 11 other Jesuits took a boat from the United States to the Philippines, a country that would become his home for the rest of his life. Since that time, he has engaged in sociological study and university teaching, as well as his pastoral activities, and this book brings together some of the articles and essays he has produced since the 1970s. Most of them are critical, and some were written under the pseudonym Benjamin A McCloskey to avoid prosecution during the Marcos dictatorship.

Applying social theory to the analysis of everyday social and political life in the Philippines, Carroll challenges the Catholic Church, elites, civil society, grassroots groups and the radical left to address the appalling imbalance of power and benefits in Philippine society. The book’s 31 articles examine the contradictions of the current social structures in the country as they relate both to everyday life and to a complex national identity rooted in an impressive historical multiculturalism. Issues of politics and economy are analyzed, but topics about family planning and sexual revolution are also addressed.

The book is structured in six chapters. After a brief theoretical introduction, Chapter 1 analyzes the moral and conceptual foundations of the Catholic Church in the modern Philippines. Issues of labour, exploitation and international dependency are presented here. Carroll claims for a much stronger role by the Church in encouraging non-violent but vehement social responses against injustice: it is necessary to understand and accept that a “conflict theory” is more adequate than a “consensus theory” for interpreting the roots of and possible solutions to social unrest. These ideas are present in John Paul’s encyclicals, even as they contradict former Popes’ ideologies and the Philippines religious establishment. Chapter 2 examines the structural problems of Philippines human development (social organization, political domination, relations of production and cultural values). Chapter 3 focuses on key political aspects: the conflictive relations between the catholic hierarchy and the dictatorship, the organizational dilemmas of the political left after Marcos, and the stability of the democratic regime in the present years. Chapter 4 criticizes the Church, especially the silence of the cardinals regarding humanitarian atrocities and some catholic internal political divisions, during the Marcos regime. Here lies one of the most universal contributions: the analysis of the conspicuous, and in many times contradictive, political role that the Catholic Church should have in conflictive contexts like this; Carroll uses sociology to help Catholicism to read and deeply understand the realities where it operates. In Chapter 5, the author addresses population issues such as the biological revolution brought by the rapid decline of death rates and the changes produced by the “American style of life”. The dominant pattern of accelerated consumption and its cultural externalities must be revised, he argues. Natural methods of family planning should help to generate better conditions for social development, more stable than the state-promoted contraceptive methods. But this should imply a fundamental change of mentality in several segments of a catholic hierarchy still opposed to any form of natural contraception. The final chapter is a conclusion and considers the sociologist’s role in the context of a developing, politically conflictive country. Carroll’s own life is an example of this.