Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live their Faith

For these practitioners, being religious means engaging the sacred and selectively tailoring one's religious preferences in conjunction with the broad parametets of American culture as well as with the various symbols and traditions within Catholicism. [...] granting that the interpretive authority of the Church cannot be narrowly confined to the Magisterium, that Catholicism is a living tradition always in process of formation and adaptation, and that Vatican II legitimated the powet of conscience, the question atises as to the latitude of interpretation vis-à-vis Scripture, creeds, councils, and the legitimate role of the Magisterium.