Catholic Identity and Spiritual Well-Being of Students in a Philippine Catholic University

Abstract

This paper primarily compares the spiritual well-being of students in a Catholic university classified according to their self-ascribed identity as creative and orthodox Catholics. With the use of a survey questionnaire, the demographic and academic profile and church involvement of students were first established and subsequently associated with their self-ascribed Catholic identity using Chi-square test. Meanwhile, the spiritual wellbeing of students was measured using the standardized 20-item Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) test developed by Paloutzian and Ellison (1982). The t-test and one-way Analysis of Variance were employed to differentiate the spiritual well-being scores of students grouped according to their demographic and academic profile and church involvement. This paper shows that the orthodox Catholics significantly scored higher in spiritual well-being than the creative Catholics. Thus, teaching the meanings of Catholic beliefs and practices should be enriched with practical relevance so students would consider them not merely as part of Catholic rituals.