The Slights and Insights of a Priest

Priest, sociologist, novelist and controversialist, Father Andrew M. Greeley has been for more than a generation one of America’s most recognizable Catholic voices.

His is the voice of a distinct yet hugely influential subset of American Catholics: the Irish-American, big-city, pro-labor Democrats who in the secular realm produced the Daleys, the Kennedys and the Browns and in the religious realm dominated the American Catholic Church for much of this century.

To the consternation of his detractors, both left and right, religious and secular, Greeley has shaped the way many Americans understand both Catholicism and Catholics. In “Furthermore!” (a sequel to “Confessions of a Parish Priest”), he sets out to shape our understanding of himself.

His book is not so much a traditional memoir as a series of essay-like chapters devoted to various phases in the life of a man who seems to have jammed several lifetimes worth of work, enjoyment and quarrels into the proverbial three score and 10.

Reading it is much like being seated at a bar next to a fascinating but garrulous fellow who alternates insights into the state of the world with grumpy recollections of long-ago slights and woozy moments of self-revelation. It is intermittently compelling.

The chapters that concern the state of the world--or at least the state of the church--will probably come as little surprise to those familiar with Greeley’s past nonfiction writing. But for those who know Greeley only through his novels or not at all, these chapters provide a clear, forceful statement of lessons gleaned from a lifetime of sociological research into the Catholic communities of the United States.

Those lessons, Greeley notes, have displeased both academic secularists and church traditionalists. Contrary to both, Greeley insists that the profound changes in the Catholic church since the Second Vatican Council in 1962 have in fact strengthened the bonds that tie American Catholics to their faith, even as they have undermined the authority of the clergy and, especially, the power of Rome.

American Catholics widely ignore church teachings on subjects such as sexuality and contraception, and deny the power of their priests and bishops to tell them how to live large parts of their lives.

But despite disagreements, 85% of American-born Catholics stay Catholic, a figure that has not changed since 1960, Greeley notes. (Latino Catholics are more than twice as likely as non-Latinos to drop out of the church--a potential problem for Los Angeles and other increasingly Latino dioceses.) Shared values and religious experiences stabilize Catholic communities, he says, providing, for example, the social capital that helps make parochial schools so effective.

Above all, he says, Catholics are bound to the church “because of the attractiveness of Catholic metaphors”: the emotional and spiritual resonance of the sacraments, the symbols and the stories. And he decries what he sees as the inability of the clerical hierarchy to understand that. The church “is wasting a precious and indispensable spiritual resource when it ignores the religious imagination,” he writes.

Religious imagination is also at the heart of Greeley’s many novels, which are the subject of several chapters of “Furthermore!” In describing the imaginative process that goes into being a novelist, Greeley recounts how characters come to him and develop in his mind.

These are the strengths of this insightful and witty book. Its appeal, however, is marred by two shortcomings.

One is a deplorable lack of editing. Chapters repeat each other; some have the feel of dictation, complete with uncorrected spellings and obvious errors. (A reference to Pope John Paul II is clearly meant to be about his predecessor, John Paul I; another sentence talks of Catholic schools being “fazed” out, where certainly “phased” was meant.)

A second problem is a desire, however understandable, to use the book to settle old scores. Greeley has engaged in many fights. Some of them, such as his effort to get the church to publicly admit and actively correct the problem of pedophilia among the clergy, have been quite courageous. Along the way, he has collected a fair number of enemies and apparently has forgotten none of them.

In many cases, the fights are so old that few readers, except those who have been steeped in the history and controversies of the Archdiocese of Chicago, will see much point in rehashing them. Greeley is, of course, hardly the only memoirist to indulge a desire to get even in print. One only wishes that a good editor--or perhaps a parish priest--might have convinced him that revenge is one of those desires best indulged in private.