The American Catholic: A Social Portrait, by Andrew M. Greeley
McAdams, A. James
"The American Catholic: A Social Portrait, by Andrew M. Greeley" agencies was more hard fought in the Nixon administration than in any other, it was no different in its essential character. And Epstein would have done much better to admit that in its...
...to the liberal American mainstream than many people would like to believe...
...If all our progress takes place only through the government we will give the world an unprecedented example of an autocracy armed with all the achievement of freedom...
...And, failing to acknowledge that the Nixonian view had any merits, Epstein accordingly fails to deal with that view adequately...
...But until he is willing to admit that the Church can (and should) operate on more expansive grounds than expediency alone, it is doubtful that he and the Holy See will be speaking the same language...
...In fact, most Catholics are less blue-collar and less conservative than the average American...
...As long as Greeley is studied for his treatment of the Catholic ethnic, and not for his analysis of Catholicism, his readers should have few grounds for disappointment...
...This is the conclusion that Andrew Greeley reaches in The American Catholic: A Social Portrait...
...This is not to say that The American Catholic should be passed up...
...Yet if his argument was a caution to revolutionaries, it was also an appeal for revolution...
...Fortunately, we have Greeley to thank for demonstrating that this is all patent nonsense...
...Epstein writes of Nixon's efforts to centralize power in the White House as if they were unique and unprecedented, which is wrong, and as if they were dangerous to our liberty...
...For the most part they were not, yet they reflect a distinctive view of executive branch legitimacy, and its monopoly in the presidential office...
...For example, Irish Catholics enjoy the highest educational attainment of any Gentile white ethnic group...
...To the contrary, the book represents some of the best research by one of America's leading authorities on ethnicity...
...Far from being racists, as some people have charged, Catholics tend to be astonishingly tolerant...
...This view, Polsby wrote, rests on the fact that only the President, in all the executive branch, is elected, so that as with a "gigantic inverted pyramid" all legitimacy rests on him, and "there can be no grounds upon which hierarchical subordinates of the President might legitimately act to thwart, undermine, modify, or attenuate his will in public policy, once it is expressed...
...At best, there might be only a morally uncomfortable accomodation in which reforms were not claimed as a matter of right and the regime suffered no retribution...
...With this fear in mind, he was loath to condemn the conspirators...
...Thus, the Second Vatican Council earns Greeley's approval since it represented a progressive advance for the Church and since it was—according to his figures—well received by American Catholics...
...In contrast, he condemns the subsequent papal encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, as anexample of inept leadership since it was poorly received, since it precipitated a decline in contributions to the Church, and since few people took it seriously anyway...
...Aware that many desired only to replace the Tsarist structure with a new and more efficient centralized state, Herzen was presciently describing Russia's dictatorship to come...
...Even today, the barriers to Catholic success have hardly been toppled...
...Paradoxically, the very progress Russia was making out of her backwardness seemed one more reason to oppose the regime...
...The answers to such questions are not forthcoming from Greeley's account...
...It is a credit to the author's integrity that he himself provides much of the evidence which refutes his "coup" argument, but while this makes Mr...
...The book's main achievement lies in its analysis of a political triangle of contendStephen Sestanovich is a graduate student in government at Harvard...
...Irish Catholics are not only well educated, they are also the wealthiest of American Gentile groups...
...Consider this statement by Alexander Herzen, who dominated the opposition in the first years of Alexander II's reign and who undertook the great task of undermining the Russian attachment to state power...
...Polsby went on to suggest that this view was, more or less, that of President Carter, despite its contrast to our more traditional check-and-balance notions.This is all most instructive, and suggests that efforts by the Nixon administration to limit the independence of certain executive agencies were neither illegitimate nor even particularly novel...
...In the eyes of many, Catholics are simply primitive, indeed, almost preconscious...
...Ulam argues that at this time there was probably more social mobility in Russia for peasants, priests' sons, and Jews than in Britain...
...tive agencies was more hard fought in the Nixon administration than in any other, it was no different in its essential character...
...and there is Nechayev (the possessed terrorist immortalized by Dostoevsky) who warns Bakunin's publisher to stop hounding him to finish that Marx translation, or else...
...The Russian liberals' attitude, that there were no enemies a gauche, is of course a familiar one...
...BOOK REVIEW The American Catholic: A Social Portrait Andrew M. Greeley / Basic Books / $15.00 A. James McAdams America delights in its minority-consciousness...
...It could be that the Vatican Council's interpreters created illusions of a religious reformation which was simply never meant to be, and that Humanae Vitae set Catholicism back on the right course...
...For Epstein too has taken a decent argument rather a good deal too far...
...Drawing from 15 years of survey research on American Catholicism, Greeley offers statistical evidence which suggests that Roman Catholics are closer A. James McAdams is a graduate student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a columnist for the New Oxford Review...
...After all, Bismarck at this time was showing that bourgeois docility could be pointed in a very different direction...
...BOOK REVIEW In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia Adam Ulam / Viking Press / $12.50 Stephen Sestanovich Adam Ulam's new book, In the Name of the People, examines the revolutionary opposition to the Russian autocracy in the 1860s and 1870s, when Russia was experiencing a cultural revolution not unlike our own of recent years, complete with rising student enrollments, declining sexual mores, and political confusion...
...Second, the liberals felt embarrassment at how rapidly they were joining the upper-class ranks...
...Actually, a Catholic background and education stand to facilitate, not hinder, financial and academic success...
...Most Catholics started out at the bottom of the social and economic ladder, and their climb to the upper rungs has been plagued with hard-ship, given the historical influence of anti-Catholic sentiment in American society...
...This would be Genghis Khan having at his disposal telegraphs, steamships, railways...
...But perhaps Greeley is laying the blame in the wrong place...
...With some few exceptions, Catholics are simply denied access to the upper levels of business, professional, and academic life...
...There is the Ukranian peasant who lectures a Jewish narodnik to forget his foolish egalitarianism and become a doctor...
...Accordingly, the Church's efficacy is measured in terms of the popular support accorded its programs...
...Homosexuals have been shuffled in and out of their closets...
...And Epstein would have done much better to admit that in its essential character, the struggle is not only familiar but entirely legitimate...
...Epstein's attempt to make it appear so is unavailing...
...Greeley's findings on America's Catholics—though still incomplete since they fail to include Spanish-speaking Catholics—are undoubtedly the most definitive to date, and they should prove to be devastating in confrontation with the prevailing myths of the poverty of the Catholic spirit...
...Have Catholics sacrificed their 32 The American Spectator December 1977 Catholicism to the pursuit of worldly ends...
...Politically, Catholics are more likely to support New Deal-type social reforms—Medicare, government intervention in the economy, income equalization—than are Protestants...
...Thus, while their jobs may pay well, most lack occupational prestige...
...German liberals may also have been embarrassed by their acceptance of bullying, but they learned to The American Spectator December 1977 33...
...Finishing closely behind, Italian and German Catholics rank second and third in terms of income...
...Ulam finds that all three succumbed to predictable if fatal temptations: the autocracy and the revolutionaries, to the idea that force could somehow substitute for programmatic political direction...
...Such achievement is, of course, a relatively recent development...
...In a sense, Greeley seems to see Catholicism largely as a vehicle for the maintenance of the well-being of Catholic ethnicity...
...The first was a sheepish awareness that if matters were left in their hands there would probably never be a revolution at all...
...But it is difficult to determine whether he succeeds or fails, since it is never really clear whether he is talking about Catholicism per se or just ethnicity...
...For Greeley, Catholics are the most widely misunderstood and misrepresented of American ethnic groups...
...It is an enormously entertaining book, both extremely funny and highly dramatic...
...As a whole, Catholics are second only to Jews in educational mobility...
...On the other hand, Greeley may be right, and the papal encyclical may represent a foolhardy attempt to return to an unenlightened past...
...Nevertheless, Catholics have clearly come a long way...
...Are Catholics any different from Protestant ethnics...
...Nixon's excesses did threaten our liberty, and in the end threatened his...
...Because of what Greeley finds to be a "cultural division of labor," Catholics are systematically excluded from key positions in society...
...Herzen was afraid (however implausible it may seem in retrospect) that Tsarism itself would become the new Khan...
...Yet the forces of enlightenment have somehow passed over one very important victim of prejudice and discrimination: the Roman Catholic...
...Nevertheless, one doubts that this kind of debate is truly meaningful within the context of Catholicism...
...ing forces: the "preposterously unreasonable" autocracy, the conspiratorial groups of madmen and fanatics, and the liberals of Russia's educated classes...
...the liberals, to a guilt-ridden sense that the revolutionaries were made of sterner stuff than they, and that their methods—in the name of the people, after all—were beyond reproach, even heroic...
...The political docility of the liberals, who let others do their work for them, was one thing...
...An excellent, almost effortless writer, Ulam is able throughout to make the most of low-comedy revolutionary shenanigans while communicating the palpable tragedy of this period...
...To be sure, Greeley might be able to use his social-scientific techniques to reach more "pragmatic" conclusions than the Vatican...
...That Nixon went too far is indisputable, but Epstein here evidences a view that imitation is the sincerest form of criticism, demonstrating as it does the wrongdoer's faults...
...But have they done so as Catholics, strictly speaking...
...This book would havebeen strengthened by a discussion, less directed to personality and politics and more attuned to the principled claims being made, of rivalry between the White House and the executive agencies...
...Their religion weighs upon them, making them political dinosaurs in the modern age and inhibiting their drive for educational and financial success...
...Greeley disagrees vehemently, and much of his book is devoted to countering this argument...
...Catholics are also considerably more successful than received opinion would suggest...
...The force of this famous observation went in two directions...
...There is a tradition in sociology that holds that Catholicism militates against success in mundane affairs because it lacks the ascetic activism and this-worldliness central to Protestantism...
...While Catholics have made vast gains in terms of educational and financial achievement, they have yet to be fully accepted...
...As Nelson Polsby has recently (October 1977) argued in these pages of some of Nixon's reorganization notions: "It would be wrong to suggest that these devices for limiting the power of government departments, agencies, and bureaus were in some sense illicit...
...But the Nixon administration's effort against drug abuse was no "coup" attempt, and Mr...
...The assassination deferred reform for a generation and permanently destroyed the regime's already shaky composure...
...of slavery and oppression supported by all the discoveries of technology and science...
...In this case it had roots in two kinds of guilt...
...Blacks, Chicanos, and that spurious minority, women, have all been liberated...
...Their acceptance of terror and revolutionary vengeance, rather than of steady integration and unpleasant compromises, was quite another...
...And Catholic Poles and Slays in northern cities tend to make more money, on the average, than Anglo-Protestants...
...What many of Greeley's critics find exasperating about his work is the ambiguous role which he assigns to religion, and it is often quite difficult to tell from his writings that Greeley the sociologist is also Father Greeley, the Roman Catholic priest...
...On a different note, we have the suspense of the plot to kill Alexander II, which succeeded on the very day he authorized reforms (about which he privately conceded, "I do not hide from myself that it is the first step toward a constitution...
...Most recently, the handicapped have earned media sympathy and support from federal coffers...
...Indeed, they are prone to have more sympathetic attitudes towards Jews, blacks, and other minorities than those groups have toward them...
...After all, it is just not Church policy to reach consensus by counting hands or by assessing costs and benefits...
...Meaningful dialogue with such alien types, we are often told, can only be initiated when their Catholicism is shelved in some distant corner...
...He speaks about a Catholic personality, but many of its defining characteristics—strong family ties, anti-rationalism, skepticism about progress, and support for the local, the particular, and the informal—would seem to be common to most ethnic groups...
...Epstein more appealing, it makes Agency of Fear a strangely contradictory and ultimately unpersuasive book...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
