The Catholic Myth

...anti-Catholic...

...But Greeley has a second agenda as well, and he confesses it right at the start...

...But Greeley is close to being right when he says that there is an "elite notion that it is somehow reactionary for religious affiliation to influence politics...

...I will not try," he says, "to hide my anger at the hierarchy, the clergy, and the scholarship of the American Catholic church...

...By contrast, the "dialectical imagination" that characterizes Protestantism is colder, distant, individualistic-because it sees God as absent from the world...

...Don Wycliff Andrew Greeley's ostensible purpose in The Catholic Myth is to tell the "fascinating, wonderful, and slightly daffy story of American Catholicism since the end of the Second Vatican Council...

...In typically pugnacious fashion, he dares them to do so...

...He'd have been closer if he had said religious conviction instead of affiliation...

...His central argument is that "Catholics differ from other Americans in that their imaginations tend to be more 'sacramental,'" meaning that they are "more likely to imagine God as present in the world and the world as revelatory instead of bleak...

...But Greeley teases this poetic insight out to 309 pages and even develops it into a theory to explain a number of phenomena uncovered in his sociological investigations of American Catholicism...

...Catholics like the warm, loving, motherly symbolism it entails, as well as its communitarian implications...

...Experts in polling and statistics may find grounds to challenge Greeley's scholarly data...

...The most important of those phenomena is the continued loyalty of Catholics to their church, even as-Greeley says-they scorn its leadership and ignore its ukases, particularly that against artificial birth control in Humanae vitae...

...In Greeley's view, it covers a multitude of sins by blundering or venal incompetents, from bishops and cardinals to Harvard-educated Democratic party bigwigs (he would say bigots) who persist in neglecting the Catholic vote in presidential elections...

...In Greeley's view, this puzzle is explained by the "sacramental imagination...

...It's the sacramental imagination that makes Catholics Catholic and keeps them in the church...

...But any Catholic layperson can relate to some of his findings, like the importance to the laity of good preaching and the dearth of it in the church, or the seeming loss of identity and direction of so many priests...

...That's sad, because much of Greeley's substantive argument is attractive and important and ought not to be distracted from with such silliness...

...On one important point, however, I do possess a certain expertise...

...Others have asked the same question apropos of a more grave matter: The Times' s editorial stance on abortion and the church's opposition to it...

...His question was inspired by the paper's failure in 1988 to explore poll data that suggested a non-stereotypical liberalism among Catholics...

...It happens that, at this moment in American history, Catholics are the principal exponents of the opposite and, in my view, correct notion that religious conviction must seek to influence politics...

...Greeley's anger-at the hierarchy and the clergy, to be sure, but also at the "leadership elites" in academia and the news media (including my employer), at the "Harvard elite and those like them who run the national Democratic party," at "Catholic self-haters of the Commonweal variety," and at countless others-is expressed endlessly, and often viciously, throughout the book...

...It finally becomes tedious and suggestive almost of obsession...

...Gerard Manley Hopkins had the same thing in mind when he wrote: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God...

...It's not for me to convict or acquit the Times of such a charge...

...And it is the hierarchy, for whom Greeley has such scorn, who are leading in that effort and taking flak for it.ort and taking flak for it...

...No one can engage in three decades of serious study of American Catholicism and not be angry...

...In fact, it becomes too much of the story...

...Anger is part of the story, too," writes Greeley, "an essential part...

...He hopes thereby to demonstrate that the "Catholicism in crisis" paradigm that informs most discussion of the church in the popular media is wrong, that "while as an institution the Catholic church is in terrible condition, the Catholic community prospers-precisely because Catholics like being Catholic...

...Writing of the American political, media, and other elites and their treatment of Catholicism, Greeley asks in a footnote: "Is the New York Times newspaper...