A portrait of the priesthood

by Megan Marz

SojoMail 6-02-2005

A review of Priests: A Calling in Crisis, by Andrew Greeley. University of Chicago Press.

Though its focus is narrow, Andrew Greeley’s recent book Priests: A Calling in Crisis reaches a conclusion that’s widely applicable – a conclusion from which not only a church divided, but a country divided, ought to learn.

To help solve the myriad problems facing the Catholic Church in America, priests, Greeley writes, should stop wallowing in denial about those very problems, stop blaming them on superiors and subordinates, stop condescending to the laity, and “be quiet and listen. And listen. And listen.”

But before he concludes with that simple advice, the priest and sociology professor winds through 156 pages of statistics and analysis on the state of the Catholic priesthood in America. His book, which looks through the lens of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis of 2002, is largely based on three national surveys of priests taken over a span of 30 years. Greeley uses the data to support his thesis: The abuse scandal (and by extension many of the Church’s other problems) was caused not by celibacy, as many liberals argue, nor homosexuality, as many conservatives argue, but by a trenchant clerical culture that fosters “blind loyalty to the guys.”

“When the values of our fellow clergy create our only perspectives on the world,” Greeley writes, “when gossip about other priests is our principle subject for small talk, we are isolating ourselves – and dangerously so – from the rest of humankind.”

Which is not to say that isolation causes abuse. Rather, Greeley writes, the isolation causes denial of abuse: “Protestants, ‘non-Catholics,’ and the laity must not know about our drunks, our borderline personalities, our loafers, our slugs, our eccentrics, our womanizers, our strange ones that dote on little boys or little girls, and all the other men who somehow managed to make it to ordination. To keep this systematic denial effective, we sometimes have to blind ourselves to the obvious.”

And that blindness, that tendency to deny a problem rather than solve it, is what ultimately created the scandal in what Greeley calls the “Year of the Pedophile.”

That said, Greeley doesn’t think priests are exclusively to blame for the scandal. In his introduction, he takes a rhetorical shot at “those ideologues (of the right or the left) who provided raw meat for the feeding frenzy of 2002 without much solid evidence for their assertions.” Who were those ideologues? So-called experts who made the rounds on TV talk shows to boil a complex issue down to simplistic sound bites, taking sides in the abuse scandal as they do on almost every similarly complex issue.

Greeley paints a more clear-headed, albeit grayer, portrait of the priesthood with the results of the two Los Angeles Times surveys (1993 and 2002) and one survey taken in 1970 by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, where he is on staff. In addition to using the statistics to support his skewering of clerical culture, Greeley draws conclusions from the results that portray priests as less dysfunctional than they might seem after a perusal of the 2002 press coverage.

He reminds readers, for example, that most priests are not abusers. (A study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York found that 4 percent of American priests ministering between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of abuse). He also reveals that priests appear to be happy in their work: In the NORC study, 78 percent said they would choose to be priests again, while in the Times studies, 90 and 92 percent said they would make the same decision. In fact, he writes, priests are more satisfied in their work than doctors, lawyers, and Protestant ministers.

Priests don’t come close to Protestant ministers, though, when it comes to satisfying those they’re supposed to serve. Forty percent of Protestants say their clergy is excellent, compared with 20 percent of Catholics. Greeley argues that fewer Catholics approve of their ministers because those ministers are out of touch. “Lack of prayer, lack of responsibility, lack of education, materialism, secularism…are quick and easy answers that the beleaguered cleric tends to give [for the Church’s problems] …. Yet these clich ©s of clerical culture won’t do. They suggest that many, many priests have no idea of the spiritual needs and problems of the laity and are all too ready to push them into simple categories.”

Perhaps because he avoids such simple categories, Greeley doesn’t ever reconcile the positive and negative sides of his priestly portrayal. Such reconciliation would have been impossible in such a slim volume. But reconciliation isn’t the point. This book is less a comprehensive overview than a starting point for discussion about the future: a discussion that, like all serious discussions of our times, should include little simplification and a lot of listening. And listening.

Megan Marz is a freelance writer living in Chicago.