This profoundly conservative book forms a powerful personal argument against the liberal dogma that “modernity” destroys religion. Much of the left, militantly secular as it is, has attempted to make it “self-evident” that no reasonable person can believe in God, let alone in a particular religious tradition and its revelation. “We all know” that religion is a dying vestige of a repudiated past. Andrew Greeley has challenged that dogma and affirmed the traditional life and way of the Roman Catholic Church. In his autobiography he tells with intellect and wit not only his own tale but also the story of the Church he has served.

A distinguished sociologist, Andrew Greeley in his Unsecular Man argued that in the world of modernism, modernization, and modernity, religion was not only not dying but was, in fact, entering a new age of centrality in human life and culture. In his autobiography, Greeley shows precisely how, in the condition of social change called modernization, as Roman Catholics moved from the status of poor and beleaguered immigrants to suburban affluence, they found new meaning and renewed faith in the Roman Catholic Church and faith. The story is told in personal terms, which makes the document all the more compelling. The message is for the entire world of letters and learning.

Let me translate Greeley’s picture into one I know better to show the universal relevance of his ideas. When, a generation ago, Jews began to abandon the second area of settlement after immigration—for example, Roxbury and Dorchester for Boston, or the Bronx and Brooklyn for New York—into the suburbs, Brookline, and even Newton (or Queens and Westchester and “the Island,” for New York), people assumed the Jewish community was breaking up. In fact, it was only changing; the deep roots of Jewish distinctiveness—what sociologists call “ethnicity”—were in no way weakened by uprooting and replanting. Jews built new synagogues and engaged new rabbis and entered a fresh chapter in the history of Judaism in America.

In Greeley’s book we learn how the equivalent process of movement to middle-class status and suburbs affected Irish Catholics in Chicago. We find, within the Catholic idiom, the same fears, the same concerns, and, above all, the same change in attitude. For just as Jews were going to college and coming home able to ask their own questions and read, and even write, their own books, without rabbis to tell them what to think and believe, so Roman Catholics were going to college—but staying Catholic. It meant, however, a different kind of Church, from one that had been formed to defend and exclude and apologize and explain.

The life of the faith was in Greeley’s time moving from one flowing from an authority on high to one reaching upward from a community of engagement and commitment. The new Church was to be one in which individual Catholics pursued, through intellect and fellowship, a new life of piety and faith, resting on conscience and character. It was not a Protestantized Catholicism. But it also was a Catholicism that had gone beyond the defensive attitudes of immigrants, persecuted and (quite reasonably) frightened, and also beyond the longstanding pugnacity of the Tridentine Church: the Church that rolled back the Protestant Reformation, corrected the errors of the Catholic Church of old, and regained its initiative and ascendancy in most of Christendom, from the seventh century to our own day.

Greeley himself both lived through and understood the meaning of that shift, which was initially feared by some as a mark of the weakening of the Church and the Roman Catholic community. In his scholarly work and theological writings, he drew attention to the deep roots of Roman Catholic faith, the permanence of Irish and other Roman Catholic ethnicity, as well as the secure foundations of the Church in the lives of its community. But he also argued that the important social changes required a different policy toward lay leadership and piety, a new kind of priest, and a different politics from one of authority focused upon the priesthood. Greeley further takes us to Rome during the Council and faces us with the issues which, in particular, related to his understanding of the sociology of Roman Catholic Christianity in the West.

By telling his own story, Greeley has made vivid and engaging the history of Roman Catholic Christianity in an age of unusual change. He may be compared to a kind of human seismograph, reporting an earthquake of 8.9 on his particular Richter scale. Noted, in his academic career, as a sophisticated sociologist with special gifts in conducting social surveys and interpreting their results, Greeley here shows a different sociology, more accessible to a broader audience of religion-scholars (as well as religious people). His rare combination of imagination and scholarly acumen marks him as a leading scholar of the history and sociology of Roman Catholic Christianity in this country, who through studying Roman Catholic Christianity teaches us much about all religions in America. His books sometimes reviewed by people who prefer to review him instead of his message, Greeley has had to endure a somewhat unfriendly reception within elements of Roman Catholic life, and he devotes a fair amount of attention to his struggle. But this is the work of a great soul and a great scholar, and as discourse vastly transcends the private and the political.

Greeley records the human meaning of the profound social changes he has observed in an account framed in part as his own story, in part as a sequence of stories of others, in part as reflection, poetry, theology, and allegory. A witty and compelling writer, Greeley’s versatility comes to the fore in this book, too, at times chatty, at times academic, at times profoundly moving. He closes with a parable that I found so intensely moving and true as to be almost painful. While, by some standards, Greeley really is not an exceptionally productive writer, whatever he accomplishes is marked by uniform vitality and intellectual power. In this book, he certainly presents himself as a writer of depth and of an exalted spirit. This autobiography will be read when some of his important novels have become theological classics, and his major works of scholarship, such as Unsecular Man, will have also run their course and become preserved in amber. Describing a religious world of enormous consequence to our understanding of what is happening to religion in America and the modern world, Greeley’s book forms a testament to taste, judgment, conscience, character, wit—but above all, courage and dignity.

Andrew Greeley is one of the masters of the modern social study of religion. He has thought deeply about what it means to be a Roman Catholic in a free society. His autobiography deserves a reading as an important spiritual document and statement—whether or not one likes the author or has even heard of him before.

 

[An Autobiography: Confessions of a Parish Priest by Andrew Greeley, New York: Simon & Schuster]