(Andrew Greeley, New York: Pocket Books, 1987)

The kindest thing you can say about a nation or church which cannot tolerate dissent is that it’s to be pitied. Charles Curran, the American theologian whose licence to teach was revoked by the Vatican wrote in his book Faithful Dissent: ‘Clarity, honesty and truth require that positions be labelled as dissent when they are such… On occasions the interpretive functions of the theologian will result in a dissenting position. A responsible theologian should never try to hide or dissimulate dissent. Dissent is dissent and not just dialogue.’

Problem is, as someone said about the Arian controversy, everyone behaves badly in contexts of dissent. Humans aren’t often both adversarial and nice.

Well, I like dissenters. I may not agree with them or appreciate their vitriolic style (Greeley is nothing if not vitriolic), but when a provocateur combines brilliance, naivety, sociological expertise, and egotism – and remains within the institution (the Catholic Church) on whose body he’s an irritating gadfly, I’m hooked.

I like Greeley. I like his novels (and wonder how a celibate priest knows so much about some things). I like his cross-pollination of ideas from sociology and education and theology and ecclesiology. I like his honesty, and particularly his prophetic unmasking of ecclesiastical humbug. He’s also indexable (I listed 71 quotable quotes or interesting ideas: my average for a 500-page volume worth reading would be about 20).

Greeley is often criticized as ‘never having had an unpublished thought’ (mostly, I suspect, either by those who have a vested interest in keeping institutions ossified or who’ve not had too many publishable thoughts themselves). It’s a pity he hasn’t enough ego-strength to dismiss jibes by petty critics. Nor is he a good psychologist: of course threatened people
won’t read your books (Greeley complains about that a dozen times). And if you’re setting yourself up as the American Catholic Church’s resident provocateur you’re going to cop a lot of flack from people who take their church-as-institution seriously. As a student of
human nature he should have expected that. So Greeley isn’t yet a saint: he was in the wrong queue when the virtue of modesty was handed out. Nor does he have much affinity with the poor: his critiques of liberation theology are lacking in compassion (so what’s new?).

But the book is worth $8-95 for two reasons alone: his beautiful delineations of the womanliness of God, and his explication of the reason (singular) for post-Vatican II American Catholics’ disenchantment with their church.

Rowland Croucher
2003

~~

Now ten years later: I’ve just finished reading his novel The Bishop Goes to University - an intriguing Whodunit? about the mystery surrounding the  assassination of a Russian Orthodox monk.

I won’t spoil it for you: but who would want to kill an expert on the practices and theology of Russia’s ‘Old Believers’? Well, it’s all part of an international intrigue involving the Vatican, and U.S. and Russian spy agencies.

You might enjoy the conversations academics have with each other; the machinations of the Roman Catholic Church; little bits of theological wisdom here and there, and an improbably romantic liaison… (But you won’t enjoy the repetitive use of the word ‘patently’).

OK. you asked for it: the question at the heart of this mystery: could someone be a Catholic priest and an Orthodox monk at the same time?

Enjoy!

Rowland Croucher                                                                                                                     July 2013

PS. Andrew Greeley passed away last month. See here .