Gandhi, Sheen, and Greeley

Three popular twentieth century male religious figures—Mohandas K. Gandhi,19 Fulton J. Sheen,20 and Andrew M. Greeley21—have written autobiographical accounts of their celibacy.

These three witnesses to their celibate calling share a significant commonality; they were all highly visible public figures. Gandhi’s testimony, however, is unique among the rare confessions of celibacy in literature. Examples include those of St. Augustine. But Gandhi reveals the process of his celibate discovery and development more clearly than any other religious writer.

Each of our three protagonists has been widely read; each testimony comes from an openly avowed practitioner of celibacy. Each man generates fascination by the tale of his life story and the celibacy he extols.

Autobiography makes special demands on any method of inquiry, especially when the spotlight is focused on celibacy and its necessary links to the sexuality and personality of the writer.

Of the three testimonies to the celibate vocation, Greeley’s is the most likely—and the most calculated—to engage contemporary American readers through its likable eccentricity. He employs a-matter-of-factness, and flatters his intended reader. He enjoys certain advantages in the freeness with which he can fashion his rhetoric, since he is not an official spokesperson for an institutional status quo.

Fulton Sheen, Greeley’s fellow Catholic, was constrained by his social position to employ “the prophetic voice” to express a predictable coda.

Gandhi has the disadvantage—or the mystique—of being from another culture and time. He was born a quarter of a century before Sheen, (and Coughlin) and had a uniquely popular reception horizon. He remains intriguing for his unapologetically unconventional thinking. Gandhi can in turn be infuriating, unpredictable, and—most powerfully—unromantically honest. Each of these three figures teaches us something idiosyncratic, and yet all expose some common underpinnings of celibate life.

Not surprisingly, Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth, as he termed the course of his life, expresses most clearly of our three authors the developmental process of achieving celibacy. The reader can discern the stages and vicissitudes of the general practice precisely because Gandhi gave a personal, rather than public, account of his experience. He took advantage of the complete honesty afforded him by his independence from having to pander to the prejudices of an expected readership. He was also free from the need to uphold the authority of any mundane institution.

Gandhi’s freedom from the normal social constraints on the public writer emerges from his position at the boundary of two radically different cultures. He revered both the British and Hindu traditions that had nurtured him. This reverence was crucial in making him such an unlikely yet powerful leader of the anti-colonial movement.

The awareness of conflicting influences also gave Gandhi the ability to admit to profoundly differing stages in his own development, and to document them with such accuracy of detail. In this autobiographical clarity, Gandhi expresses his freedom from the kind of institutional dogma imposed by Catholic sexual theory and teaching that accepts no subtlety or shading in its ideal of celibate practice—no developmental process—only knife-edge sharp obedience.

Many priests report that the example of some celibate man was a powerful element in the formation of their would-be celibate intention. Gandhi credited the influence of Raychandbhai as the predominant factor in his decision to observe brahmacharya (celibacy). Raychandbhai was a prominent poet who, though married, was evidently practicing celibacy.

It is noteworthy that Gandhi’s initial inspiration to become celibate was accompanied by a discussion of the relative value of a wife’s devotion versus that of a servant. Gandhi felt the devotion of a servant was “a thousand times more praiseworthy” than the devotion of a wife to her husband because an indissoluble bond demanded the wife’s devotion to her husband. Therefore, he considered a wife’s devotion as perfectly natural—expected. However, he felt that equal devotion between master and servant required a special effort to cultivate.

There is more to Gandhi’s discourse than at first meets the eye. Arguably, both forms of devotion are the result of a social “cultivation” stemming from class and gender oppression. There was, however, a two-pronged psychological significance in the distinction: Gandhi needed strength to break with both his wife and his idealization of marriage in order to take up the celibate life. Certainly, his enthusiasm—“a thousand times more praiseworthy”—reflects an attitude required to offset the sense of loss and grief—reminiscent of St. Augustine’s—that accompanied the double “separation” from wife and the sexual self required by the formation of the celibate intention.

The reader must be open, without prejudice, to consider the question that Gandhi’s—and to some extent Sheen’s—celibate decision gives rise: Does male celibate intention require the demotion or denigration of women to support its own resolve? 22

The second prong of Gandhi’s argument is also significant. Gandhi appeared indifferent to the Indian class distinction between master and servant, describing it with the same enthusiasm reserved for friendship between unconstrained individuals. This position contradicts that element in Gandhi’s Hindu culture that anthropologist Louis Dumont calls, “Homo Hierarchicus.” Still, it must be kept in mind that Gandhi was also the product of England and its culture—one where the importance of the master-servant relationship was a prominent sentimental motif of British literature.23

This master-servant motif is linked to a world of male-male bonding in literature where anti-sex and anti-female biases persist. Consider, for instance, the sexless, misogynist, and avuncular world of the Hobbits in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; it is dominated by the sentimental master-servant relationship of Frodo and Sam.

Erich Auerbach, in his essay “The Knight Sets Forth” observed the significance of the connection between male-male bonding, master-servant fidelity, and avuncular kinship in adventure genre on the one hand, and male celibacy in the “Grail Quest” genre of romantic literature and real spiritual vocation, on the other.24

Again without bias, the reader must carefully consider the relationship of celibacy to male-male bonding. It would be superficial to dismiss the question simply as a homosexual concern. Understanding the connections in these literary expressions have implications for understanding the celibate ideal, resistance to democratization, and women’s rights in both Western culture and the Church. What is culturally determined and what is inherent in the nature of the bonding?

From the time that Gandhi determined the personal importance of celibacy, he records his progress toward the celibate achievement that follows an authentic pattern of celibate development—awareness of capacity, knowledge of the process, practice, and commitment. Both before and after his formulation of intention, Gandhi’s awareness of his capacity for celibacy—that is, his capacity to live a life of service capable of balancing the deprivations of personal celibacy—expressed itself in a longing for some humanitarian work of a permanent nature. (Cf. A Secret World, 1990)

After his meeting with Raychandbhai, Gandhi decisively shifted his humanitarian work from his family cares toward community, serving as a nurse and ambulance corpsman. Gandhi vowed his celibacy five years after he began practicing it; the vow was crucial in establishing his commitment to the celibate life.

Gandhi’s greatest significance as a witness to celibacy is the frankness with which he treats the growing knowledge and experience of achieving celibate practice. He does not shy away from including accounts of his sexual lapses as he recounts his experiments with fasting and physical renunciation and their limits. He tells the tale of his changing, growing, appreciation of what it means to achieve celibacy.

Some observers—like George Orwell and some of Gandhi’s Hindu contemporaries interviewed by Erik Erikson—had reservations about the level of Gandhi’s achievement and integration of celibacy, in spite of the fact that Gandhi’s service of humanity speaks eloquently to his internal achievement. These critics felt that there was a bit of showmanship and dissimulation in his physical closeness to young virgins in his old age to prove his self-control. Orwell, like Dorothy Day, held that the label “saint”—so often applied to Gandhi—was a facile dismissal of a person’s message and a “thing human beings must avoid.”

A series of significant characteristics—along with service and the acceptance of all humanity—mark the achievement and integration of celibacy. Among these are a routine of prayer, vital intellectual interests, and a profound and living relationship with The Transcendent, all of which Gandhi definitely had. He certainly demonstrated good humor, tolerance, and a subtle wisdom in social and political matters. Apparently, Gandhi also achieved the humility so common to the integrated celibate—even a critic as severe as Orwell is loath to accuse him of lacking it.

Gandhi’s autobiography, however, confronts the reader with rigidity in the intimate character of the man; a failing easily overlooked before the inestimable accomplishment of his life of service. That inflexibility appears limited. But his area of greatest rigidity concerns exactly that arena in which the discipline and charism of celibacy is realized: the dynamics of human sexuality. His most dogmatic views dictated the proper sexual life of both the celibate and the non-celibate, and the puritanical interpretation of each reinforced that of the other. Some combination of his cultural heritage, which included the English Puritanism of his associate, the Reverend Mr. Hill, and his personal psycho-biological constitution, locked Gandhi into a sexual rigidity from which he seems to have never been able to free himself.

Even before his vocation, Gandhi was committed to an archaic model of human sexuality, one similar to that, which threatens to undermine the credibility of the sexual teachings of the contemporary Catholic Church. Gandhi—who had engaged prostitutes from the time he was thirteen—felt that a married couple should never have sex out of “lust,” but only to conceive progeny. He had contempt for the idea that sex was a necessary act like sleeping or eating, and felt that lust should be controlled at any cost.

To be sure, an archaic view of sexuality is at least as culturally and historically influenced as it is psychologically generated. Nevertheless, Gandhi was aware of alternatives; he had read about contraceptives and, considering Rev. Mr. Hill’s opposition, simply chose to reject them in favor of self-control. The necessity of using abstinence as the only form of birth control led Gandhi to his years of “unsuccessful strivings.” He rectified the process only by shifting to a commitment to a spiritual vocation and the vow of celibacy.

Gandhi spoke with heat and intensity about his struggle for sexual control: “There is no limit to the possibilities of renunciation.” He pursued celibacy with an uncompromising regimen of sensual renunciation and extreme fasting. The importance of fasting as a means of achieving celibacy has been well documented in the lives of early Christian hermits. The focus, however, is not merely the subjection of the senses but rather the life system and productivity that reinforce the celibacy.

Celibates like St. Paul or John Cassian, who have achieved an “ascetic” integration, do not demonstrate an imposition of their life solution on others, a situation one often observes in the fanatic or youthful enthusiast. There is a quiet discipline about the lives of integrated celibates and a consistently observed accompanying tolerance of others and their needs.

Significantly, the passion of Gandhi’s asceticism was matched by his intolerance—even contempt—for the non-celibate, an attitude precisely inimical to what can be expected from the integrated ascetic.

Worse still, Gandhi employed a rhetorical strategy similar to that of Fulton Sheen, by which the glory of the celibate ideal is established through a condescending comparison with the generic non-celibate that is frankly absurd. He taught that there was a profound dividing line between the celibate and the non-celibate that was clearly apparent, and that any resemblance between the two was an illusion. Although both had eyes and ears, the celibate uses his to see and hear the glory and praises of God. The non-celibate uses his for frivolity and ribaldry. The celibate stays up late to pray; the non-celibate fritters his time in useless amusement. Naturally, Gandhi extends his diatribe to a comparison with eating: the celibate to maintain the temple of the spirit, the other to gorge himself and “makes the sacred vessel a stinking gutter.” Gandhi maintained that the situation only worsens with time.

In his Elmer Gantry-like diatribe, Gandhi sweeps aside precisely the ground upon which celibate and non-celibate can come to understand and support one another—the ground of mutual respect.

Gandhi created a credibility gap with his rigidity on matters of sexuality; he exacerbated negative reactions and rejection of celibacy by his rhetorical dogmatism and intolerance. Many young people reject the spiritual values of the Catholic Church in much the same dynamic as Orwell rejected Gandhi.

Finding the form in which Gandhi declared celibate achievement to be one which excluded and denigrated Orwell’s own choices of marriage and human service, Orwell devised an oppositional pattern through which he in turn excluded celibacy and religion from his own moral universe, as well as from the realm of Eros, both intimate and communal.

Orwell felt that love and living, whether sexual or nonsexual, were tasks that demanded hard work and cause pain. He judged that “nonattachment” was an escape. He refused to argue the relative value of spiritual versus humanistic ideals. He concluded they were incompatible. The choice between God and Man was settled. He chose Man.25

This chain of argument, leading from the perception of intolerance and unreality in the “religious” position on sexuality to hostility toward religion altogether, is much the same as that found in the contemporary reactions of many young people. For them there is no realistic framework offered by a teaching that labels as sin any sexual activity outside marriage for the developing—or even mature—single person. In their dilemma many young people reject all religion.

It is precisely this link between celibacy and, by extension, spirituality, on the one hand, and an archaic anthropology, with its Puritanism and misogyny, on the other, that threatens the continuing relevance of the Catholic Church and religion today.

Hope relies on reconciling the Orwells of this world—those who follow their ethical and humanitarian vocation according to non-celibate or secular models—with the Gandhi’s—those who define their vocation in spiritual and celibate terms. Both can be enhanced by the achievement of the other as each seeks to penetrate and master the common reality that generated and continually nurtures them both—human sexuality.

Only through a shared perception and understanding of that sexuality can the two value-judgmental stances—which share so many humanitarian ideals—reach a position of mutual respect and even communion.

Within every great institution reside the seeds of its own destruction. For the Catholic Church the danger of potential demise is rooted with its power wedded to non-sex. The time bomb that has been ticking for the past century is its unresolved issues of human sexuality and religious celibacy.

The image of the priest and the presumption of celibacy—or the doubt of it—are intimately interwoven in public consciousness. In twentieth century United States, five Irish American priests cast radiance and shadows that created images far beyond their own persons.

Father Francis P. Duffy, a New York clergyman, volunteered in the U.S. Army as chaplain during the First World War. His consistent self-sacrifice and indifference to risking his life ministering to the men of his Irish American unit, the Fighting 69^th, gained him their unswerving devotion and, in time, nationwide fame. A statue of him stands in Duffy Square, just north of Times Square. His example proclaimed that Catholic priests could indeed be patriotic Americans.

Youth groups called the Fighting Sixty-Niners’ were organized to honor him in grade schools across the country up until the 1960s. The members dedicated themselves to “heroic purity”—sexual abstinence—using the sixth and ninth as monikers for the two commandments that forbid sexual activity. This movement did not prevail in that form past the sexual revolution of the 1970s—one that gave a very different interpretation to the term “sixty-nine.”

After he founded Boys Town in Nebraska in the 1917, Father Edward Flanagan won worldwide fame, admiration across all religious divides, and immense financial support for his work with homeless and wayward boys. His statement, “There is no such thing as a bad boy,” became a mantra for generations of youth workers.

The incident of a young boy loaded down with another youngster on his shoulders appearing at the door of Boys’ Town on a snowy night has been commemorated in bronze. The saying inscribed at the base of a statue on the campus of Boys’ Town—He ain’t heavy, Father. He’s my brother—worked its way into American folklore and even popular music. Father Flanagan reached the acme of popular attention when Spencer Tracy portrayed him in the 1938 movie Boys Town.

The actor Pat O‘Brien brought Father Duffy to similar fame in the successful 1939 movie, The Fighting 69^th. The statue commemorating Father Duffy’s selflessness still stands, and Father Flanagan’s Boys Town continues its work into the twenty-first century.

Three other American priests have achieved the status of media stardom on their own. In the 1930s, the Reverend Charles Coughlin used his mellifluous voice—“a voice made for promises”—to attract an audience of forty million enthralled listeners to his radio broadcasts. He was a priest who would be heard.

In the 1950s, Reverend-Monsignor-Bishop Fulton Sheen provided his viewers with a vision of priestly glamour, enabling him to outdraw Hollywood stars in the television ratings. His penetrating blue eyes have only been rivaled by the likes of Paul Newman. He was a priest who would be seen.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Father Andrew Greeley, the priest-novelist, created a unique amalgam of sex and mystery informed by Catholic concerns, ensuring his books a consistent place on the bestseller lists. He was a priest who would be read.

Though their messages have been very different, there is no doubt that all of these priests have had a considerable impact on the idea that priest equals celibacy. They sold the image not merely by what they said but by who they were. Some of their efforts extended from the Catholic Church to American society at large.

Father Coughlin made Americans aware that the Catholic Church indeed had a position on social issues. Bishop Sheen did much to legitimize the Church intellectually in the popular mind during a time of widespread scientism. And Father Greeley opened discussion of sexuality and celibacy, as well as questions about the nature and limits of church authority.

These very public priests reinforced the unexamined equation. Although the public unquestioningly presumed celibacy, in a very real sense, all these priests gave their followers permission to refine their understanding of “priest” and eventually opened the way for a more informed discussion of clerical humanity—sex and celibacy.

Father Duffy impressed the public that priests can be heroes, but men like any other soldier nonetheless. When heroics are exposed questions about the shadow side also arise, because not all priests match the standard set by the champion. Heroes in a group raise the question of the possibility of anti-heroes too.

Father Flanagan gave the priest a human heart, even though it was super-sized. His example raised the specter of human and tender relationships even beyond pastoral obligation. Bit by bit the human side of priests was unveiled. The sexual abuse of minors, especially boys, stands in stark and shocking contrast to the example of Flanagan.

Father Coughlin sanctioned the labor movement generally and legitimized social activism by clergy extending democratic dimension to the priesthood.

Bishop Sheen permitted intellectual inquiry into basic religious concerns; he encouraged rational exploration of religious issues.

Father Greeley encouraged Catholics to imagine erotically.

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INTRODUCTION: [APOSTLES OF CELIBACY] Selling an Idea—Foundations of a Crisis

The idea that defect, shadow, or other misfortune could ever cause the church to stand in need of restoration or renewal is hereby condemned as obviously absurd.  -  Pope Gregory XVI, 1832

The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is in a profound crisis. Its name is SEX. Its symptom is sexual abuse of minors by clergy. But its core is celibacy.

Understanding the dimensions of the present catastrophe in one of the world’s great religions is not simple. The conflict is not only conditioned to resist investigation by centuries of tradition, but is also elegantly bound up in an elaborate structure of secrecy and power.

A SYMPTOM

Hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the United States—five thousand named since 1950—have sexually abused minors.

Outrage over sexual abuse of minors by clergy in the beginning of the third millennium, especially in the English-speaking world, has not been limited to liberal or conservative elements either in the Church or the general public. Questions about clergy integrity are not limited to the offending clerics, but involve the Church hierarchy and its participation in covering up abuse by priests. Questions remain of just how high and how broad the conspiracy to conceal crimes goes.

Here I address why this symptom of corruption in the Catholic Church is so dangerous to the internal stability of the universal church.

The first question is: “How did wide ranging public indignation spring up, seemingly so fully matured after January 2002, in response to the Boston Globe’s investigative reports of abuse?” Excellent and powerful as this reporting indeed is, in itself it was not sufficient to destabilize an unconditioned populous—a national and world wide church—unprepared to accept the truth and gravity of a situation.

Make no mistake. Sexual abuse of minors by priests—men bound by a vocational requirement of perfect and perpetual chastity and presented to the public as sexually safe—is a major social and religious problem. It is criminal.

There is no doubt that for decades bishops and religious superiors have known about the abuse by priests, covered it up, transferred the offenders, intimidated the victims when they could, “bought their silence” when persuasion or intimidation failed. Volumes of court documents indicate that cardinals and bishops lied and conspired to keep immoral and criminal activity from the public.

The irony of the scandal of sexual abuse by priests and bishops is that secrecy was meant to save the Church from scandal.

My ethnographic research between 1960 and 1985 established a base line that 6 percent of Catholic priests involve themselves sexually with minors. (Cf. A Secret World, 1990. or Celibacy in Crisis, 2003)

In 1993 sociologist Father Andrew Greeley estimated that between 5 and 7 percent of Catholic priests abuse minors. The John Jay Report commissioned by the American Bishops concluded that 4 percent of priests from 1950 to 2002 had abused minors. The numbers run from 7.6 percent in Boston, 8.2 percent in New Hampshire, and in 1983 11.4 percent of the priest active in the Los Angeles Archdiocese were abuses and 75 percent of all parishes there had at least one abuser on its staff over the 50 year period studied.

Forget the polemics. Sexual abuse by priests is a significant problem.

Beyond the numbers, the atrocities of clergy sexual abuse against minors are the tip of an iceberg. Sexual abuse defines the symptom of an institution rocked to its very foundations, gasping for air and trying desperately to keep its head above water. Or less kindly, in the words of one bishop, “the institution to which I belong is rotten to its core.”

The second question is: Why has the impetus for an-as-yet-ill-defined Reformation surfaced now and primarily in the United States? After all sex is universal. Sexual offences of clerics and religious controversies are not new.

One reason for the current upheaval is that the critical mass of men and women abused by priests has grown to a point where the numbers of responsible priests ministering can no longer balance the number of offending priests. The best estimates state that each abusive priest has between ten and fifty victims. Father Greeley estimated victims in the hundreds of thousands.

Additionally, during the twentieth century Catholic priests became familiar and prominent on the American horizon. They no longer operated under the radar of public scrutiny.

In fact the Church sought an ever-higher public profile to match its growing influence. These factors conditioned the American public to consider priests through bifurcated lenses. First, priests were accorded greater respect, and even reverence, than ever before in “Protestant America.” But also, priests were judged in an ever more realistic light—against American democratic principles.

Cinema is an example of one element that prepared the American public to think the (Catholic) unthinkable—priests can be sexually active. Mixed with the stories of strong priests—who fight sin and evil, stand up to oppressors, protect the poor, and sacrifice themselves for their flock, celibate all—were vignettes of less ideal clergy. Movies touched, however deftly, on problems of clerical immaturity, masturbation, homosexuality, sexual abuse of women, or conflicted loving relationships, abuse of minors and abortion.

The Movies—that particular American medium that creates and reflects an “image”—featured priests at first idealistically under the strict eye of Catholic censors. More recent portrayals have intimated at a spectrum beyond the heroic.

Movie-goers witnessed the evolution of the Catholic priest’s public image from immigrant protector and leader of small ethnic communities—predominantly Irish or Italian—to super stars and idols for millions to less honorable and more pedestrian souls.

Mid-century movies portrayed priests as strong, masculine champions of the poor, with no hint of sexual feelings or awareness. The roster of actors portraying priests contributed to an image of power and sensual appeal without sexuality: Spencer Tracy as Father Tim in San Francisco (1936.) Pat O’Brien as Father Jerry in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938.) Karl Maldin as Father Barry in On the Waterfront (1954.) Anthony Quinn as the saintly Pope-to-be Kiril Lakota in Shoes of the Fisherman (1968.) Robert DeNiro as Father Des Spellacy in True Confessions (1981.)

Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley in Going My Way (1944), and Frank Sinatra as the poor, frail pastor in Miracle of the Bells (1948) neutered and sentimentalized the image of the priest, and in the words of Garry Wills, “celebrated all the Church’s faults as if they were virtues.”

Movies in the last three decades of the twentieth century hinted at individual priests grappling with sexual problems of conscience, including abortion (The Cardinal, 1963.)

Minor clergy characters began to appear as a well meaning but ineffectual pastors (M*A*S*H, 1970) or a “childish masturbator” (The End, 1978.) A starkly negative view of a priest emerged as a manipulator and frankly sexual sinner (Monsignor, 1982)

The issue of sexual abuse and clergy was hinted at in two movies both released in 1995: Sleepers, shows the struggle of a priest who had himself been sexually abused as a boy, and Primal Fear peeks at an Archbishop who is an abuser of young boys and girls.

The Priest a 1994 an English made-for-TV movie that made it to big screen theaters in the States, sympathetically portrayed two priests, one heterosexual and one homosexual, both sexually active.

Documentary films recording the crisis have proliferated. The degree of knowledge and awareness of priest and bishop abuse of minors is so prominent that comedians, situation comedies, and editorial cartoons are common-place. Some

In spite of contradictions during this half-century transition, church officials reinforced the equation that priest equals celibate. An official spokesperson for the American bishops asserted on television as late as January 2001that “99 and 44/100 % of priests are celibate.” The average American neither challenged the statement nor was convinced by the hyperbole.

A third element prepared the American public to face the problem of sexual abuse of minors. From the 1960s on legislation defending the rights of children proliferated.

Reporting laws required health professionals, teachers and others to report suspected child abuse to State social services. Federal legislation put the full weight of its pocketbook behind the movement in 1974 when it refused funds to States that lacked reporting laws.

In 1994 in Rome a long-time staff member of one of the Congregations of the Vatican stated: “The Vatican cannot understand why the American Bishops can’t control the courts and the media better” in response to the question, “Why has Rome not helped the US bishops in the sex abuse crisis?”

The American hierarchy, indeed, has desperately tried to control the courts and the media—and still do to a degree. Coordinated efforts from the central offices of bishops in Washington D.C. aimed a counter attack in the 1990s on any news story about priests abusing minors. They dismissed all reports—“a smear campaign,” “anti-Catholic, anti-church, anti-priest” or “biased reporting.” Even Vatican spokesmen supported the thesis that there was, in fact, no crisis, simply a media driven attempt to exploit and sensationalize isolated misbehavior by a “few bad apples.”

These church efforts failed finally because court documentation and the media forces, led by the Boston Globe’s reports beginning on January 6^th, 2002, tipped the balance. A readied public became an informed public. Those who were reluctant to believe the worst were roused to anger—outraged at the deception by their leaders who knew of abuse and conspired to conceal it. Lay people—along with the civil authorities—demanded an accounting.

Lawyers representing the Church fight furiously to exonerate abusing priests and justify the involvement of bishops and dioceses in the crisis. Statutes of Limitation have saved hundreds of priests—but not all—from serving jail time. Civil suites have proliferated beyond count.

THE UNITED States has a highly refined tort system that has made civil litigation more possible than in European countries. High profile, high stakes jury awards and cash settlements in favor of victims sobered church officials—thirty-two-and-a-half million (119.6 million jury award) for eleven victims in Dallas, Texas (1997); seven-and-a-half million payout (32 million jury award) for two victims in Stockton, California (1998); five million plus payment to one victim in Los Angeles/Orange (2001). All of these settlements were awarded prior to January 2002. Since then several dioceses have made group settlements—Orange County, California, 100 million, Boston, 85 million, Louisville, Kentucky, 25.7 million and many others.

Awareness of the depth of the crisis evolved slowly. But even the highest church authorities now relinquish some measure of denial as cardinals and bishops are no longer immune from depositions and court appearances. Previously unheard of in American history until this time, cardinals and bishops suffered the indignity of becoming targets of Grand Jury investigations.

The crisis is not simply abuse of minors. It involves three distinct elements of concern: sex, money and loss of credibility in moral authority. These storm clouds on the clerical horizon were harbingers of the massive forces that combine—like a Midwest tornado—to threaten the very foundations of the church’s sexual assumptions.

Beyond the symptom of sexual abuse by clergy is the threat to the problematic equation—on which all of the church’s reasoning about sexual behavior rests—that “priest equals celibacy.” When that myth dissipates the whole sexual structure of Catholic teaching about sex falls like a house of cards.

A PROBLEMATIC EQUATION

Central to my understanding of the present crisis is the disintegration of the myth that priest and celibacy are an identical and inseparable reality.

Two questions have to be addressed: What are the core constructs and main factors that laid the foundations for the climate of crisis and reformation? And What does religious celibacy that affects only clerics, have to do with the disruption of the faith and confidence of millions of faithful who practice their religion for the most part within marriage?

Three super star American priests of the twentieth century sold the priest-celibate image to millions of Americans at the same time as they conditioned the Catholic faithful for Reformation.

Father Charles E. Coughlin, his celibacy unquestioned in the public mind, championed the link between religion, social justice, and democracy. In spite of his obnoxious anti-Semitism—an authentic echo of the traditional Catholic teaching of the time—he gave the average Catholic a voice—the courage to speak up and an expectation to be heard.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen charmed a nation with his radio and television presentations. Doctrinally orthodox, especially in sexual matters like birth control, he, nonetheless, encouraged Catholics to think for themselves.

Father Andrew M. Greeley has been the single most powerful clerical force preparing for a Reformation by forming a bridge from mythical clerical stereotypes to penetrating analysis of hierarchical figures. No American priest has been more influential than Greeley in encouraging Catholics to confront sexuality and the church hierarchy.

Never shy about addressing church problems or problematic churchmen, Greeley has been a consistent critic of bishops. He has called them to account for their inadequacies, intellectual and spiritual limitations, and failures. Since 1985 he attacked the problem of sexual abuse by priests, and chided the bishops for dragging their feet and their cover up of the problem.

Greeley is himself a champion of clerical celibacy at the same time he introduced a generation of Catholics to fictional churchmen—cardinals and Vatican officials—who were believable and sexually active. Although other writers have dealt with the same subjects, Greeley’s stature as a priest and sociologist added a dimension of authenticity.

The practice of clerical celibacy remains largely ill defined and unexamined in practical terms.

Celibacy has long been the Sacred Cow of the Catholic Church. Supposedly irrefutable, it remains unquestionable and unexamined by church standards. Only idealistic reflections or arcane reaffirming and defensive treatises are tolerated and considered authentic.

In spite of the monolithic defense of the law of clerical celibacy by the Catholic Church the very word has lacked sufficient definition and distinction to make meaningful dialogue possible.

Is celibacy a religious ideal? Or is it an image? Is it a vow or promise? Is it a regulation necessary for ordination to the clerical office? Is it a state of non-marriage or singleness whether on not one is sexually abstinent? Is it simply a situation of sexual abstinence in or outside of marriage—for an indeterminate amount of time? Is celibacy a life adjustment? Is a celibate one who has made a promise of sexual abstinence regardless of his sexual activity? Does a man qualify as a celibate merely by his acceptance into a group that demands a claim of celibacy but not necessarily a practice for inclusion in its ranks?

The deficiency of an adequate vocabulary of celibacy has rendered a great disservice to the practice, process, and achievement of an important human resource, because it has relegated it to the realm of magic (mystery) and incomprehension rather than reality.

And what of the culture of celibacy? For instance, if every lawyer in the United States, in order to practice his profession and receive its benefits and status, were required to be male and unmarried, committed to perpetual and perfect chastity would it change the legal profession? Would it change the culture of law?

That question is a “no brainer” when applied to the legal profession. But the reality of the social significance is mostly ignored when one considers the Roman Catholic priesthood. But clerical celibacy does constitute a culture, a fraternity, social standing, an ethos, with ethical expectations and a mode of operation inherently wedded to secrecy. It is a culture with practical world-wide repercussions.

More critically, Celibacy is a system. This system—with its celibate/sexual agenda—is the true vortex of the current monumental and epic crisis of the Catholic Church. Clergy sexual abuse of minors—the topic in 2002 that riveted the attention of a nation and shook the foundation of a centuries old religion—is merely the symptom of a far deeper and wide ranging problem in the system—its teaching and practice.

The Celibate/Sexual agenda of the Roman Catholic Church includes the questions of: masturbation; pre-marital sexual activity; sexual activity after the death of a spouse or post divorce; contraception; the homosexualities;. abortion; the requirement of non-marriage, perfect and perpetual chastity for ordination to the priesthood; a married priesthood; ordination of women; and the appointment of bishops.

Those who claim that these issues are completely settled and require no dialogue only intensify the crisis of confidence in the authority of the church and expose it to ever-greater disdain for its hypocrisy.

It is precisely the public glimpse into the hypocrisy of the secret celibate system revealed in the priest sexual abuse issue that has inspired an unprecedented degree of rage against the hierarchy of the church and mobilized historic demands for accountability, transparency and reform.

This book explores the reality of religious celibacy and the secret system of which it is a part. It contributes to a deeper understanding celibacy and to the development of a more adequate vocabulary for discourse.

SOURCES FOR DIALOGUE:

CELIBACY IN LITERATURE AND LIFE

In part one I offer a reflection on the life work of three priests, Charles E. Coughlin, Fulton J. Sheen and Andrew M. Greeley and a critical analysis of the autobiographical accounts of their celibacy by the latter two priests. Each has had a tremendous influence on the development of the twentieth century American image of priests and celibacy. Another chapter of this book offers a similar analysis of the autobiographical account of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Finally other chapters explore the view of clerical celibacy/sexuality evidenced in novels by E. L. Voinich, Ignazio Silone, James Joyce, James Farrell, Graham Greene, J. F. Powers, Georges Bernanos, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis.

The reality of celibacy—with all its powerful contributions to culture as well as its aberrations and perversions—is a neglected area of the study of human sexuality. It is a far more vital area of life and culture than most people think.

Years of exploration have convinced me that celibacy is not just an incidental facet of one religion. Its image—its face—is not just another face in the crowd. Like the face of Helen that “launched a thousand ships” it has been capable of instigating reformations in the past and still has the potential to ignite revolutions.

A Reformation is upon us and its name is the sexual/celibate system of the Roman Catholic Church. Celibacy’s portrait is painted in literature and its history written boldly in the lives of priests. Let us explore.

I am not posting here the sequence of the material as it will be presented in final form.

Two research assistants have been indispensable to this 15-year effort.

The representation of defilement dwells in the half-light of a quasi-physical infection that points toward a quasi-moral unworthiness. - Paul Ricoeur

In 1930, Father Charles Coughlin was the voice of the Catholic Church for many American families. Father Andrew Greeley records a warm memory from his childhood home: Sunday dinners when his family was eating pot roast and noodles and listening to Father Charles Coughlin or Monsignor Fulton Sheen on the radio. He could not have imagined at that moment that someday he would join them as a star whose name would be widely recognized and whose ideas would be discussed around many American dinner tables.

In truth, Coughlin was not a personal champion of celibacy—his practice has been severely compromised by history—but that made no difference to his public portrayal and reception. He was a priest. In the mind of his public he had to be celibate.

Father Charles Edward Coughlin’s fame was real in the 1930s; his tarnished reputation endures. His message of social justice and legacy of organizing labor have been mixed with defilement. His celibate practice was imperfect. Unlike Sheen and Greeley, who both have written about celibacy in their autobiographies, traces of Coughlin’s sexual/celibate adjustment have been pieced together from his school history, court records, and—most prominently—from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation along with observations from his friend and parishioner, psychoanalyst Leo H. Bartemeier.

THE TIMES

In 1928 there were few, if any, prominent voices urging social justice or seeking vital social reforms. The novels of Upton Sinclair and Jack London that had previously popularized the struggles of the poor, were replaced by writers who preached the doctrine that business should be left alone by government so that the forces of the market could work.¹

Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, summarized the political consensus of the day in words that sound eerily timely in the early twenty-first century:

“The budget must be balanced annually, whatever the cost to the economy; the gold standard was sacred and must be preserved at all costs; socialism was the nation’s greatest menace, and ‘free enterprise,’ if left alone, would provide jobs for everyone…And finally, of course, business should run the country.²”

The loudest voices in the 1920s belonged to advertising, public relations, and boosterism. Successful writers like Ernest Elmo Calkins proclaimed that business was the world’s greatest benefactor, and columnist Walter Lippmann agreed:

“…the more or less unconscious and unplanned activities of businessmen are for once more novel, more daring, and in a sense more revolutionary than the theories of the progressives.³”

A Horatio Alger mentality prevailed, in which the businessman emerged as the hero of the age; “The mood of the times stressed individualism.” Collective bargaining was relegated to the trash bin; it was simply un-American. The outlook of the working class was that a man got ahead by himself and not by joining unions.⁴

Frederick Lewis Allen described the atmosphere where chauffeurs, valets, nurses, cattlemen, grocers, motormen, plumbers, seamstresses, and speakeasy waiters were playing the stock market and listening to radios to follow their investments. When workers owned shares of stock, they preferred to think of themselves as businessmen.⁵ The realist novelists John Dos Passos and James T Farrell wrote about ordinary people, plasterers, painters, and mechanics, dabbling in the stock market and quoting pamphleteers on salesmanship and positive thinking. As long as the prosperity of the 1920s held, the lack of a voice for workers and social justice was not keenly felt.⁶

After the stock market crashed on October 23, 1929, the attitude and atmosphere in America changed dramatically. The ordinary people who had bought shares of stock on margin were sold out—and so were those who had banked their money. The Bank of United States, for example, which catered to poor immigrants, engaged in speculation; when the market collapsed, the bank’s officers passed their losses on to the depositors. It folded in the middle of the night on December 11, 1930.

Moreover, between 1929 and 1932, almost six thousand other banks closed, costing mostly working-or middle-class depositors, almost three billion dollars. Retail sales fell, merchants went bankrupt, sales and production workers were laid off in increasing numbers. One insurance company reported that 23.8 percent of its policyholders in forty-six large cities were unemployed in December 1930. In spite of the fact that 76.2 percent of workers remained employed, the spectacle of one million people riding the rods and living in “Hoovervilles” caused deep anxiety in a people who had expected prosperity to be a permanent part of life. Even in 1938 more than ten million people nationwide, or 19 percent of the population, were still unemployed.⁷

Such were the times and the circumstances in which Father Coughlin was to raise his voice.

THE MAN

Charles Edward Coughlin was born October 25, 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, the son of a third generation Irish-American family who had originally settled in Indiana. When Charles was a child his father, Thomas, worked as a sexton at St. Mary’s Cathedral. His mother, Amelia Mahoney, had herself dreamed of becoming a nun; she dedicated her son to the priesthood even before his birth. Charles grew up literally breathing the atmosphere of the Catholic Church. Coughlin seems to have chosen the priesthood as a career early in life and, like Greeley, never looked back.

Amelia first dressed her son like a girl and allowed his hair to grow in long curls; she even sent him to his first day of school in a kilt. Whatever the mother’s motivation in cross-gender dressing—Ernest Hemmingway was subjected to similar treatment—it did little to curb the young Coughlin’s natural aggression. There are accounts of him roughhousing with his friends, yelling loudly, and ripping his clothes in minor scuffles in the streets. Distinct from Sheen or Greeley, Coughlin was a natural athlete; his natural aggression found an outlet in rugged sports—rugby, football, and baseball.⁸

After grammar school at St. Mary’s, Coughlin attended St. Michael’s College in Toronto. This was a minor seminary—a boarding high school—that prepared students for the priesthood. Like Greeley and Sheen, he proved himself an outstanding student; he studied public speaking and, like Sheen, excelled on the debate team. He capped his high school career as president of his class and starting fullback on the varsity rugby team.

After graduation, Coughlin enrolled in St. Basil’s Seminary. Priests of the order of St. Basil the Great—known for scholarship—conducted St. Michael’s and St. Basil’s. Coughlin joined this religious group and was ordained a priest on June 29, l916. After ordination until 1923, he taught English, history, Greek, and coached football and drama at Assumption College near Windsor, Ontario.

Although Coughlin continued his excellent academic performance during his theological studies his training with the Basilian’s had been interrupted by a brief and unexplained exile for a year to one of the Order’s high schools in Waco, Texas, where he taught philosophy and coached baseball. Another piece of the mystery of Coughlin’s career was that his relationship with the Basilian’s was completely severed in 1923 when he joined the Archdiocese of Detroit.

As a diocesan priest Coughlin served as assistant to pastors, first in Kalamazoo and later in downtown Detroit. He was appointed pastor of the small farming community of North Branch where he served for only six months. In 1926, he was assigned to Royal Oak, Michigan. At the time, Royal Oak was a small and poor suburb of Detroit. An additional obstacle to the development of a new parish was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, with its nativist and anti-Catholic agenda, which had an active chapter in the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, one of Charles Coughlin’s first acts on his arrival was to build a new church. This new structure—the Shrine of the Little Flower—with a seating capacity of six hundred, was much too large for the thirty-two Catholic families in the parish. But Coughlin led his parish to growth and prosperity even in the direst days of the Depression. He not only filled the pews and paid for his first church, but built a larger, architecturally notable round church with the altar situated in the center. Coughlin remained in Royal Oak for fifty-three years until his death on October 27, 1979.

All this would constitute an unremarkable biography of a suburban parish priest were it not for the extraordinary power, influence, and, ultimately, the notoriety Coughlin achieved on the national scene by way of his radio ministry.

THE RADIO PRIEST

On October 17, 1926, Coughlin began a Sunday afternoon radio broadcast, “The Golden Hour of the Little Flower,” apparently to help finance his new parish. And he reaped almost immediate results. Even in the first weeks after Coughlin’s broadcasts began, people started to flock to his parish masses; mail was sent to him—in the first years by the hundreds and increasingly by the thousands each week. Most of the letters contained small contributions.⁹ By 1930 he had begun broadcasting over the CBS network nationwide. His reputation spread, the mail sacks multiplied, and the contributions kept coming in.

Part of the key to Coughlin’s radio success was his voice. It was a deep voice that he could modulate into higher registers for effect. Coughlin would frequently manipulate his trace of an Irish brogue to add intimacy, warmth, and color. Andrew Greeley often employed a parallel technique in his later writings.

One writer who listened regularly to Coughlin described, “a voice of such mellow richness, such manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and integrating charm, that anyone turning past it on the radio dial almost automatically turned to hear it again…without doubt one of the great speaking voices of the twentieth century…It was a voice made for promises.”¹⁰

This voice could be heard regularly on radios throughout most or all the nation from 1926 until the end of 1940. His message, however, in the decade of the 1930s transmogrified from that of a kindly pastor expounding religious or biblical themes, often intended for children, into that of a shrill anti-Semitic demagogue and Nazi sympathizer. Although even his early broadcasts took an occasional shot at the Ku Klux Klan or at the perpetual enemies of Catholic sexual teaching—the proponents of birth control and abortion—Coughlin’s voice was pastoral, nonpolitical, and non-controversial.

All that would change with his January 12, 1930 broadcast—a stinging denunciation of Communism.¹¹ From this time on, the topics of his programs took a social and political direction.

The reasons for the shift? By this time, Coughlin had achieved acceptance, even wide popularity and a degree of financial success. His mail-box-parish drew comments and support from all parts of the country. People shared their plight and he listened. Men in important positions in the church and business—for instance his superior Bishop Gallagher and Henry Ford—began to pay court and listen to the new media celebrity.

It would be unfair to assume that, at this stage of his career, vanity alone emboldened Coughlin to speak out on political and economic issues. He had some genuine concerns for the weakened and vulnerable position of ordinary workers; he had an understanding of social encyclicals and Catholic teaching on the rights of the working class; he had the disposition of an activist; and he now had the power base.

In 1930 Coughlin knew that a large segment of the American public was disenchanted with the language of business, deprived of the language of trade unionism, and unwilling to adopt the language of Communism. He was determined to speak for them in language everyone could understand. He would lend them his voice. Eventually, some forty million Americans would listen.¹²

Although Coughlin’s political message was vague at first and his focus initially blurred, he did zero in on the temper of the times. He preached that the real reason for concern was not the failure of business confidence but human suffering: the suffering of his listeners’ unemployment, deprivation, and dispossession.

The Depression was not just a slump in the market, “but a problem deeply rooted in the economic system.” He hinted that the solution, “lay in a concerted effort to redefine the structure and goals of American society at home.”¹³ In his early political broadcasts he lamented the economic condition of the country—millions of homes in America without adequate water, plumbing, electricity, heat—but he did not propose an alternative.

Even in his exploratory attempts to help his audience find some understanding of their dilemmas and define solutions for them, Coughlin generated emotion against an ever-widening circle of enemies. Communists—of the Bolshevik, intellectual, Jewish variety—were a frequent early target. The Left spoke for the most hopeless in America, for displaced “Okies” and black people, for immigrants and the starving. The Communist Party in particular, proved tremendously attractive, not only to these classes, but to many artists and intellectuals. An editorial in “The New Republic” said that the Communist party:

“Can offer an end to the desperate feeling of solitude and uniqueness that has been oppressing artists for the last two centuries, the feeling that has reduced some of the best of them to silence and futility and the weaker ones to insanity or suicide. It can offer instead a sense of comradeship and participation in an historical process vastly larger than the individual.”¹⁴

BEYOND PASTORAL CONCERN

Coughlin’s attacks on Bolshevism were political and economic, in contrast to Sheen’s attacks on Cold War Communism that the latter saw as a spiritual enemy of freedom. Both garnered popular support from their sympathizers. The greatest numbers of anxious employed were terrified of Communism, which they associated with the violent overthrow of the government, to be followed by the confiscation of private property, “race mixing,” atheism, free love, and the destruction of the family.

Birth control was a consistent object of Coughlin’s attacks; but since there were few effective methods in the decade of the thirties that subject was tolerated as appropriately Catholic and did not raise great controversy.

Negative reactions and controversy erupted immediately when Coughlin began to attack the power system—bankers, businessmen, international financiers, and American capitalism generally. He blamed the economic power brokers for the social plight of the poor. Wall Street was the villain.

In order to help his listeners organize the contradictory and fragmented data that swirled around them, Coughlin constructed a narrative to make sense of their world.

World War I served Coughlin as a convenient end point. That traumatic experience saw millions of Americans under arms for the first time in fifty years—more than a hundred thousand of them died, and two hundred thousand were wounded, gassed, or shell-shocked. Moreover, the war stimulated enormous changes in society, including overproduction of goods the change in the status of women, and the place of racial minorities in the work force. Coughlin’s choice of World War I as a starting point for the economic troubles of the 1930s thus makes good rhetorical sense.

With moral indignation Coughlin broadened the scope of his inquiry into the causes of the depression to include underlying conditions of class division and distribution of wealth. Coughlin was able to steal some of the Communists’ thunder by first citing—and then denying—the reality of government overproduction to supply goods for Europe’s war as a cause of Americans unemployment. His references to Wall Street bankers and foreign interests are clear harbingers of the scapegoating that would soon poison Coughlin’s voice.

He proposed a corporatist economic program, in which social classes are maintained, including a proprietary class, but in which everyone is guaranteed a slice of the pie. Coughlin attempted to satisfy both sides: the capitalists, by guaranteeing a right of ownership, and the workers, by guaranteeing public control over wages, working conditions, and benefits. Coughlin’s words thus offer something to everyone at a minimal cost.

While Coughlin’s political economy was deficient, his demagoguery was masterful. Without a doubt Coughlin was having a political impact. He was an important factor in the first presidential election of Roosevelt and in rallying support for the New Deal. He was a principal in the formation of the United Auto Workers and influential in recruiting their membership. He taught and propagated the significant Catholic social teaching on justice, property and the rights of workers, promulgated in the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum), and Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno). Coughlin was not just a parish pastor; he was a priest-social-activist—and he was a star.

By 1934 Coughlin was a power broker: He had been a house guest at Campobello before the presidential election; received a personal invitation to FDR’s inauguration; could attract as many as 20,000 people to a rally at New York’s Hippodrome; and inspire his followers to inundate the White House with letters. Coughlin also took credit for the heavy turnout in urban Catholic areas in the November 1932 elections. Ten U.S. Senators and seventy-five Congressmen petitioned Roosevelt to appoint Coughlin an advisor to an economic conference in London.¹⁵

But Coughlin was not happy with the reforms of the political system. He was disappointed and angry at what he considered a personal betrayal and a series of rebuffs from FDR.

Coughlin’s attacks on his “enemies” became more frequent, direct, and shrill. His violence always tended to be directed against certain well-defined groups: Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, African Americans, bankers and financiers, the British government, the Roosevelt administration, and—especially—the Jews.

Coughlin’s choice of these groups appears puzzling a first glance: he attacked both the Klan and African Americans, both financiers and Communists. And “Jews” included, in the 1930s, both Lord Rothschild and Leon Trotsky. Coughlin’s social and economic program cannot be defended as the work of some kind of “radical moderate,” steering a middle course between rapacious bankers and wild-eyed Bolsheviks, between vicious Klansmen and pushy Negroes. Fascism is not a middle ground between capitalism and Communism, between race-hatred and race mixing. Coughlin was not walking a middle ground between extremes. His star was out of orbit.

SOCIAL ORGANIZER

On November 11, 1934, Coughlin proposed the formation of the National Union for Social Justice. This date not only marked a definitive break with FDR and the New Deal, it marked a bid for greater power and a voice of command. This new phase ushered in an escalation of anti-Semitic attacks and mobilized the formation of a Third Party to post a presidential candidate in the 1936 election. Coughlin blatantly endorsed pro-Nazi propaganda, even plagiarizing speeches of Joseph Goebbels.

Coughlin’s mellow voice became increasingly more strident in its political criticism and demands for its own brand of economic reforms. His National Union began to publish a journal, Social Justice, which was circulated until 1942. It would expand his sphere of pronouncements beyond the radio. The movement and the journal expounded his theories and organized cells to discuss social issues and promote activism. Coughlin’s voice still had power, but it was becoming more disaffecting and less winning.¹⁶

Coughlin’s tone turned bitter as his persona transformed from Presidential advisor and New deal promoter to demagogue. Coughlin’s support and followers decreased in proportion to his exaggerated attacks and criticisms of the President. The caliber and quality of Coughlin’s supporters also shifted dramatically from his first distressed, but hopeful radio audience. They now became a rabble.

In mid-1938 Social Justice announced the formation of the “Christian Front.” This amounted to groups of followers who held Chapter meetings, drank late into the night, praised Coughlin, berated the English, cursed the Jews, and ridiculed FDR.¹⁷ The head of the Anti-Defamation League reported that many Jewish people were beaten by Christian Front members who screamed that they were, “Father Coughlin’s Brownshirts.”¹⁸

There is no doubt that Coughlin provided the ideological and inspirational foundation for the Christian Front, in spite of the fact that an FBI investigation into a 1940 armed conspiracy attempt by a New York chapter could not prove Coughlin’s direct involvement.

Coughlin, protected by his priesthood, could play it both ways. He could orchestrate mass demonstrations without appearing to have actual responsibility for any hateful out come. A vignette from a Farrell novel serves a more accurate description of his modus operandi than any journalistic account. The scene is a rally; the priest speaks:

“They didn’t do the pick and shovel work to make America what it is today.  Oh no, not they!”

The speaker gets an audience reaction. As his sarcastic tone increases the audience becomes more attentive and the speaker continues: “It was the Christian who did the pick and shovel work to build America!” the speaker yelled, accompanying his words with flourishing gestures. The audience roared in agreement. As the applause died down, a stout woman with a pudgy face yelled in a loud voice: “Name them!”

“My fellow Christians, I don’t have to name them,” the speaker replied, smiling unctuously.

A lean woman, whose face was beginning to crack with wrinkles, jumped to her feet.

“I’ll name them!” She cried in a shrill, high-pitched voice. “I’ll name them! The dirty Jews!”¹⁹

The fiction of James T. Farrell also offers an enlightening contrast between Coughlin’s early followers and his later ones. Thinly disguised as “Father Moylan,” Coughlin is the subject of a street corner discussion by the sons of Chicago’s middle class in 1930. They conclude: “There’s a man for you. Boy, what Father Moylan doesn’t say about bankers, and the Reds, too.” ²⁰

In a later work, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade, Father Moylan’s xenophobic and anti-Semitic diatribes no longer interest ordinary well-adjusted youth. Only guys like Tommy, the mal-adjusted loner, chronically unemployed, heavy drinker, and harboring hate for Jews and admiration for Hitler, respond to Moylan’s message. Farrell’s fiction shows—with a power and concision that escapes historical description—how Coughlin’s changing persona first attracted, then alienated, the disaffected American middle class, and how at last Coughlin claimed only the weakest and most desperate.²¹ The fictional portrait of the priest turns out to be more revealing and accurate than the priest in real life.

Fanatics had now replaced many of Coughlin’s respectable followers. One by one radio stations dropped Coughlin and by the end of 1940 he found himself, “with virtually no access to the air.”²² In the spring of 1942 the Postmaster General refused to allow Social Justice to be mailed: even Coughlin’s printed voice was silenced. At the same time, the Attorney General of United States warned the Archbishop of Detroit that Coughlin would face formal charges of sedition if his activities did not cease.²³

For thirty years, from 1942 until 1972, Coughlin’s voice was confined to the pulpit of his parish church. In Coughlin’s career and his silence there are mysteries about his priesthood, his personality, and his celibacy that give important clues to understanding priests, sex, and celibacy in both literature and life.

FASCINATING MYSTERY

Father Andrew Greeley claims that priests are among the most fascinating men in the world and that their celibacy makes them so. There are, however, other elements that add mystery and interest to the priest: one is his relationship to his Church—his power vis-à-vis a veritable Leviathan.

The priest is an organization man even more fully than any corporate executive or military officer. Theologically he is “another Christ,” his commission eternal; he holds the authority to forgive sins; there is a party line he is expected to support. All this and more is under the direction and control of ecclesiastical authority.

When popes or bishops censure, silence, or discipline priests, the full weight of church control comes into public view. There are, however, multiple layers of power, intrigue, and ambiguity within the hierarchical system. This is the atmosphere where the priest who is a star maneuvers. What mysterious, fascinating elements of power does a priest who has star status wield within the church system?

His religious superiors, in spite of the fact that many bishops, arguably most, were not anti-business, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or fascist, never successfully curtailed Coughlin’s mission and message. Of course, those elements were not the sum and substance of Coughlin’s teaching. He did promote social justice and workers rights. There was enough ambiguity and support of Catholic teaching in his message, and sufficient support of his thinking in high places to save him from official censure.

Coughlin did receive criticism for his political involvement; after his first mutterings in 1930, William Cardinal O’Connell of Boston openly objected, but his opposition was to a priest speaking about politics at all rather than a rejection of specific ideas.

His Detroit superior until 1937, Bishop Michael Gallagher, generally protected Coughlin, in spite of controversy. Edward Mooney who took over the reigns as Archbishop of Detroit in 1937, made repeated efforts, soon after he arrived, to silence Coughlin. That autumn when Coughlin attacked the CIO for supposed Communism and anti-Christianity, Mooney rebuked him; Coughlin knew that Mooney wished to censor his broadcasts. Coughlin’s response was to cancel his radio program and appeal to the Pope’s personal representative in the United States, the Apostolic Delegate. In January 1938, the broadcasts resumed. Coughlin commented on his victory:

“The archbishop had overstepped himself. I was more than he could take on. I had lots of friends at the Vatican, people who could not agree with me publicly. But they knew that I spoke the truth. They knew that I recognized the Communist threat to the Church. Well, they finally reached the Pope, and when they did, he came to his senses and he saw the righteousness of my ways. So, of course, instructions were sent here to halt any restrictions on my activities.”²⁴

Coughlin was not merely blasting the establishment. He was popularizing papal teaching on social justice; this garnered him support from some unexpected quarters, including some church liberals. Father John A. Ryan, professor of theology at Catholic University, one of the most prominent and influential Catholic liberals of the time supported Coughlin to the extent that he, “was performing a useful service by bringing the messages of the encyclicals to the masses.”²⁵ And Coughlin got good grades from liberals for promoting labor unions.

Was Coughlin anti-Semitic? Yes, without a doubt. It is also clear that there was enough anti-Semitism within the American Church and in Rome during the 1930s to tolerate, and even support, Coughlin’s preaching. In 1938, an Irish priest, Denis Fahey, published a book titled The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, which blamed Jews for every secular and liberal reform since the Renaissance.²⁶ Fahey saw these reforms as negative and destructive. Coughlin’s anti-Semitism was at its most vocal when he discovered Fahey’s “theology of history.” Coughlin was inspired by yet another theologian to justify and re-infuse twentieth century “scientific anti-Semitism” with longstanding medieval religious prejudice

Was Coughlin a fascist? Coughlin’s economic program—private ownership, but the means of production rigidly controlled by government—was classically fascist. He generally praised such avowed fascists as Franco and Mussolini, and he broadcast and published what can only be described as German propaganda even in the months after Pearl Harbor. Coughlin’s anti-Semitism dovetailed with the Nazi program.

Certainly Coughlin never described himself as fascist, and never used the term in connection with the National Union for Social Justice, though he did endorse “corporatist” economic policies under which everyone gets a piece of the pie, but the government does the slicing. At the very least, Coughlin took a leaf from the success of the various fascist movements including the vilification of certain groups, including the Jews, to build a radical political movement in the U.S. that he would control. If Coughlin was not an actual fascist, he was so close it makes no difference.²⁷

There were in the 1930s, and still are, Fascist regimes that support Roman Catholicism. This support of Church interests merits silent acceptance if not out right endorsement in the Vatican. Fascism had been seen as a bulwark against Communism and other enemies of religion and a protector of the Church’s rights. Coughlin had support where it counted.

Coughlin held in his grasp the three elements of power needed to pave his way successfully through the authoritarian maze of his Church—to maintain his voice. He enjoyed a broad-based popularity—even beyond a Catholic constituency. His Message was ambiguous enough, no matter how offensive to some churchmen, to draw support at some elevated level of the hierarchy. And, importantly, he had significant and substantial means of independent financial support. In distinct synergies these were also elements of the power at work in the careers of Sheen and Greeley.

By way of contrast to the hierarchical tolerance for Coughlin, Thomas Merton and Pierre Teilhard were famous priests silenced for periods of time by church superiors. They lacked the same “unassailable” power matrix of the stars.

COUGHLIN’S SECRET WORLD

Coughlin, like every Roman Catholic priest, was required to make a lifelong promise of celibacy prior to his ordination. Coughlin left no written account of his thoughts on celibacy. Certainly, he never married, but throughout his public career Coughlin was pursued by rumors of affairs with members of both sexes. He left a considerable paper trail in his FBI file.

Coughlin’s biographer cites several well-known accusations against Coughlin. It had been reported that Father Coughlin, as a young priest, was caught in the act of sodomy with another priest, who was defrocked.²⁸ The only documentation Marcus could locate was an unsigned, undated memo circulated within the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith.

Coughlin’s mysterious conflicts within the Basilians—the interruption of his theological studies, and his unexplained departure from the Order—could have been the result of this or similar incidents. Although there is logic and precedent to give plausibility to such conclusions, one must be cautious in reading effect and cause into sexual affairs.

A court document from the income-tax evasion trial of Dr. Bernard Gariepy before a Detroit Federal Judge in 1949, records testimony that Coughlin paid Dr. Gariepy $68,000 over a three-year period for “taking liberties with Gariepy’s wife.”²⁹

In over seven hundred pages of FBI files we obtained under the Freedom of Information Act contain several references to Coughlin’s sexual indiscretions. One tantalizing file is an unsigned typewritten note date-stamped October 12, 1937. The principal subject of this note is the questionable loyalty of composer Cole Porter and his valet. It claimed they listened to German propaganda every day at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. But the last paragraph cites Coughlin, “How come that Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest, wears civilian clothes when he is in New York, and registers at a hotel under the name of Smith. And what parties—wine, women, and ____“³⁰

When the FBI’s anonymous informant wrote “wine, women, and ____,” it is clear that his ellipsis referred not to “song” but to homosexual encounters.³¹ The reports put Coughlin in the social company of the homosexual elite—Cole Porter, Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward.³²

Moreover, Coughlin did in fact sometimes travel under assumed names: in 1937 he traveled incognito to England and Europe. A letter from the Assistant Executive Officer of Military Intelligence, to J. Edgar Hoover reports that Coughlin visited Jackson, Mississippi, under the name “Eddie Burke.”³³

After 1942, all the entries concentrate on Coughlin’s sexual life. A memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to Clyde Tolson, his assistant and close friend, dated April 15, 1942 cites a confidential source: “…Father Coughlin at the present time was being treated by a reputable Detroit psychiatrist for certain sexual difficulties. It was also stated that Father Coughlin had in his employ a maid or a secretary with whom Father Coughlin had had relations, and who was also being treated by the same psychiatrist.”³⁴

J. Edgar Hoover conveyed the same information to the Attorney General in a memorandum dated April 20, 1942. High-level memoranda flew in all directions. One operative reported to Hoover: “a confidential source: (name deleted) told me that Father Coughlin was known to be a man of very unsavory repute; Reverend (name deleted) had investigated Coughlin; (source) has proof that Father Coughlin has a mistress;  It is (source’s) understanding that Reverend (name deleted) presented his evidence to some of the leaders of the church, but that no action was taken.”³⁵

The Bureau went to a great deal of trouble to probe these allegations. They conducted interviews in Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio, Washington, D.C. and Boston. Obviously, the FBI and the Attorney General’s office considered the source of the information credibly enough to give him at least three extended interviews.

Can one guarantee the trustworthiness of anonymous and secret letters and FBI files? Hoover was out to curtail Coughlin’s activity. It is clear that Hoover and some of his top aides took pains to investigate Coughlin and wrote reports that clearly reflect some knowledge of the goings-on in the Waldorf-Astoria, and with Coughlin’s penchant for traveling in disguise.

The “reputable psychiatrist” referred to in a number of the FBI reports was Dr. Leo H. Bartemeier. He and his wife were among the charter members of Coughlin’s Oak Park parish. Bess Bartemeier even in the days before 1930 frequently cooked for Coughlin to help the priest and his struggling new parish. In later years Coughlin was a frequent guest at the Bartemeier table.

After Coughlin’s death, Bartemeier revealed the key to Coughlin’s thirty-year silence. It was not the threat of law suites by the United States Attorney General, which were real, but not daunting to Coughlin; he bragged he had better lawyers. It was not sudden obedience to his bishop, who he had successfully defied for several years. That was a cover story circulated in May 1942 by church authorities to explain Coughlin’s retreat from public view.

Coughlin felt the effects of a voice more powerful than his own. That voice silenced Coughlin’s magnificent voice in any public forum, on any subject, and shackled him to his parish pulpit as long as that man lived.

The personal threat was delivered by phone from J. Edgar Hoover to Coughlin on the February 1942 Sunday morning after Mass, at the exact time trucks from the U.S. Attorney General’s office were loading files of Social Justice and all Coughlin’s other operations for transport to Washington.

Coughlin rushed in a panic to the Bartemeier home to confer with his long time friend at a juncture he felt was the greatest crisis of his life. Hoover had proof of Coughlin’s homosexual activity. That proof, communicated in the verbal exchange between Hoover and Coughlin, was sufficient to silence Coughlin’s public voice until May 24, 1972 when he gave his first unrestricted interview to Heritage magazine. J. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972.³⁶

COUGHLIN’S TRAGEDY

In another dimension could one imagine Coughlin being cured of his violence and anti-Semitism by the sainted Sheen’s reason? Or could one imagine that Greeley, the popular paper back writer, could transform Coughlin’s life into a comedy of grace? Or is the irony of the mellifluous voice being silenced by the whisper of government blackmail too overpowering to be transformed into anything but tragedy?

This is a troublesome perspective. Tragedy is a Greek form, depending, on a wicked and blinding God. To the Christian consciousness, a blind God is “unthinkable.”

The priest-as-Prometheus imagery does have a certain delicious irony. The Catholic tradition on the one hand—with its emphasis on grace and redemption—contrasts the Faustian career of the Reverend Charles Edward Coughlin on the other.

To understand we have to move temporarily from the language of religion—which emphasizes sin and salvation—to the language of behavioral science, emphasizing causes and conditions.

The story of Coughlin’s rise and fall resembles a Greek tragedy. Coughlin, the young, heroic Voice, is blinded by ambition and challenges forces greater than himself, only to end up out of control, pursued as a criminal—isolated, and finally silenced.³⁷ Beyond mere ambition, however, Coughlin’s rise and fall depended on his historical circumstances, on his personal abilities and education, on his clerical status, and on his psychological makeup.

The importance of Coughlin’s historical setting is clear. Had he been born forty years earlier, before the radio, before the Depression, and before the rise of modern fascism, he might have become a clerical William Jennings Bryan, a gifted orator in the populist cause with a religious dimension. Forty years later, after the end of the Cold War, in a time when discourse defines itself as “postmodern,” he might have become a clerical Ross Perot, attracting millions of disaffected Americans. In neither case would his ministry have electrified, so to speak, such a substantial part of the American public at a time of national emergency.

Coughlin’s personal abilities and education also played a part in his tragedy. The 1930s produced a flood of angry orators. Many remained ineffective; others ridiculous. Coughlin’s power depended in large part on his beautiful voice and his rhetorical skill, honed by years of preaching, debate, and drama, at a time when radio communication was nearly universal.

Coughlin intuitively sensed the importance of a coherent social theory for a population in turmoil. He had the wisdom to offer a translation of solid religious teaching about workers rights and social justice for popular consumption. Coughlin’s status as a priest was important. He created the image of a strong authority figure, who “gave permission” to millions of Catholics, schooled in obedience to question their society and their government, much as Greeley would one day give permission for his readers to question church teaching about sex.

The psychoanalytic quest—like the riddle of Oedipus with which it is so closely bound—somewhat resembles a detective story. Something is dramatically wrong, whether in the individual’s life or in the public life of Thebes. The task of the detective—whether analyst, king, or literary critic—is to discover the underlying cause of the blight. Coughlin is like a tragic figure in that he rose brilliantly, but fell just as quickly in his hubris and his blindness.

This raises the question: what was Coughlin blind to? The answer is: himself.

THE PERSONALITY OF THE STAR

Coughlin’s personality characteristics are vital to his story. He was a man of action—impatient, always harboring a tendency toward aggression and violence. He hungered for attention and acknowledgement. He demonstrated a magical view of money and status; and most importantly, a pattern of wooing authority figures, then rejecting them. These impulses inspired Coughlin to strike out for new territory on the airwaves and in politics. Coughlin’s situation thus virtually conspired to bring about both his rise and his fall.

TURMOIL: A review Coughlin’s public life strikes one as a constantly troubled existence. Coughlin was frequently attacked and attacking, even on a physical level, when for instance, he ripped the glasses off and punched the face of a Boston Globe reporter for having the audacity to dispute his preposterous claim that Judge Felix Frankfurter was a Communist.

After a deranged attacker threw chicken feathers over him at a public rally, Coughlin began packing a pistol, “a thirty-eight caliber chrome Smith and Wesson revolver with a white pearl handle which he carried under his clerical garb.”³⁸

AUTHORITY: Coughlin enjoyed and used his clerical status to his own advantage, personally and professionally. Coughlin’s relations with his ecclesiastical superiors, however, were far from smooth. At times he openly defied them; at other times he simply paid lip service, and went his own way. Coughlin’s obedience to his Bishop depended on convenience.

Coughlin admired leaders he perceived to be strong. But there was an excessive and personal quality to Coughlin’s attachment to authority figures. In the case of FDR, Coughlin’s overzealous adoption of Roosevelt was followed by an over-zealous hatred of equal proportions. Coughlin fell in love, so to speak, with Roosevelt, only to reject him bitterly when Roosevelt did not return his fervor.

Coughlin’s attitude toward dictators also betrays his love-hate relationship with authority. One biographer speaks of Coughlin’s “admiration for strong, dictatorial rule.”³⁹ Hitler was the “big man” who Coughlin admired and feared.

Fiction helps us understand the dynamic: Writing of the motives of candidates for MI-5—the British intelligence service—John Le Carré’s fictional Smiley notes that he eschews prospects who burn with hatred for Communism, since such people are already half in love with the Soviet Union and will likely defect. Even Stalin, like Hitler and Mussolini, and like Franklin Roosevelt, was for Coughlin one more hated and beloved father figure.

Coughlin’s love-hate relationship with authority is key for an understanding of his attraction to violence, manifested in his tendency to scapegoat particular groups and mark them out as targets for violence, and in his grandiose thinking. All of these tendencies combined in his psychological underdevelopment and narcissistic attitude toward the world.

ENEMIES: The conjunction of Coughlin’s anti-Semitism with his sadomasochism is very apparent in the way his anti-Semitism developed. At first, Coughlin complained, not of Jewish machinations, but of the preferential treatment accorded to Jews suffering in Nazi Germany and Fascist Spain while the suffering of Catholics in Republican Spain, Mexico, and the Soviet Union went “ignored” by the press. This grievance recalls a childish complaint that a parent unfairly prefers another sibling.

By 1936, Coughlin openly began to instigate violence against Jews by his followers. Coughlin pursued his enemies politically and personally and incited others to action.

His contemporary, Fulton Sheen, used his priesthood and power very differently. Sheen considered his opposition as intellectual adversaries and spiritual dangers. People, if informed, could reason and make free choices to improve conditions. The common features of Coughlin’s groups of enemies are, first, their distance from or opposition to Coughlin himself, and their relative power.

Greeley is clearly free and purified from Coughlin’s racial and religious biases, but psychologically they share many common characteristics especially in their treatment of enemies.

GRANDIOSITY: As early as August of 1936, according to FBI files, Coughlin was talking about sending an Army to overthrow the anti-clerical Mexican government. He bragged to a government agent that he could handle any opposition from Roosevelt.⁴⁰ Coughlin fantasized about vast wealth as well as about armed might. Again from the FBI file, a letter dated September 10, 1940 notes a speech by Father Coughlin in Dubuque, Iowa that June, in which he recounts his opportunity to stop Hitler if the government had only listened to him. A news account quotes Coughlin:

“In 1933, March 4, there was an inauguration of a New Deal in the United States. Germany also had a New Deal with the inauguration of Adolf Hitler. There would have been no Adolf Hitler had the Democracies given Bruening [a German political opponent to Hitler] the 30 million dollars he had asked for. Now they can spend 30 billion dollars and Hitler will be their master. There is a page of history for you. I was in Washington on March 4, 1933. Some of Mr. Bruening’s friends asked me to please plead with the administration for 30 million dollars from here. I did, and was refused. Hitler would not have risen to power if there had been one single grain of Christian charity in the treasury of the so-called democracies.”⁴¹

In his own mind, Coughlin could authorize money from the United States Treasury as easily as he could command it from Germany.

At an earlier time, Coughlin had bragged that the “big man” had supported Social Justice with substantial contributions. In fact, Germany evidently did contribute money to Social Justice—but not to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, as Coughlin boasted. Records show the government could prove payments of only thirty-six dollars over four years by a German agent—little more than pocket change—in order to remain on Coughlin’s mailing list to keep their clipping service current.

Coughlin’s grandiose boasting and his denial of actual responsibility for real crimes are thus opposite faces of the same coin.

FANTASY and IMAGINATION: If Coughlin’s boast of support from Hitler was mere illusion, perhaps encouraged on general principle by the German government, it is nevertheless interesting psychologically. Coughlin refers to Hitler as the “big man,” an obvious reference to a childhood fantasy of a father at once terrifying and empowering. His boasts of vast wealth and an enormous armed following are likewise fantasies traceable to a very early period. The project of boasting itself indicates a difficulty of negotiating between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic—a difficulty arising early in the “phallic” stage of development.

Coughlin was absorbed with rhetoric on the practical levels of fundraising and demagogy, and never rose to the literary level. Clearly, Coughlin failed to achieve the perspective necessary both to appreciate himself and to see himself in relation to others.

The foundation of Coughlin’s stardom rested on a kind of bootstrapping. As a high school Greek teacher he represented himself as an expert—while he was himself in the process of learning basic elements; his responsibilities doubtless encouraged him to remain a step ahead of his charges, and he succeeded. As a young pastor in Royal Oak, Coughlin built a 600-seat church on borrowed money, a church many times too big for his tiny parish, yet he was able not only to fill the church, but to replace it with an even bigger one. And as a radio preacher, self-confidence and self-righteousness were quite literally his stock in trade; people listened to him to acquire a sense of power over overwhelming political and economic forces. Coughlin was, like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, “riding on a shoeshine and a smile.”

But on a level deeper than the sales pitch, Coughlin’s imagination was rooted in violence and power, and his fascination was expressed in fantasies of military triumph. Such fantasies originate from early sado-masochistic desires. According to Freud, the fantasy of “a child being beaten” represents above all an incestuous wish for the father. A large, powerful father is a common image in Coughlin’s discourse, particularly in his adulation of powerful politicians. This contrasts with the status and person of Coughlin’s biological father. Coughlin’s repeated approaches to authority-figures—and his repeated disillusionments—illustrate the incompatibility of childish fantasy with adult reality.

Some words resonate on such a deep level that they actually become violent; the courts have long recognized the reality of “fighting words.” This continuum of words and actions may have made it difficult for Coughlin actually to distinguish between the fantasies that made him feel good, the words in which he attempted to communicate those fantasies, and their effects in the outside world. Coughlin, in other words, may not have been fully able to differentiate imagination from reality, or to fully control his expressions of fantasy.

NARCISSISM: Coughlin reveals the depth of his narcissism in this comment on his own religious belief:

“Do you know how I would live—if I renounced religion and was illogical enough to disbelieve in a life beyond—in the real life? Why, if I threw away and denounced my faith, I would surround myself with the most adroit highjackers, learn every trick of the highest banking and stock manipulations, avail myself of the laws under which to hide my own crimes, create a smoke screen to throw into the eyes of men, and—believe me, I would become the world’s champion crook. If I didn’t believe in religion and a happy beyond, I would get everything for myself that I could lay hands on in this world.”⁴²

Coughlin actually seems to have committed many of the enormities he catalogues. Sheldon Marcus records his abuse of his church’s tax-exempt status to cover profit-making schemes, his speculation in silver and in the stock market, and his personal and political use of funds contributed for the relief of the poor.⁴³

Coughlin profited politically from a cynical scapegoating of the Jews and then hid from responsibility behind flimsy equivocations. Apparently Coughlin took advantage of his wealth and clerical status to conduct a series of sexual adventures. The surface of Coughlin’s quotation tempts the reader to conclude that Coughlin simply did not believe in God.

But, as always, truth extends deep below the surface of things. Coughlin’s statement from a theological perspective presents a startling outline. Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov began from approximately the same theoretical position as Coughlin—with the proposition that if there is no God, then all is permitted—only to find such a philosophy literally unlivable.

Moreover, it is clear that committed atheists and thoroughgoing agnostics can be principled and upstanding people. Indeed a certain atheistic conscience finds ethical conduct incumbent because it does not recognize a spiritual judge outside the individual.

On a level of common sense, Coughlin’s syllogism does not hold up. From a Christian perspective, it is even stranger. St. Anselm defined God as the greatest thought that the human mind can hold. If that definition is applied to Coughlin’s quotation above, the greatest thought—and hence God—is equated with the satisfaction of selfish desires. Greed and lust, for Coughlin, exist with or without an afterlife; the function of the afterlife is only to hold these desires in check. Coughlin’s narcissism permeates his deepest religious convictions.

Coughlin came to assume, on some level, the ultimate mendacity of all discourse. The conflict between total mendacity and total truth implies a vitiation of the very opposition of mendacity and truth: there is thus neither lie nor truth, but only the power of the voice.

How do the elements of Coughlin’s life and work fit together? Which are of personality? Which are of priesthood and which of celibacy and celibate culture? If priest equals celibacy were not the accepted mantel of his work, would he have been allowed the same voice?

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Chapter 2: Fulton J. Sheen - The Television Priest

Every theologian ought to be a saint.  - Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Andrew Greeley had a worthy predecessor on the center stage of American popular culture. In the 1950s, he presented what was described as, “a vision of clerical glamour.”¹ His name, no longer a household word, was Fulton J. Sheen. Like Coughlin and Greeley, Sheen was an Irish American priest who soared to ecclesial, financial, and popular success from humble family roots. Sheen sold millions of copies of the sixty books he wrote; only one-third the number of Greeley’s titles.² His radio broadcast, The Catholic Hour, spanned more on-air years than Coughlin’s entire career as a radio star. But Sheen’s preeminent claim to popularity and fame was by way of prime-time television.

From 1951 until 1957 Sheen’s program, Life Is Worth Living, was one of the most popular television programs in America. What made it remarkable was that Sheen held the attention of thirty million major network viewers in prime time against some of the most popular entertainers of the day—Milton Berle, Gene Autry, Groucho Marx, and Lucy.³ In 1952, Newsweek and Time magazine both commented on the phenomenon, estimating that 14 percent of all the TV sets in America were tuned to Sheen’s broadcast.⁴ That amounted to two million sets. By 1955, five and a half million sets were fixed on Sheen’s Thursday night ABC presentation.

Sheen’s books and videos of his TV programs are still currently available, but they now appeal mostly to a pietistic segment of the Catholic audience rather than the broad spectrum of viewers targeted back in the 1950s.

Sheen, like Coughlin before him, appealed to a broad audience that included even agnostics and atheists; like Greeley after him, he was willing to address his audience on something like common ground instead of speaking to them from an authoritarian position—although that didn’t stop him from dressing himself in traditional ecclesiastical garb. Sheen’s focus on “this world” of people and their problems, rather than on “the next world” of eternity, moved the discourse of American Catholicism in a direction that anticipated the changes featured in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

Sheen’s television ministry certainly changed millions of Americans’ attitudes about Catholicism and priests. He portrayed the Catholic Church as an institution that deserved toleration because it was accessible, and did not need to be feared. He presented an image of priests as educated and reasonable.

THE MAN

Sheen was born on May 8, 1895 in El Paso, Illinois.⁵ Perhaps he manifested a touch of characteristic vanity in his name selection. He was baptized Peter. Later, he selected his mother’s maiden name, Fulton, as his first name. John was his confirmation name, and he incorporated that initial into his adult identity.

He was educated in local parochial schools, where proved himself a superior student: St. Mary’s grade school; Spalding Institute in Peoria; and St. Viator College—where he was a champion debater. He spent his first three years of theological studies at St. Paul Seminary in Minnesota. Although admittedly a brilliant student of theology, some faculty and students judged him “too serious.”⁶

Amazingly, one of the major factors that contributed to that impression was the amount of time he spent in the seminary chapel. During those first years, he took a private vow to spend one hour each day before the Blessed Sacrament.⁷ It was a promise he kept until his death. But while in seminary he did develop a stomach ulcer, left St. Paul and, after a period of recuperation, completed theological studies in Philadelphia.

Sheen was ordained a priest for the diocese of Peoria, Illinois on September 20, 1919. He took further studies in philosophy at the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1923. Two years latter he was awarded the highest scholastic distinction the university could confer.

After serving one year as an assistant pastor in St. Patrick’s Church in Peoria, Father Sheen began to teach philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He remained a popular professor there for the next twenty-five years, most of the time lecturing to standing-room-only classes. So, unlike Coughlin, who remained attached to one parish church all his life, Sheen’s congregation began in academia, but it was not grounded in buildings or confined to a pulpit.

All three priests, Coughlin, Sheen, and Greeley, reached out to millions of people via radio, television, or novels, and found their congregations in the mailbox.

By 1956 Sheen was to average between eight and ten thousand letters per day, occasionally receiving as many as thirty thousand.⁸ Some people dubbed his parish “the mailbox.” This volume, of course, did not equal Coughlin’s mail, which at its height in 1932 exceeded the weekly mail sent to the president of the United States. Greeley has acknowledged with gratitude his own “mailbox parish” and, in keeping with the changing times, has expanded his outreach by way of his computer and Web site.

Early in his career, Sheen authored a respectable philosophical work: God And Intelligence In Modern Philosophy; it remains durable and credible in its professional area. Three to Get Married, Peace of Soul, and Sheen’s autobiography, Treasure in Clay, were among his most popular books. Sheen, like Greeley after him, also wrote newspaper columns: “God Love You” syndicated in the Catholic press, and “Bishop Sheen Writes” for the secular press.

His speaking ability was showcased on the Sunday evening radio program, The Catholic Hour, broadcast over 118 NBC stations from 1930 to 1951, and sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men.⁹ Fulton Sheen’s voice was good, but it did not match the exceptional, magnetic quality of Father Coughlin’s—but then how many voices could? What Sheen had was “eyes” and presence, wonderfully suited for the new medium of television. That was to be the venue of his popularity and fame.

As the prospect of Sheen’s TV career took shape, he took up residence in New York. From 1950 to 1966 he worked there as the director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, a church-sponsored group that supported missionary work and charity throughout the world. During his entire career he enjoyed the reputation as an excellent speaker, drawing large audiences when he preached at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Paulist Catholic Center. He continued teaching, but focused on convert instruction. He received a good deal of publicity about the number of high-profile persons he ushered into the Catholic Church—the likes of Clare Boothe Luce, Louis Budencz, and Heywood Hale Broun.¹⁰

All of Sheen’s work was conducted under a commission from superiors or sponsored by official church organizations. The institution he served honored and promoted him: in 1934 he was created a Monsignor and later Papal Chamberlain; on June 11, l951 he was consecrated a bishop. Coughlin and Greeley, in spite of their individual fame and power, always remained somewhat on the fringes of institutional borders and beyond bureaucratic control; ecclesiastical honors eluded them.

No one has ever questioned Sheen’s loyalty to his Church or his commitment to traditional priestly celibacy. “Celibacy and hard work,” factors Greeley credits for his productivity, could well have been the keys to Sheen’s productivity also. He was a driven man, working seventeen-hour days. Daily Mass, his Divine Office, and his hour of meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, were his only regular daily respites. Naturally there were those who criticized him. Some who lived with him, like historian Msgr. John Tracey Ellis, found Sheen vain and ambitious.¹¹ Father Daniel Noonan, housemate and biographer, described Sheen as a “consummate egocentric,” who was frustrated by ecclesiastical ambitions and the tedium of administration.¹²

That, of course, was not the whole picture; it is not always easy to be objective about people who live closely, especially if they are famous. It is clear from many sources that Sheen was a brilliant man—impetuous and entirely devoted to his church; he burned at any corruption he found within it. He was generous to a fault. Like Coughlin and Greeley, Sheen made millions of dollars during his career, and gave literally millions of his own money to the charities for which he collected from the public.

All of these qualities made Sheen an effective priest. His intelligence and broad knowledge allowed him to deal comprehensively with the topics he chose to discuss; his impetuosity and spontaneity suited him for a series of half-hour telecasts—all conducted without a single written note or a teleprompter.¹³ His humanity inspired admiration and devotion among secular viewers; his ecclesiastical status and stardom compelled pride and respect among the faithful.

Sheen’s final assignment from his church came in 1966. He was asked to serve as Bishop of Rochester, New York. He threw himself into his duties with the added enthusiasm generated by the recent Council; but all of his earlier media and diplomatic experience were little use in the daily administration of a small, economically divergent diocese manned not by intellectuals, but by ordinary priests. His missteps were recorded in the national press. His fame followed him. His stardom was in the past. He suffered heart attacks and retired with dignity, continuing his charitable work until his death.

Bishop Sheen died on December 9, 1979, at the age of eighty-four. In 2000, Cardinal John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York, gave permission to begin a study of the life and writings of Fulton J. Sheen that could lead to his canonization, the long process whereby the Catholic Church declares a person to be a saint.

THE MEDIUM

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was a man ready-made to be a television star. All of his teaching and preaching experience, his long series of radio broadcasts, his personal charm honed with enthusiastic college students and church dignitaries, his intensity and personal good looks combined to make him a welcome presence in the burgeoning medium eager for new personalities to help it sell itself.

Sheen’s on-camera strategy suited TV. He was a salesman. He created a need in the mind of his viewer. Like the car salesmen of l950s folklore, Sheen told his audience “you can’t afford to pass up this deal!” Although he never denied the cost of Christianity, and indeed spelled out the pain and separation of celibacy in his autobiography, his emphasis—like that of Greeley’s novels—was on the “good news” of God’s Grace. Sheen was selling peace of mind, hope, and freedom to reason about life.

Sheen was clearly selling Catholicism to Catholics and anyone else who would listen. In order to make the sale, he first had to get his customers’ attention. Primarily, his own looks and manner accomplished this task: he appeared on television in his vestments, embodying what one commentator called, “a style of clerical glamour, his piercing blue eyes transfixing the viewer.”¹⁴

The same writer elaborates:

“Sheen’s eyes were indeed striking, but it was his hypnotic half-mad use of them that made them really jive. Like a pretty girl without her glasses, he seemed to be gazing just at you, if not through you.”¹⁵

Exceptional eyes were not unknown or unique for a minister among big time American evangelical preachers. Minister Charles Finney, a famous and captivating orator, held audiences of thousands spellbound, again giving the impression that he was speaking to each person individually. Many said his eyes had a hypnotic effect. “No man’s soul ever shone more vividly through glance as did Charles Finney’s.”¹⁶ He successfully sold salvation through fire and brimstone. But that was in the 1820s; no television yet existed to make audience contact available beyond the flaps of the revival tent.

Sheen flattered his viewers, oiling his discourse with laudatory references to popular themes and people—soldiers, mothers, the Irish, and the current hero, Eisenhower. He set his viewers at ease with humor and even corny jokes, “puns, jingles, alliteration,” much in the manner recorded of St. Augustine.¹⁷

Like the good pitchman he was, Sheen situated himself in a common space with his audience: a space defined geographically as the United States; temporally as the modern world; and thematically as the province of mind and heart, marriage and the family, business and practical decisions. In entering these regions, Sheen himself had to leave behind the sectarian Catholicism of ritual and authoritarianism. He brought many American Catholics with him, anticipating the tone and agenda of the Second Vatican Council.

By 1958, when Sheen left his first television ministry, his ecumenism, his willingness to enter into dialogue, and his attention as a spiritual leader to the problems of this world helped change the American mind about Catholicism. It seemed as if when Sheen stepped before the cameras, at a distance from the old stodgy, constricted, sectarian, domineering Church and into the space of television, the old Church, in reality, vanished behind him.

THE MESSAGE

Sheen established a common ground with his viewers: one of mutual respect. From this vantage point he encouraged them to think for themselves, to reason, to figure out complex problems of life. He championed freedom. At the same time he was not shy about stating his own views and rendering his own judgments. He was invariably diplomatic. But Sheen had his designated enemies. They were not persons. He equated the enemies of reason and nature with his enemies. These enemies were not just enemies of religion, but of everyone.

Sheen felt that the three greatest dangers of his time were Freudian psychoanalysis, atheistic Communism, and artificial birth control. All of Sheen’s presentations were tinted to one degree or another by this bias.

The smallest category of Sheen’s early telecasts dealt with specifically religious or inspirational topics. This is not to say that religion played a minor role in his discourse; quite the opposite. But he tended to downplay the religious—and specifically sectarian—aspect of his thought. Instead he emphasized a kind of Neo-Thomistic system of anthropology, economics, ethics and politics. An Everyman’s philosophy in which practical problems could be explored in terms of “the man” and “the woman.”

By 1955, later in his TV career, Sheen felt confident enough of his reception by the general public to speak more frequently on specifically religious topics. His broadcast entitled “Angels” began with the observation that, “our modern world does not believe in angels, regarding them as poetical and mythical creatures that tide over the transition from infancy to maturity.”¹⁸ He then inverted his observation to a critique of modern materialism and proceeded to a thorough discussion of the intelligence and function of angels. In the same series he ventured into a discussion of biblical stories, like the woman at the well featured in John’s gospel (4:1-30) and evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He even gave one presentation on the doctrine of the Trinity.

MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

The largest number of Sheen’s TV programs dealt with popular psychological issues involving marriage, the family, and child rearing. His titles included: “The Laws of Marriage,” “The Training of Children,” “How Mothers Are Made,” “To Spank or Not to Spank.” He also focused on common stresses like “Pain and Suffering,” “Fatigue,” and “Human Passions.”

He devoted time to ethical questions preaching on: “The Meaning of Love,” “Conscience,” “Character Building,” “Something Higher,” and “The Cure for Selfishness,” and the theme that permeated his philosophy, “Freedom.” He featured specific problems like “What Is Alcoholism,” and “Cure For Alcoholism,” and even psychology like “Psychology of the Irish,” all with an astringent anti-psychiatric tone.

Anxiety, for Sheen, as distinguished from fear, was a purely psychological phenomenon, and resulted from a preoccupation with the emptiness within a human heart. He proposed a spiritual solution: “Perfect love casts out fear.”

Pain and suffering, like fear, presented a double challenge to man: on the one hand, pain forced one to look inward and could lead to self-centeredness; on the other, this introspection could be a stimulus to faith.¹⁹ Sheen chose the two thieves crucified with Jesus as examples. The thief on Jesus’ left cursed his lot, while the one on the right begged forgiveness.²⁰ Pain and suffering were not then intrinsically evil: they became evil only when they serve as a stimulus to selfishness.

Modern man, in Sheen’s judgment, often invoked sickness as an excuse for selfishness, egotism, and impatience. Selfishness was the result of a choice to direct natural instincts inward to preoccupation with self, rather than outward toward others and the world and its needs.²¹ Similarly, fatigue resulted not from exhaustion, but from stagnation. People grew fatigued when they were bored, and they became bored when they saw no purpose to their activity.²²

Sheen used his theme of boredom to join and attack his two enemies of moral freedom, Freud and Marx. He said that boredom frequently led to a “surrender” to their philosophies.

“Marx holds that we are economically determined. Despite all the talk about freedom today, the plain fact is that many are bored with freedom. That is why they are willing to surrender it to a dictator as Marxism demands or else are willing to deny any personal responsibility as Freudianism suggests, by denying moral guilt.”²³

Human beings, Sheen said, must rise to the challenge of suffering and must not fail in their will. Sheen taught that alcoholism was one particular failure of the will. Alcoholics were to be distinguished from drunkards, since drunkards enjoyed the taste and the experience of alcoholic beverages, while alcoholics were driven to drink from mental stress and moral anxiety.²⁴ Eventually, however, the alcoholic was conditioned by his addiction and, to some extent, lost his free will.

Alcoholism, to Sheen, was not exclusively a physical disease, but a complex spiritual and medical phenomenon.²⁵ The alcoholic could, however, cure himself by following the example of the prodigal son: he had to recognize his powerlessness and turn to God, confess his moral guilt without making excuses; he must make reparations for the damage he has caused, but foremost he must become reconciled to God.²⁶

All these psychic problems, fear and anxiety, pain and suffering, fatigue, and even alcoholism, ultimately stemmed—in Sheen’s judgment—merely from the failure of the individual to recognize that freedom must ultimately be directed to the service of God.²⁷ These observations seem dated and particularly unscientific in comparison to the sophisticated approach Greeley was to take when he commented on problems of the human condition and religion.

But Sheen was specific about nationality when he said that the American people were basically good and moral; far more so than they gave themselves credit for. They needed spirituality—not Freudian explanations—for their condition. In fact, they had no need for psychiatry, for Americans were “Not As Queer As We Think.”²⁸

THE RED MENACE

Bishop Sheen devoted a great deal of airtime to exposing and attacking the evils of Communism. In fact, more than one-third of his broadcasts had anti-Soviet and Cold War themes. His take on Communism and his approach to his audience were dramatically different from Coughlin’s. Ever the dynamic teacher, Sheen kept his audience interested with historical background and instruction laced with practical and moral lessons. Communism had done nothing to alleviate human suffering; it perverted true brotherhood by reducing everyone to a one-size-fits-all mentality; it destroyed family values by advocating free love; it reduced the standards of living and morals. Communist evil was highlighted to inspire his listeners to do the opposite: increase compassion, reduce suffering, and promote democracy. After clearly defining Communist dangers, Sheen exhorted his audience to attack it by confronting the breakdown in our own order: by restoring the sanctity of American homes and marriages, by raising children with discipline.

An example of this master’s clever rhetoric is clear from one of his presentations of Communism:

“Fellow citizens, be not deceived. Remember, when Russia talks peace, it is a tactic, and a preparation for war. Russia says it wants peace. The peace it wants is a piece of China, a piece of Hungary, a piece of Poland. A peace overture of Russia will be the beginning of another Pearl Harbor.”²⁹

Sheen was generally careful to note that he was exhorting his viewers to attack evil in general, and in themselves, rather than advocating a military attack on the Soviet Union specifically, but his choice of images—Pearl Harbor, the swastika, the then immensely popular General Eisenhower—tended to blur his message into a general sort of hawkishness. The threat of Communism and the danger of the atom bomb it implied were a worry—a drawing card—to many of Sheen’s viewers in the 1950s, much as sex is a draw—a timely concern—for the readers of Greeley’s novels. Sex, marriage, and psychological issues were Sheen’s other popular subjects and have retained a freshness in Greeley’s sociology and fiction, but Communism has had its day as a subject to hold popular attention. Many of Sheen’s messages have been marginalized by the fact that he zeroed in on very popular topics of his day rather than eternal verities.

Nor, in retrospect, was Communism really much of a danger to the “worried well” who made up Sheen’s congregation, an audience of white-collar and secure blue-collar Americans. The Communist Party USA, that had also been the object of Father Coughlin’s ranting, never attracted more than 50,000 votes in any presidential election and never succeeded in electing a state governor or a congressman. The Soviets, for their part, were safely packed behind the Iron Curtain, and Communists exposed few Americans to any real threat, in spite of Senator Joe McCarthy and James Bond. In this sense, Sheen’s Cold War broadcasts were essentially psychological, translating perceived danger into moral motivation.

Coughlin had emphasized the threat of Communism for his own political ends. He called for the destruction of the entire system of capitalism. His National Union for Social Justice would do away with exaggerated class divisions—fodder for revolutions like those in France and Russia—at the same time that it saved the United States from Communist domination.

There is no question that Sheen the priest philosopher hated atheistic Communism. He, however, reassured his public that atheism was not a denial of the reality of God but actually an affirmation of God. In a most telling analogy, he explains that atheism is an experience of God, “just as much as wife-beating is an experience of marriage. All hatred is love turned upside down.”³⁰

Sheen did predict that atheistic Communism would eventually consume itself and turn to its opposite, re-Christianizing the West. A prediction all the more astonishing since it was uttered in 1955.

For Sheen, Communism was an intellectual, not a political affair. He put words in the mouths of Communists, then caricatured and disregarded their arguments. He ignored the central topic of Soviet public discourse in the 1950s, which was the victory of the Soviet army over Hitler. He ignored the importance of work in the Communist ethic. The possibility of a Christian Communism, as expounded for example the devout Roman Catholic Ignazio Silone, was an oxymoron in Sheen’s discourse.

Communism existed, for Bishop Sheen, as an abstract and fallacious position in the debate about what was most central to his philosophical and religious concern: freedom and determinism.

FREEDOM AND REASON

Central to Sheen’s philosophical and theological thought and discourse was the idea of freedom. He preached individual freedom and responsibility in the face of social degeneracy and national peril, but with the assurance of God’s grace and salvation.

Freedom, Sheen argued in his broadcasts, was part of the nature of man and a necessary good. It involved freedom from determinism and constraint. It demanded freedom for choice. His hatred for Freudian psychoanalysis was based on his belief that psychological determinism destroyed man’s ability to choose. Freedom “for,” in Sheen’s schema, was equated with responsibility. He frequently said that psychoanalysis, so trendy in his day that it was part of mainstream culture, destroyed individual responsibility by absolving people of all guilt. Many religious leaders judged it at the time as an intruder into the province of the clerical profession—the right to counsel and to hear confessions.

Individual choice, especially in matters of sexuality, should be in accord with reason and nature. Central to marriage and the family for Sheen, was the freedom to reject artificial means of birth control which, in his mind, were against nature, reason, and love.

Sheen, like Coughlin, felt strongly about the evils of artificial birth control. He devoted much effort to making strong arguments for the soundness of his judgment. In order to lead viewers into an understanding of the importance of their personal choices and responsibilities, and the assaults on their nature and reason, Sheen “periodized” history epistemologically. That is, he divided history in terms of how people knew the world. According to this scheme, there was the Age of Faith of an uncertain time of beginning that reached its apogee during the life of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). It was an ideal time of integration, and was followed by the Age Of Reason. The current Age of Sensation in turn, followed this.

But Sheen appeared not to be concerned so much with understanding history as with setting up an apocalyptic myth. According to this myth, the golden Age of Faith slipped into the Age of Reason. For Sheen, this was an organic process and complementary, as it was for one of his intellectual heroes, Erasmus. For each of them, Reason implied Faith and vice-versa, but Faith was always superior. The Age of Reason, through the action of wicked men the likes of Marx and Freud, became the current demoralized age. This Age of Sensation was degenerate and posed grave perils; nonetheless, good and faith would ultimately triumph.

According to Sheen’s myth the United States was portrayed as good and even divinely inspired. The United States under assault by external forces (atheism) and internal corrupting influences of materialism and sexual license (Freudianism) mirrored the individual consciousness under assault by the sensations of covetousness, resentment, anger, and, of course, sexual desire.

Sheen said that Satan—equated with Marx and Freud—would indeed triumph in the Twentieth Century if Americans dismissed the importance of faith. Some countries of Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam, were examples of groups that had succumbed, and it was evident that individuals had also fallen by the wayside. Viewers, however, were assured a personal victory if they only had the courage to will it, and to exercise their free choice.

These history lessons offered many of Sheen’s viewers the gift of independent thought. To be sure, that thought was guided toward a predetermined end. Viewers knew Sheen would end each broadcast by affirming the reasonableness of the values he proposed. The family, the United States, and Catholic Christianity would endure. This guiding of the meditation was one more aspect of Sheen’s salesmanship: nevertheless, his broadcasts had the shape of independent reflection.

Sheen always began a program by positing some contemporary problem. He then defined his terms (to suit his own needs, to be sure) and proceeded through various “thought experiments” to imagine what it would mean, for example, for property to be held in common, for man to be without guilt, even for angels to have human intelligence.

Sheen, like Greeley after him, had a profound respect for the Catholic imagination. In his process of imagining, Sheen encouraged his audience, through his example, to explore novels and the great works of imaginative fiction. His list of authors was broad and bold, including: Shakespeare, Malraux, Baudelaire, G.K. Chesterton, and even D.H. Lawrence. This choice held some interest since Malraux was, at the time, best known for Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, novels extremely sympathetic to Communism and Anarchism; Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were even in an ambiguous legal position in the 1950s, and were condemned in many jurisdictions for their depictions of sex and immorality.

To his credit, Sheen had the courage and the scope of vision to draw from them what he considered elements of truth. “Think for yourselves,” he told his audience, “and by that route you will arrive at the same conclusions as Feodor Dostoevsky and John Cardinal Henry Newman.”

Independent thought, however, is like a genie that can neither be controlled nor put back into the bottle. When American Catholics applied freedom of judgement to problems of sex and marriage in particular, they came to conclusions that put them at odds with church authority and opened a gulf that only grew wider in the following half century. This is the time, and these are the areas in which Father Greeley’s star would come into its ascendancy.

SEX AND MARRIAGE

Problems of love and marriage concerned many of Sheen’s programs. He argued that true love between a man and woman implied body and soul. He objected both to what he termed the “Victorian Error” of denying sexuality, and to the “Freudian Error” of focusing exclusively on sexuality.³¹ If love between the sexes did not seek God, it was destined to seek death.³² Following this logic, Sheen argued that Freud was correct in “equating” Eros and Thanatos: a love that rejected the soul and God was destined for death. He quoted André Malraux’s comment on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, “She clings to sex in the face of disgust and death.” To reinforce his point he cited Baudelaire who described soulless love as, “sitting on a skull.”³³

Marriage was the only natural goal of sexual love for Sheen. Homosexual love was not a concept that Sheen could even consider. Homosexuality was not a topic to be mentioned on TV in the 1950s.

Once having embarked on marriage, Sheen predicted that husband and wife could expect their relationship to pass through three stages: an initial phase of infatuation, followed by a period of disillusionment, and finally maturing into a stage of fulfillment.³⁴ In the first stage of infatuation, which he considered a necessary biological state motivated by sexual desire, the wife believed her husband to be “the most wonderful man in the world.” The husband considered his wife to be “an angel.” This period led to a second stage, one of disillusionment as “the repetition of pleasures” hardened into irritability. This development was logical in Sheen’s mind since the biological phase involved such a close and sustained encounter between two “egos,” the deficiencies in each individual would inevitably come to prominence.

Here Sheen’s analysis unwittingly evoked Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” with its gloomy conclusion that “hell is other people.” Philosopher Sheen, however, was no existentialist; for at the instant the two partners discovered God, they transcended the gulf that separated them and there by reached the third stage of marriage, that of fulfillment.³⁵ Greeley’s novels portray a far more complex and realistic process of sexual relationships. And his sociological study of intimacy, love and fidelity in American marriage, Faithful Attraction, supplies a detailed scientific bent to questions that Sheen could not approach via his medium.

When children arrived—as in Sheen’s formulation of marriage they must—they are to be spanked soundly.³⁶ He argued that modern and Western ideas of child-rearing led to license and juvenile delinquency.³⁷ Spanking, Sheen said, was a concrete symbol of the divinely instituted authority of parents over their offspring; indeed, the parent who did not care enough to spank his children did not love them.³⁸ He preached that an error of the Western world was love without discipline, which produced softness. The Communist error was discipline without love, which begot hardness. Sheen’s principle of youth training was Freedom through Discipline. He made analogies to pulling up the weeds in a garden or breaking a colt. His goal was discipline to realize the glorious freedom of the children of God.³⁹

He was, of course, not advocating pathological child-abuse. He also took pains to make it plain that parents’ rules had to be reasonable and that parents had an obligation to listen to their children. But his harsh tone echoed the Irish discipline that James Joyce cited in Dubliners and his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Although Greeley grew up in a typical Irish home with a strict father, there is no evidence in his writing of a harsh attitude toward children or young people. Greeley likes and trusts young people; he teaches by association.

Sheen argued that the rise in juvenile delinquency paralleled the decline of the razor strap and of the woodshed; He yearned for the return of both. He also traced the causes of juvenile delinquency to parents: to drinking parents, doting parents or discordant parents.⁴⁰ Needless to say, parents had an obligation to give their children religious instructions. His entire argument for discipline tempered by love was recapitulated in his condemnation of “tolerance” which he thought was a by-product of psychoanalysis. Tolerance in Sheen’s vocabulary referred to evil not to persons.⁴¹

Strict discipline had an object: an approach to the transcendent. The philosophy was communicated in the simplest possible terms: every human being, even a child, had a natural instinct leading it toward the transcendent.⁴² This instinct was manifested in the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans in their philosophy and poetry, and in the ease with which primitive peoples accepted Christianity.⁴³ Most importantly it showed itself in the conscience, the sense of right and wrong experienced by everybody.

The innate hunger for the transcendent is a recurring theme in many of Greeley’s novels, but he embraces more latitude in portraying it, unconstrained by the philosopher‘s grid. Also he sees the hunger expressed and fulfilled between men and women in flesh and blood ambiguities. God is present in sex, not merely the object beyond it.

Sheen remained the philosophical commentator. For him the natural instinct toward God had been perverted in the modern age especially by sexual preoccupation. Man was shut up within himself. Sheen offered a way out: through study and through love. These two paths were viable because the soul had the faculties of knowing and loving.

In Sheen’s view, humans were like animals in as much as they had sensations and passions. Knowledge and love were specifically human. Knowing belonged to man’s intellect or reason; loving belonged to his will. The object of the intellect was truth; the object of the will was goodness or love.⁴⁴ Of these two faculties, will, therefore love, was infinitely preferred. For in the process of knowing, the subject of our knowledge was necessarily reduced to man’s level. In the process of loving, the subject—ideally God or another person—was accepted without any attempt to dominate or reduce the subject.

This discussion of “knowing” and “loving” was basic to understand the sharp distinction Sheen interposed between male and female and their modes of loving. Sheen’s way of speaking about women was typical of the public discourse of his time. It related closely to his attitudes toward celibacy and sexuality, intellectual and clear cut, and in sharp contrast with Greeley’s generation’s thoughts about the sexes.

Sheen’s attitudes toward the sexes can now be seen as stereotypes. Men were concerned primarily with things; women with persons. Men talked business; women talked about how another woman was dressed. A man’s interests were more remote; a woman’s interests were more immediate. Men favored the abstract; women the concrete and intimate. Men were concerned with ends, goals, and purposes; women with something proximate, close, near and dear to the heart.

This psychology was distorted but seemingly acceptable to at least part of his public. For instance there was no outcry when he concluded that because men centered on things and women on persons, women were more inclined to gossip. “A woman does not believe everything she hears, but at least she can repeat it.”⁴⁵

Another difference Sheen listed between men and women was that a man’s love was always tied to his intellect. A Man needed to have reasons for loving and needed to justify his love. But for women, love was its own reason; she didn’t have to give anyone a reason for her love. This distinction presumed that personal defects interfered with a man’s love for a woman, while defects in a man never hurt a woman’s love for her man.

Greeley’s women are important players in many of his novels. Many of them demonstrate the characteristics Sheen attributes to women generally: they love unconditionally; their nature is like God’s, to save men.

Sheen’s philosophical construct made all of sexuality problematic. His explanation of the process of knowing (the masculine principle) made an inevitable hierarchical conflict between the sexes.

“Whenever the mind or intellect knows anything that is below it in dignity, it elevates that thing by knowing it. Whenever mind or intellect knows anything that is above it in dignity, to some extent it degrades it.

“But when we know something that is above the mind in dignity, it, to some extent loses its nobility because we have to pull it down to our level.⁴⁶

“The will, on the contrary, when it loves anything above it in dignity, goes out to meet the demands of whatever it loves…We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.”⁴⁷

Beyond the evident stereotyping of men and women in Sheen’s examples, it is patently clear that in his philosophy the act of knowing proper to a man “degrades” (Sheen’s word) its object, placing (her) below the subject in dignity. At the same time the act of loving proper to woman ennobles its subject raising her almost (but not quite) to the level of her beloved.

Greeley’s sociological work seems free of gender distortion. The sum total of Greeley’s novels, however, echo a hint of Sheen’s Thomistic psychology, and reveal a population of female characters who can be divided into “whore” and “madonna.”

Sheen mastered the medium of television to communicate his message and achieve fame, just as Coughlin had via the radio and Greeley would via the computer. Sheen set the stage for intelligent, educated priests who gave the impression of listening, without the requirement that the audience conform to their religious affiliation or political agenda and who could be respected for their openness and reasonableness

THE NEW ERA’S CRUCIAL DIVIDE

Sheen firmly believed that reason and nature led inevitably to faith, and in Roman Catholics, to compliance with the reasoning of authority. He was truly the champion of freedom of thought, but he could not imagine that such freedom would lead American Catholics to reject the sexual teaching of their church. By 1968 the Sheen era was over. Sheen’s philosophy could reconcile itself to the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae, but Greeley’s sociology could not.

Father Andrew M. Greeley, who was to take the popular mantle from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, was not a philosopher but a social scientist. He scientifically studied changes in his church. Like Sheen, he approached the stage from academia. He examined issues affecting the Church, including the influence of Catholic education, population migration from city to suburbs, the upward mobility of Catholics, and the interplay of ethnicity with the political, religious, and familial attitudes of Catholics. He applied statistical tests to the kinds of changes formerly catalogued anecdotally and by common sense.

One crucial issue Greeley paid close attention to was the attitude of Catholic parishioners, priests and bishops to the official Church teaching on birth control.

In 1960 Harvard professor Dr. John Rock, a devout Catholic and daily communicant, along with Dr. Irving Pincus introduced Enovid, the first oral contraceptive for women.⁴⁸ Enovid was inexpensive, convenient and, for most women, safe and relatively free of side effects. When taken correctly it was nearly one hundred per cent effective. Because the “pill” consisted of hormones normally present in a woman’s body, it was judged by many to be a more natural method of birth control than barrier methods such as the condom and the diaphragm. Oral contraception quickly achieved tremendous popularity among American women including Catholic women.

Pope Paul VI appointed a commission in 1964 to review the Church’s position on birth control generally and the pill in particular. This group included experts in theology, medicine, sociology, and canon law as well as an American married couple who founded the Christian Family Movement. The majority of the group issued a confidential report that concluded that the ban on “artificial” methods of birth control—all methods except rhythm and abstinence—could and should be changed. Pope Paul rejected the recommendation of his commission, and reaffirmed the prohibition against birth control in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

The document was greeted with a firestorm of protest and anguish. Archbishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin told Greeley, “Often I can’t sleep at night because of what that goddamn encyclical is doing in my diocese.”⁴⁹ Many bishops, priests and most lay people did not simply accept the papal judgment in a traditional manner. Initially many protests were staged around the world and some remarkable objections voiced on high levels. Most people became indifferent to church pronouncements; some intellectuals and scientists, like Dr. Rock who had served on the Pope’s commission were deeply disillusioned by the Pope’s determination, but people did not leave the Church in droves. Catholics simply continued to go to church and ignore the teaching. Greeley observed:

“A new era in Catholic life in the United States was dawning, an era of ‘do it yourself’ or ‘selective’ Catholicism, in which men and women would affiliate with the Church and engage in regular religious practice, but on their own terms and according to their own judgments, no longer listening to the church as arbiter of sexual ethics.”⁵⁰

During the final quarter of the Twentieth Century, American Catholics were thinking for themselves and solving complex life problems with reason just as Sheen, from the television screen had encouraged them to do. Another priest, Andrew M. Greeley, was to become a force in the popular arena, gain fame, shape religious thought and articulate the concerns of his time. The medium would no longer be radio or television, but the romantic novel.

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Chapter 3: Fulton J. Sheen - A Mixed Message

If you have a sense of the hope in store for you, you will be delivered from all hurtful passions and you will put in your soul the image of God’s love for man.  Jean le Solitaire

Gandhi may share an archaic model of human sexuality with Catholic clergy such as Fulton Sheen, but he makes no attempt to package that bitter pill in sugared rhetoric. He presents it with the simplicity of his own diet, challenging Orwell and the would-be celibate alike to consider its savor and decide for themselves whether it is to their liking. Fulton Sheen chooses to offer the same ingredients with a different recipe.

The genre of autobiography raises the expectation of a personal narrative—and a narrative is a story of events in time. Yet temporality is entirely lacking in Sheen’s account of his celibacy. The struggle for, and achievement of, celibacy appears to be a static balance of forces from the moment one takes the vow until death or lapse ends the celibate practice. The process of change and progress toward achievement and integration of celibacy, which can be observed in every authentic celibate narrative, is either hidden or absent in Sheen’s conception. While such a flat and abstract narrative could be construed as an expression of permanent achievement, the recurrence of certain disturbing patterns in Sheen’s description of sexuality suggests instead a failure to fully integrate celibate understanding as a lived, rather than merely professed practice.

Sheen’s claim at the outset that, “celibacy is not higher, marriage is not lower” forms the core of his mixed message about celibacy. Sheen demonstrated his perception that his contemporary audience expected a moral witness that upheld the democratization rather than privileging of the spiritual vocation. He desperately tried to respond to their expectations with phrases. His arguments, however, belied his real convictions.

The failure of Sheen’s witness reveals itself in his descriptions of his relationships with his inmost self, his God, and others—celibate and non-celibate alike. Sheen is caught in a religious culture where spiritual relationships rely on vertical hierarchies called “states of perfection.” That stance is direct contradiction to the sense that “all are one,” as witnessed in celibate maturity. Only at such a point can the sense of having transcended the self to a level beyond sexuality, beyond the distinctions between male and female, Black and White, slave and free, become truly meaningless.

Sheen attempts to disguise this hierarchization with a kind of rhetorical shell game. Sheen accounts for celibacy in his “autobiography” as if he were writing a promotional pamphlet, disarming his reader with conciliatory arguments while defending himself behind an abstract and metaphorical style of “reflections” rather than a narrative of witness—so unlike that of St. Augustine.

The reader can choose either to be lulled by pleasant phrases into accepting Sheen’s institutional coda, or to go on the offensive, reading through the metaphors, listening for the double entendres, and exploding the simulated coherence of those pat arguments. That choice might appear to be simply one between a religious or skeptical reception of Sheen’s message. There is another alternative, however. A critical reading allows the recuperation of whatever witness to the celibate life underlies this sermon. Applying the key that the author’s title, Treasure in Clay, offers, the reader can sift the silt off of Sheen’s rhetoric to discover what of real value remains in the pan.

Sheen’s mixed message unfolds in two ways: first there is the assertion of an ideal without any narrative of its practice, process, or achievement; second there is the effort to distinguish the celibate from the herd through negative externals rather than a sense of inner worth. Sheen uses a “chaste” discourse that is charged with sexual innuendo and reveals the inadequacy of his model of sexuality. He evades the reality of his own practice by tending to channel sexuality into a series of metaphors of unsuccessful sublimation. These become evident in a rhetoric of violence—violence toward women, toward self, and even toward Christ.

Violence toward women in Sheen’s account of his celibacy takes two forms. The first is the catalogue of misogynist clichés. Perhaps they can be understood as a cultural hangover from his Victorian past. Nonetheless, they promoted the anti-women tradition, often identified with a celibate hierarchy. The institutional nature of this violence is expressed by the quaint and unoriginal wording chosen by Sheen. Woman as temptress, is “a hank of hair,” a “Jezebel.” Woman as bad wife is defined as not sexually fulfilling—“the shrew.” Ironically, he contrasts her to “a lovely, beautiful wife,” not a loving one. This subtle linking of the bad wife and the temptress, both of whom are given the blame for man’s infidelity, runs throughout Sheen’s imagery. He credits the husband who loves his wife intensely having little problem with fidelity; the man subjected to constantly quarreling is often in search of greener pastures. The guilt is quietly shifted to the woman as shrew and fallow field.

The second level of violence is more ominous, both because it is physical, and because it is expressed more idiosyncratically, giving a disturbing glimpse of Sheen’s personal conception of the normal relations between men and women:

“A husband would never say, ‘I know I gave my wife a black eye; I also gave her a bloody nose; I beat her, but I did not bite her ear.’ If the husband truly loves his wife, he will not begin to draw distinctions about how much he hurt her.”

This analogy is made in the service of illustrating another even more sublime relationship: that of the priest with Christ. But the weight of the analogy with spouse abuse, in itself apparently unremarkable to Sheen, is maintained and, while not legitimated, disturbingly normalized by the metaphorical sadomasochism of his love of Christ.

Sheen’s favorite scriptural analogy for the priest’s struggle is that of Jacob wrestling with the angel—the Heavenly Wrestler who finally touched the nerve in Jacob’s thigh and paralyzed it—an image itself rife with sexual innuendo. Similarly, the celibate struggles not with temptation, but with Christ himself; and the narration of this struggle combines metaphors of masturbation with a sadomasochistic interplay of pleasure and pain reminiscent of the anticlerical satires of the Marquis himself:

“So in our lives, Christ sets Himself up as our adversary in the dark night of the soul in which we are full of shame for what has been done. As we wrestle with the great adversary…we hang our heads in shame.… We grope around in the darkness and forget that even in the darkness He is wrestling with us bidding us to return.…”

“The Spirit lusts against the flesh and the flesh lusts against the Spirit. It is not so much the wrong that we have done; it is rather how we have smeared the image.”

The crowning achievement of Sheen’s struggle appears to be a love of Christ based on self-hatred: “It is because of His love that I loathe myself. It is His mercy which makes me remorseful.”26 The physical and sensual imagery of smeared images, fouled raiment, and groping in darkness accompanying the obsession with shame, wounds, and pain are psychologically provocative.

Gandhi’s celebration of a similar renunciation of self and the senses opened the possibility for humility and a greater acceptance of human weakness in general. Sheen describes an experience of self-loathing tinged with contempt, and thinly veiled condescension that seems to embrace the vast majority of his fellow mortals.

Sheen reserves sharp criticism for the lapsed celibate—those who reach a spiritual crisis when young in the priesthood and others who fail at a late age either from weakness or defects in their own character.27 But he does not demonstrate either empathy or understanding of the developmental struggles involved in the various stages of celibate practice in spite of the personal implications raised by his reflections on the “dark night.” He gives no clue to the developmental history of his own practice, but his use of the first person plural voice does not completely take away the impression that the voice of personal experience speaks through his analogy of a struggle.

Sheen’s allegory of the cross in which “Heaven and Hell meet” also holds some personal hints. Hell is the realization of the part our infidelity played in the crucifixion. Heaven is our remaining faithful, or our return to ask pardon.

The reader cannot ascertain what constitutes a celibate transgression, or slip, and what is a betrayal. The reader is simply told is that the author is one of “we priests who have never broken our vow.”28 Sheen’s aggressive tone toward the “imperfect” celibate seems to be directed to those who abandon the priesthood rather than those who exist in some compromising situation still within the celibate caste. Is it a mechanism, whereby he can pillory an isolated other while dissolving his own shame into the common pool of Original Sin?

The most disturbing mixed message of all, however, is the elaborate rhetorical ruse by which Sheen attempted to fool his presumably committed, though non-celibate Catholic readers. Initially he flattered their choice of worldly love. Sheen’s essay on celibacy began with the express goal of dispelling the assumption that marriage is less holy in the divine plan than celibacy. He boldly proclaims that both are good, complementary, and not competitive. Celibacy is not higher; marriage is not lower.

Despite his professed stance, every one of Sheen’s metaphors do nothing but reestablish a relationship of condescending superiority. Marriage belongs to the secular world, uses alternating current, travels by roadway, labors with hand tools and reason, etc. Celibacy, by contrast, deals with the spiritual world, uses direct current, travels by air, and positively vibrates with intuition, poetry, and dreams. The legitimate source of authority is clear. The attributes of celibacy are firmly aligned along a vertical axis, not horizontally.

By contrast, Gandhi’s blunt and insulting distinction between celibate and non-celibate seems refreshingly honest and a better, even if flawed, basis for achieving community between both groups. Difference, no matter how value-laden the attributes of distinction, is still not a claim of superiority and, in this case, of being “higher”—that is, literally closer to heaven.

Sheen first implicitly, then explicitly, contradicts his claim that celibate and married loves share the same plane. He even constructed a new set of metaphorical connotations that claimed celibacy is sensually higher by pointing out that the libido has a potential for superiority and not merely a means of intensifying the unity of husband and wife.

Sheen attempts to use psychological arguments similar to the Victorian and Hindu theory of “spermatic economy”—a quantifying vision of the libido through which the libido may be spent or harbored. He appealed to Carl Jung who held that spiritual transformation involved holding back some of the libido that would otherwise be “squandered” in sexuality.

Sheen’s positive understanding of this process of “holding back the sum of libido” is naïve at best, manipulative at worst. Pop-psychology, whether fielded by psychologists or priests, is consistently characterized by an evasion of the ambivalent nature of all sublimation. The sublimation involved in celibacy, rather than being simply “superior,” shares in a process connected with all human experiences of love.

The spermatic economy thesis and its opposite, the optimistic thesis that postulates genital gratification as the route to liberation or health, both share a limited and mechanistic model of human sexuality. Both positions ignore the real basis for mutual respect and a shared reality between celibate and non-celibate—the ambivalence of sublimation as a universal human experience.

In his concluding paragraphs Sheen’s mixed message becomes clear. The argument with which he first wooed the reader, that nether form of love is higher, dissolves before his testimony that “I never felt I gave up love in taking the vow of celibacy; I just chose a higher love.”29

How can an observer square this statement with his “celibacy is not higher; marriage is not lower”? The reader is left with the disquieting sense that he has been following a shell game about human sexuality while Sheen slowly tilted the table from the horizontal to the vertical, attempting to disguise a spiritual hierarchy behind a spurious veneer of equality.

Pope Benedict XVI issued his first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, on January 25, 2006. It is a beautiful statement about love that lacks any hint of misogyny or the double dealing demonstrated by Sheen. He points out the beauty of sex within a committed love relationship. Among other things he suggests that sex within that love relationship fosters closeness, generosity and service. He, of course, could not yet deal with the committed love relationship between homosexuals, but his openness does not put down charity in any forum or even hint at glorifying celibacy above married love. The playing field of Christian love is leveled a good deal.

The force of Eros was too big for even a great mind like Sheen to incorporate into a coherent picture, and the facets of celibacy were too complex, to be so easily manipulated without exposing his mixed message. Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est, 2006, attempted to approach Eros in a more sophisticated and rational way than Sheen. But the pope was not struggling to explain his own celibacy.

When analyzing Sheen’s relation to his own sexuality, one wonders who is playing with whom. How much is a designed defense of a religious state and how much is an unconsciously determined avoidance of personal revelation of celibate struggle and achievement?

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Chapter 4: Fr Andrew M. Greeley - THE PAPERBACK PRIEST

An autobiography can distort: facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.  -  V.S. Naipaul

Andrew M. Greeley is a priest, sociologist, and storyteller. To those who expressed their amazement by quizzing the source of the voluminous productivity that has brought him to public attention, his response is classic: “Celibacy, hard work, and maybe a little talent, too.”

Unlike Charles Coughlin, Greeley has no secular political agenda; nor does he preach a volatile social message of hate. Clearly, Greeley is not anti-Semitic—in fact, he has been frankly ecumenical. Greeley’s expressed political positions resist categorization. In a broad sense, though, he tends to be liberal on social issues like racial justice and gender equality, and libertarian on economic issues.

Unlike Fulton Sheen, Greeley has not been known for a particular interest in missionary work. Although Greeley certainly preached in parishes on weekends, he was not a televangelist—unlike Sheen. Like Sheen, however, Greeley has commanded intellectual respect—not for philosophy, but for social science. How then does Greeley fit in with a fascist radio priest of the 1930s and a conservative television priest of the 1950s?

First of all Greeley, like Coughlin and Sheen before him, has enjoyed tremendous popularity. Greeley is a literary figure; his readership, particularly of his novels, is estimated at over twenty million. At one time Coughlin’s radio audience was estimated at forty million; but his listeners could tune in for free, and his radio career was limited essentially to one decade. Sheen’s television audience, at its height, was estimated at thirty million. The programs’ sponsors, too, treated his viewers to his broadcasts. Greeley’s audience for the most part has to pay for his words, and his novels consistently make bestseller lists. Each man extended his ministry far beyond any parish or institutional boundaries by way of the mail he received. With their huge followings, all three priests deserve to be called media stars.

Many authors, radio, and television personalities have reached audiences in the tens of millions. How, then, do Coughlin, Sheen, and Greeley stand apart from myriad other media stars? One difference between Coughlin and the Lone Ranger, between Sheen and Milton Berle, between Greeley and Harold Robbins, lies in the fact that each of these men has had something profound to say.

Nobody ever accused the Lone Ranger, Milton Berle, or Harold Robbins of profundity. But Coughlin, Sheen, and Greeley have made serious efforts to address current problems. Coughlin addressed political economy and the Great Depression as they related to the Catholic Church’s stand on social justice. Sheen discussed the relationship of science and society to reason and religion. Greeley has considered the place of sexuality and democracy in the modern church. Coughlin, Sheen, and Greeley thus share not only popularity but also a serious concern with contemporary issues.

Finally—and most importantly—all three of our “stars” are Catholic priests. This special status has privileged their words for millions of listeners, viewers, or readers.

Coughlin gave his listeners permission to act: to vote for FDR; to join unions; to write to their Congressmen in support of the New Deal; and later, regrettably, to attack Jewish-owned businesses and engage in street battles.

Sheen also gave his viewers permission: permission to think logically; to define their terms; to consider root causes and conduct thought experiments; to integrate their conclusions into a coherent worldview.

Greeley, through his novels, gave his readers permission to think about sexuality—even of priests’ sexuality—and about the authoritarian structure of his church outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church’s official moral teachings. He encouraged his readers to think analogically; specifically, to think about what, up to that point, could not be coherently stated in the language of the Church.

Before proceeding further, however, a digression is in order. The  prospect of analogical thinking needs consideration, since it is the key to understanding Greeley’s work, and the man himself.

REASON AND MYTH

One of the weaknesses, as well as one of the great strengths, of logic as practiced by Aristotle, the Scholastics, Descartes, and Kant is that it cannot admit contradiction. Aristotelian logic corresponds very well to mathematical thinking, including Euclidean geometry and algebra. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as mathematics grew ever more sophisticated, logic grew in importance and prestige. Moreover, when Newton was able to quantify physical theories—for example, of gravity and of celestial dynamics—the triumph of logic seemed complete. All that remained was for investigators to fill in the gaps linking physical phenomena to psychology, ethics, and politics.

Such, at least, was the project of La Mettrie, whose book Man A Machine proposed the famous slogan “The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” Condorcet sought to apply mathematical formulae to political events. These systems, however, tended to break down almost as soon as they were proposed: Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste and Le Neveu de Rambeau are direct expressions of his failure to construct a “scientific” system of ethics, set in comic dramatic form. By the end of the eighteenth century, Kant used his famous “antinomies” to demonstrate that logic alone can say nothing about the ultimate nature of reality.¹

At various times in its history, the logical view of reality appeared to conflict with Catholic religious teaching that glorified “blind” faith and obedience. The most basic problems of religion—problems such as the nature of Christ, the origin of evil, and the methods by which salvation is to be achieved—transcend the simple rules of systematic logic. How can Jesus be both human and divine at the same time? Why would a God of goodness permit evil in the world? Can individuals accomplish their own salvation? If not, what should they do?

Troubled by the apparent contradictions inherent in such questions, people in the ancient world tended to adopt radical positions and split off from the Church. Such schisms—even expressed in civil war—were a serious problem during the first millennium of the church’s existence. In the twelfth century, Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle, which postulated a difference between scientific truth and religious truth, provoked a storm of controversy in the Universities, a storm that could only be quelled by the intellect of St. Thomas Aquinas.

With the incredible advances in astronomy, geography, physics, and biology following the Renaissance, St. Thomas’s synthesis of reason and faith was itself called into question. Many thinkers, including the French encyclopedists, solved the dilemma by denying any validity to religious thought. Although Kant refuted the totalitarian claims of pure reason, totalitarian claims of “science” still persist in Western culture. The psychology of B.F. Skinner expressed it as determinism. The philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre expounded it as nihilism. Wittgenstein and Quine embraced it in positivism. Moreover, “scientism” has been in continual crisis since at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even as science continues to advance and to provoke serious questions for religion. It is fair to say that since St. Augustine’s era, the crisis of faith vs. logic has been a constant in the history of the Church.

One of the most reprehensible—but also, it seems, one of the most persistent—approaches to the conflict of reason and religion has been violence. Violent action was the approach favored by Church authorities in ancient and Medieval culture.

The Crusades and multiple anti-Semitic campaigns serve as horrific examples of the Church’s use of violence to control. Indeed, the Inquisition was a response to the threat of violence: the Church had lost control of the princes, who in turn had lost control of the mob; both were energized by the heresies that challenged the ultimate authority of Catholicism. Violence in support of either reason vs. religion or vice versa, also fueled the wars that wracked Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, and the Spanish and Mexican civil wars.

Violence, too, was the response Charles Coughlin elicited from his listeners—at least after 1936—when he encouraged his listeners to solve the distress of the Depression by attacking Jews. And Greeley’s mythical cleric, the fictional Blackie Ryan, repeatedly reveals his strong violent streak.

Sheen appealed to the neo-Thomistic mode of solving the discourse between religion and science. He was convinced that reason, thinking life through, would lead to the conclusion that “truth is one.” He used a dialectical approach; he yoked reason and faith and resolved apparent contradictions by transcending them, leaving the logical system intact.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a kind of “science of the concrete,” as Lévi-Strauss called it, took shape in the new sciences of anthropology and psychoanalysis. These approaches enter into a metaphoric mode of thought, suspending, for a time, the rules of logic in order to allow the mind to operate according to its own rules. The language of dreams, the thought processes of children, and the evolution of myths all obey a logic of their own. This logic permits one object to “be” another object; it dissolves the boundaries between symbol and referent to permit the operation of magic.

Myth represents a way out of the impasses of logic and point of view, not as a superior logic disclosed by the dialectic, but as an immediate totality.

Contrasting scientific language with myth, the Egyptologists H. and H.A. Frankfort write:

“Our modern desire to capture a single picture is photographic and static, where the Egyptian’s picture was cinematic and fluid. For example we should want to know in our picture whether the sky was supported on posts or was held up by a god; the Egyptian would answer: “Yes, it is supported by posts or held up by a god—or it rests on walls, or it is a cow, or it is a goddess whose arms and feet touch the earth.” Any one of these pictures would be satisfactory to him, according to his approach.”²

The function of mythic discourse is profound. Myth eschews objective language for a coherent narrative that involves the speaker directly in a personal relationship with the universe. Its intent is not mere entertainment. The ancient myth-makers did not intend to provide intelligible explanations of the natural phenomena. They were recounting events in which they were involved to the limits of their very existence. Their narratives reflected what they experienced directly. The images of myth are products of the imagination, but they are not merely fantasy. “True myth presents its images and its imaginary actors, not with the playfulness of fantasy, but with a compelling authority. It perpetuates the revelation of a thou.”³

Mythic assumptions underlay all scientific approaches. The biologist, E.O. Wilson acknowledges that the philosophers of science call these assumptions paradigms. In the physical sciences these paradigms tend to be very much reduced, so that almost anybody can supply the suppositions: cause must precede effect; an object is identical only with itself; no object can be in two places at once; the speed of light sets limits to time, etc. The myths underlying the physical sciences are abstract enough that researchers seldom have to worry about them.

In the case of the social sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, questions of paradigm tend to be less obvious and more complex.

Religion poses its perennial challenge to reason. But Wilson, in his search for a synthesis of ways of knowing reality points out that, “Doctrine draws on the same creative springs as science and the arts, and its aim being the extraction of order from the mysteries of the material world. To explain the meaning of life it spins mythic narratives.”⁴

Greeley discovered myth—analogical thinking. By means of that discovery, Greeley was able to express his identity as a priest, sociologist, and storyteller. His life provides one key for understanding priestly celibacy.

THE PRIEST

Greeley was born on February 5, 1928 to a Chicago-Irish-Catholic family. Each of these elements is so tightly bound to Greeley’s identity that he is unimaginable without any one of them. His sociological work and his novels revolve around or interweave these elements so consistently and profoundly that the stamp of his spiritual geography becomes a trademark.

Greeley was the first-born of four children; a sister who followed died—essentially at birth—of spina bifida. His sister Grace, two years his junior, was chronically ill; Greeley supported her care and was personally attentive to her throughout her life. In his first autobiography, Greeley made the point that (unlike so many other Irish families) there is no schizophrenia in his family; close family friends, however, identify this as his sister’s affliction.

Greeley, in contrast to Tennessee Williams, has not made use of the experience of an incapacitating illness of a sibling in any decipherable way in his novels. Greeley was especially close to his youngest sister, Mary Jule, her husband, children, and extended family. Early in his priesthood they owned a beachfront home together. Both Greeley and Mary Jule received doctorates from the University of Chicago—he in sociology, she in theology. They  cooperated on professional projects and coauthored books.

Greeley’s parents, married in 1927, were a hard-working couple who initially enjoyed enough prosperity to live in a substantial middle class home in a good Chicago neighborhood, take a summer home on Grand Beach, Michigan, and travel—quite elegantly for the time—by train to Mississippi.

The Great Depression hit Greeley’s family hard. It altered the family economy, necessitating a shift in employment and a move to more modest quarters. Hard work was the paramount family value and excellence was an unwavering expectation. Greeley told a priest friend that, as a boy, if he brought home a grade of ninety-nine on a school project, his father would ask him why he hadn’t gotten one hundred.

Greeley’s Catholicism is expressed in his priesthood that subordinates, or rather interweaves, all the other elements of his identity. Greeley the man and Greeley the priest are indistinguishable. Greeley decided to be a priest when he was in the second grade. Certainly, his home was congenial to religious practice and custom, but he denies any overt parental pressure to be a priest like Coughlin experienced from his mother. In fact, Greeley’s father was in general skeptical about “the cloth”—having known his share of unhappy, alcoholic priests—and wanted his son to attend a high school that offered ROTC. But thirteen-year-old Greeley, acting on a decision made six years earlier, entered Quigley high school, and began formal training for the priesthood. The scholastic aptitude that marked him the “smartest in the class” in grade school continued when he entered this minor seminary.

Greeley matriculated to St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein on schedule to follow his studies in philosophy and theology. Like so many priests educated in the 1940s and 1950s, he found the seminary training regimented, rigid, sterile, and not intellectually challenging.

Seminaries in the era before the Second Vatican Council were “total institutions.” The seminary allowed little freedom of choice—unlike universities, which offered latitude in course selection, lifestyle, values, friendships, daily routine, and schedule. The institution tried to mold and discipline the young mind and heart into a devout priest by controlling every element of his life. The mediocrity, misogyny, and air of juvenile peevishness that pervades some seminaries came also to mark some of the students who passed through its system of indoctrination.

Seminaries offered no direct instruction covering sexuality or celibacy. The system reasoned that its requirement of weekly confession and a designated spiritual director would imbue the student with all he needed to know about sex. Celibacy meant complete and perfect abstinence from all sexual thoughts and actions. Confession was the place to deal with any questions or lapses of control. The rest would come as he practiced his ministry and helped others deal with their sexual problems.

Greeley was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1954. He was assigned as assistant pastor to a suburban Chicago parish, Christ the King. He was an enthusiastic, energetic, creative, and successful curate in every regard save one—his relationship with his pastor. Many young curates have empathy for Greeley’s experience with his pastor, who he found petty, tyrannical, and jealous.

A review of the full range of Greeley’s works convinces the reader that the great significance for Greeley in this curate-pastor conflict must be rooted in his early family experience. He has demonstrated a lifelong desire and effort to please authority and an equally strong disappointment at being rejected. However painful Greeley found his ten years of pastoral work, he permanently incorporated the role of parish priest into his identity and a parish life similar to the one he experienced at Christ the King informs many of his novels.

The unpleasantness of the relationship with his pastor did not bridle or crush Greeley’s creativity or intellectual ambition, nor did it deprive him of a firm footing from which to deal with authority. Quite the contrary. It drove him to look for additional outlets for his considerable talents. He asked for, and received permission from his major superior, Cardinal Meyer, to study sociology at the University of Chicago. It was a bold move for both men; many religious leaders held the social sciences suspect in 1960.

GOD’S SOCIOLOGIST

Just as his advanced degree in philosophy offered Sheen an avenue into academia and beyond, so Greeley’s 1961 Ph.D. in sociology opened a door to his future on the national scene. His early research was not a developed sociology of religion, but rather a sociology of interest for religion. He began his career by studying Catholic education. He accepted as his thesis the prevailing assumption that the graduates of Catholic schools did not do as well professionally as graduates of public high schools: that was, they did not go as far in school, did not enter the professions in comparable numbers, did not rise as high in their careers. Greeley found, however, that the conventional wisdom was false. In fact, graduates of Catholic schools did significantly better than graduates of public schools.

The results, published in 1966, as The Education of Catholic Americans, brought Greeley to national attention. In January I969, Time Magazine referred to Greeley, already three years on the full time staff of the National Opinion Research Center, as, “one of the shrewdest observers of U.S. Catholic life.”⁵

The Second Vatican Council, which Greeley attended as an observer in l964, was crucial to his development and thinking. The Council emboldened him to visualize the role of the priest—now in the role of facilitator and community builder rather than a lawgiver. He pleaded for the development of a sense of professionalism and intellectual curiosity among priests. Like Sheen, he preached that priests should think for themselves and not use obedience as a cover for dependency.⁶

Greeley defended the rule of celibacy for priests, but recognized that some men join the priesthood to avoid the stresses of dealing with women. Along with others like Fr. Eugene Kennedy, Greeley began to write about sexuality as a reality of the priest’s existence. This line of critical thinking plus Greeley’s definition of contemplation as a “dreaming and imagining” conditioned by poetry, fiction, drama, music, and art already set Greeley’s direction from sociology to storytelling, although it would be another decade before he published his first novel.⁷

Greeley had to complete some serious sociological studies before he found his role as a mythmaker. Humanae Vitae, the disastrous papal encyclical issued in 1968 that reiterated the traditional ban on artificial birth control including the Pill, riled priests as well as the faithful around the world. Greeley used his training to investigate the effects of the encyclical. He concluded that the Church teaching on sexuality had a negative effect on church attendance and financial support.

Greeley divined the trend of the times. Many priests and laypersons would reject the Church as an authority in sexual matters; priests and nuns would leave their vocations in increasing numbers, and fewer men and women would enter religious life; the hierarchy would suffer a crisis of authority. By the end of the century all these predictions had materialized.

Sociology gave Greeley a firm foundation to speak his mind about a variety of religious issues: priests, papal elections, schools, ethnicity, sexuality, myths, and the religious imagination. In his interests, Greeley never strayed far from the concerns of people in the pews. Early in his career he wrote practical guides for young men and young women in the form of “letters” and a guide for adolescents. Greeley argued for a dynamic view of sexuality—one that opened one person to another and thus, eventually, to God.

Greeley’s early model of sexuality was somewhat conventional and almost Victorian. He viewed a boy’s naturally aggressive nature to be exaggerated by sexual attraction. As a result, the boy strives even harder to achieve in order to impress the one he loves. Greeley viewed the girl as “sweet and charming and all that,” but giggly and superficial until she falls in love with a “real” man. Greeley evidenced no awareness of a homosexual stage in normal psychosexual development, or of the homosexual component in normal male competitiveness.

The model of a sexual dynamic leading one to the love of God is appealing in itself and for the consistency it confers on the world. Greeley garnered the idea not from a theologian, but from Paul Claudel’s play The Satin Slipper.

This model remains constant in his early work. There appears some nervous caution on Greeley’s part when he stated: “Even if we pass over all the sins and the selfishness that pose under the name of love, we can’t ignore the terrible narrowness that sexual attraction often introduces into the life of a young person.” Greeley’s novels—and his extended experience of celibacy—would later modify and refine his sexual model.⁸

Fidelity has been a consistent theme in Greeley’s reflections on sex, celibacy, marriage, and even in his writings on sexual intimacy and playfulness. He participated in a major study about sexuality and marriage in America, published under the title Faithful Attraction.

Greeley maintained that the term sexual revolution is a mere metaphor, not a reality. He, of course, was part of both the metaphor and the reality. A celibate priest was surveying human sexuality, was expounding on the sacramentality of sex, the gender of God, revealing his own sexual fantasies in the context of his priesthood—for instance, writing about the comely airline stewardess and her beautiful breasts as he praises God and turns in for the night in his celibate bed. It was a revolutionary approach in the discourse about celibacy and sexuality—powerful and effective.

The American bishops, energized by the Council, set up a number of sub-committees to study the life and ministry of priests in the United States. They selected priest-experts to direct segments: Monsignor John Tracey Ellis authored the historical survey; Fr. Eugene Kennedy directed the psychological study; Greeley and the NORC conducted the sociological investigations.

The gap between the religious critique of social and psychological issues that bishops were used to—expressing what ought to be—and the social sciences—considering what actually is—was too great for the hierarchy to bridge. In effect, the bishops rejected their own studies that were commissioned with the admonition, “not to fear to speak the truth.” Since the bishops did not have ears to hear the language of the social sciences when it conflicted with their notions of what ought to be, another language had to be used to express the same truths. Greeley already sensed that the discourse would continue in the language of myth, and the truth would be told in the form of fiction.

THE MYTHMAKER

Greeley’s transition from sociologist to novelist seemed as natural and seamless as his movement from priest to sociologist, mainly because Greeley remained Greeley. He passed intellectually from priest to sociologist to mythmaker without ceasing to be any of the three.

Greeley did not proceed immediately to compose novels. His study of myth was initially academic. His appreciation of mythic discourse grew as he explored the sociology of religion and felt the need for the development of an internal—holistic—approach in a field that favored external—codifiable—procedures. Greeley’s study gave him an appreciation for the near universality of fundamental structures of religious experience and expression.⁹ He learned a healthy critique of the limitations of the scientific method and that the “quest for truth was an exercise in model fitting.”¹⁰

Greeley proceeded with his sociological training on three fronts: popular sociology written as literature, advanced consideration of models, and finally the writing of imaginative fiction. He used his sociological insights to describe the operation of mythic structures in religion—The Jesus Myth, The Mary Myth, The Catholic Myth, and God In Popular Culture—finally extending his observations by way of novels into the mythopoetic exploration of reality.

Theologian David Tracy notes:

“In the course of his remarkable intellectual career, Andrew Greeley has illuminated the pervasiveness of symbols in our social and personal, our secular and religious lives.”^11,12

Although Greeley had written fiction since the 1950s—mostly inspirational stories for young people—by 1979 and 1980, he was ready to incorporate his experiences into novels. His first two works were not immediate commercial successes, but they were paradigms of all that were to follow. From the very beginning, Greeley crammed all his theology, sociology, pastoral experience, and life into his stories. Of his first book, one critic commented:

“The Magic Cup, the Holy Grail, thus emerges as the central and most significant symbol in Greeley’s writings, for, even more than the literary form of the romance (though inseparable from it), the Grail theme allows him to combine his two loves for the Catholic Church and his Irish heritage, while simultaneously permitting him to pursue the theological topics of the sacramentality of sexuality and the womanliness of God.”¹³

Thus, Greeley passed from sociologist to mythmaker.

Greeley’s second book was a mystery, Death in April. The setting: Chicago; the protagonist: a successful novelist; the theme: the courageous hero rediscovers and saves his first love. The mystery genre, which has included all of the elements of this novel, would latter develop and come to full bloom in the character and escapades of Blackie Ryan—a fictional priest serving as a Greeley alter ego.

Before that, however, Greeley was to score a blockbuster commercial success with his 1981 novel, The Cardinal Sins. It is the story of “Two Irish boys growing up on the West Side of Chicago, discovering themselves, awakening to desire, dealing with faith…then entering the priesthood. One rises to the center of power—the other remains a parish priest. Each must deal with the love of a woman—in his own way.”¹⁴

Father Kevin Brennan is the narrator, and “speaks at times” for the author. He remains celibately devoted to the church over the thirty-three-year narrative. Patrick Donohue, proud and ambitious, becomes a shell of piety and a Cardinal. As boys, they had experienced an agreeable adolescence, mostly focused around a lakeside resort. They struggled with the prospect of being priests and the issue of celibacy.

After high school, but before seminary, the boys are allowed to date girls. They engage in flirtation and mild sexual experimentation. Kevin, for instance, goes skinny-dipping with Ellen Foley, a fifteen-year-old friend. Patrick’s dalliance with Maureen Cunningham goes much further, but ends short of intercourse.

These passages form a paradigm for the novel and Greeley’s treatment of celibacy. A lake and skinny-dipping are recurrent images in Greeley’s myths, representing a quasi sexual but still sanctifying experience. Patrick’s lifelong sadomasochistic attitude toward women is apparent: he wants sex with Maureen in order to “teach her a lesson.” When Maureen proves willing—“she gave up, as if resigned to losing her virginity”—he loses all interest in her, and is filled with revulsion.¹⁵ This passage echoes the behavior and feelings of J.T. Farrell’s “hero” Studs Lonigan in the cab scene with Lucy. The reactions of these young men illustrate the ambivalence toward celibacy and sexuality typical of adolescent boys.

Greeley’s Kevin and Pat move from summer vacation and the ill-defined and ambivalent world of adolescent sexuality into the “homosocial” world of the seminary. “If you lock up a couple of hundred lonely young men, attachments can get to be a problem.”¹⁶ Pat develops a problematic emotional attachment to another seminarian; Kevin rescues Pat’s career by getting the other seminarian kicked out of school. Pat then turns his sexual attention to a girlfriend who he frequently sneaks out to meet. When seminary officials suspect Pat’s absences, Kevin again saves Pat’s career by climbing into Pat’s empty bed during bed check. [author italics]

Pat is selected to study in Rome where he continues the predatory sex of his adolescence. He blackmails a married woman into having sex with him, as Greeley puts it: “He took her brutally. As he expected, she loved it. Back in his room, he sobbed in disgust and self-hatred, and murmured an act of contrition.”¹⁷ [author italics] This pattern of cruelty and contrition escalates as he subsequently fathers a child with this woman, has a number of lovers, and develops a long-term affair with his childhood love, Maureen Cunningham. In contrast to Pat, Kevin keeps his promise of celibacy. He also maintains close and lasting friendships with Maureen and with Ellen Foley.

Toward the end of the novel, Greeley shifts genre, leaving the format of the introspective Bildungsroman—“novel of development” like A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man or Of Human Bondage—to become a novel of adventure, piling episode on episode with little space for reflection. All four characters are involved with Vatican and Mafia intrigues. Pat becomes a Cardinal but it is Kevin, the parish priest, who displays the real political power by circumventing authoritarian incompetence and enlisting a higher power to aid his efforts—to save the Church from financial scandal and an inept Pope, and Pat from blackmailers. [author italics]

Greeley creates in Kevin a priest adept at using violence—a gun, explosives, karate, harboring murderous impulses—to further his ends of saving Pat and the Church. It is the task of the woman—in another of Greeley’s leitmotivs—to save the hero from his own murderous impulses.¹⁸

When Greeley says that “The principal theme of The Cardinal Sins—obviously and self-evidently, I would have thought—is that God’s love pursues the four main characters through their human loves, sometimes licit, sometimes not, always with a sexual component, but never with a compulsion to sin,” he is really describing the sacramentality of Kevin’s love. Kevin’s celibacy takes the direction of “vicarious sex”: sexually abstinent himself, he is repeatedly involved with Pat’s sexual transgressions saving Pat from the consequences of his sexual activity.¹⁹ Likewise, Kevin barred from actually having sex with Ellen, he nonetheless manages to give her sexual satisfaction through and improved relationship with her husband.

All of Greeley’s novels are peopled with a variety of priests, but the 1982 and 1983 novels have a priest as protagonist and the same theme of his 1981 book. Nowhere does Greeley come entirely to terms with his sexual tension and anxiety.

In contrast, James Joyce does in fact resolve his adolescent sexual conflicts in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Indeed, Greeley having forcefully presented the nexus of sexual—and oedipal—anxiety and celibacy in The Cardinal Sins, he actually backs away from it step by step in his subsequent novels.

In Thy Brother’s Wife (1982) sexual intercourse involving a priest occurs only once and the character quickly repudiates his lover, returning to a celibate state. The central character in Ascent into Hell (1983) alternates sequentially between goodness (= celibacy) and evil (= sexual activity) without ever resolving the conflict.

Lord of the Dance (1984) externalizes evil (and sexuality). In place of The Cardinal Sins’ two priests, Pat, the sexually active “bad” one and Kevin, the celibate “good” one—paired like halves of a single personality—Father Ace is entirely good, and entirely celibate. This novel introduces seminarian Blackie Ryan as a personality.

Elements of vicarious sex, the magical use of violence, the manipulation of the power system, and Greeley’s characteristic mode of relating to fact and perception—denying the contrary of a proposition and thereby suggesting the proposition without ever actually starting it positively—become increasingly important in all of Greeley’s myths.

After this set of novels, Greeley’s priest characters tend to become increasingly abstract, remote, and bloodless, eschewing entirely the possibility of adult sexuality, whether as sexual love or as consolidated celibacy. Greeley’s later novels become increasingly formulaic and avoid the essence of the celibate/sexual struggle.

Greeley presents his “good” mythical priests as rounded pastoral characters. Throughout, they can be seen praying, preaching, counseling the perplexed, mediating disputes, and supervising youth groups. They are troubled by doubts and fears, and they freely indulge in fantasies of a sexual nature; overall, however, they are hardworking and utterly devoted to their flock, to their Church, and to their God.

But Greeley imagines his priests with an inordinate influence over their parishioners. The image of the parish priest is everywhere present, even in the bathrooms of his parishioners (at least in the minds of the attractive female parishioners!). These parishioners refer marital problems, choices of career, and intergenerational disputes to their priests, who usually counsel charity and restraint, seasoned by referrals to specialists for technical problems—such as seeking psychiatric help for depression or medical help for alcoholism—a more informed pastoral stance than that of Sheen.

In one of his pastoral works Greeley proposes replacing the traditional authoritarian role of a parish priest with the model of a professor presiding over a graduate seminar.²⁰ He goes on to argue for the priest as the “Love Person” in the Christian community,²¹ and as the center of hope and vision in the parish.²²

One concomitant of Greeley’s parish-centered Catholicism is a type of insularity. Greeley goes out of his way to mock missionaries, for example, explicit denunciation of the Maryknoll missionaries and liberation theologians who “have dirty fingernails, stringy hair, and bad breath.” Greeley portrayed them as ineffectual and meriting the derision of a bishop who says: “Fuck the bastards, Blackie.”

In one way, a concern with the parish becomes a kind of xenophobic attack on missionaries. Incidentally, this hostility to missions stands in sharp contrast to the career of Fulton Sheen, who served as permanent advisor on missions to the Second Vatican Council. While Greeley is not hostile to all missionaries, his priests have an unmistakable tendency to focus on matters close to home, on family, parish, and community, and to regard the world outside the parish with a degree of detachment. The diocesan and even the Vatican halls of power appear in Greeley’s works, but even then primarily as they relate to Chicago, the parish, and its parishioners.

Certainly, Greeley’s stories inspire reflection on the meaning of Christian spirituality and sexuality and advance the discourse about the credibility of Church authority in these matters, just as Jesus did. Andrew Marsden notes the association between Greeley’s myths and the parables of Jesus:

“There is little doubt that Father Andrew M. Greeley is writing modern religious parables in his best-selling fiction which certainly seem to have found a large audience among both the Catholic and non-Catholic populations of the United States.”²³

Has Greeley’s prolific production exacted a price in the quality and richness of his mythmaking?

Lévi-Strauss’s view of the genre of the roman feuilleton—the serialized popular novel—may have relevance in reviewing the body of Greeley’s myths. Lévi-Strauss claims that ultimately the roman feuilleton distorts the pristine freshness and originality of the myth. Greeley consciously eschewed irony in his mythmaking. His “comedies of grace” necessitate a “happy” ending in which the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished. They run the risk, of establishing a closed mythical structure in which “the hero of the novel is the novel itself. It tells its own story.”

Precisely this mechanical winding down of the mythic substance—presented with such freshness in The Cardinal Sins—is what occurs in the fiction of Andrew Greeley. His investment in a few of his characters that appear repeatedly in his novels threatens to make his world claustrophobic instead of kaleidoscopic. Despite the recurring cast of characters, Greeley’s “paperbacks” are not similar to the nineteenth-century French roman fleuve novelists such as Balzac or Zola, whose empathy and identification with even the most improbable characters lent a broad spectrum of colors and textures to their fictional worlds.

Homosexual orientation becomes a significant question in considering religious celibacy since it is frequently assumed, and validated by authoritative observers, that a larger proportion of gay men enter the ministry than exist in the general population.

Greeley generally did not deal very deftly, either in his novels or his essays, with the subject of homosexuality in the priesthood. His attitude on the growing number of gays in the priesthood was to excoriate them, and warn Catholics about the dangers of “lavender rectories.” He acknowledged that good priests with a homosexual orientation could and do exist, but any gay priest character in Greeley’s novels is invariably either defective or a villain.

Kevin, the priest hero of The Cardinal Sins, and Ellen experience a powerful sexual attraction that is portrayed as salvific for both: “God attracting us to Himself/Herself through our sexual attractions to others.”²⁴ Greeley has not demonstrated that he can handle—mythically—the same celibate struggle between two men or between two women.

Not all novelists can portray gay characters with empathy. David Plante is one Catholic writer who can, and writers of varying religious and sexual backgrounds—like Graham Greene, Willa Cather, James Joyce, Georges Bernanos, and Jon Hassler—have been able to deal with the reality of gay priests with sympathy, if also with some reserve and subtlety.

SEX AND THE FAITHFUL

Greeley’s concerns in his novels extend beyond the priesthood. In fact, one reason for his staggering popularity was that he raised a singular voice from within the authoritative ranks of the clergy echoing the point of view of the experience the people in the pews were living out. His novels struggle with the religious problems of ordinary people—problems of sexuality and family, of job and community, faith and practice—on their own terms, and in their own language: for instance when a priest says, “Don’t fuck with God!”

Greeley’s characters are people with whom the reader can identify. Greeley’s Chicago novels feature people like their readers, or, more precisely, people better off than most readers, but in positions the readers could realistically attain. Greeley’s characters are all power figures, they work as psychiatrists, art dealers, judges, journalists, lawyers, investors, commodities brokers, and of course, as priests. Greeley’s characters enjoy wealth and social status: they vacation in summerhouses, eat at elegant restaurants and fly off at the drop of a designer hat to Rome or Ireland; they hobnob with the rich and famous.

But Greeley is no elitist; his characters attained their wealth by going to law school or medical school, by working hard and playing by the rules. His characters, like his readers, have extended families—ordinary families with ordinary problems—striving toward nuclear stability. In fact, most of Greeley’s Chicago novels concern two large extended families: the Farrells and the Ryans. Together, the Ryans and Farrells appear—at least as minor characters—in over half of Greeley’s published novels.

These families are multigenerational, commonly including a hero and heroine together with teenaged offspring. Older adults are on hand as advisers, and deceased ancestors are remembered—fondly or not—for their continuing impact on their descendents. Although Greeley himself describes his novels as “comedies of grace,” it may be enlightening to think of them as romances rather than comedies.

Northrop Frye divides classic works into four genres, corresponding to the seasons. According this scheme comedy is proper to youth and analogous to spring. These stories are concerned with the struggle of young lovers to overcome obstacles placed in their way by a demanding elder.

The Ulysses myth—the hero trying to find his way home to his true love—informs the plot of many of Greeley’s novels. Those novels, like James Joyce’s classic, attempt to show a hero at the height of his powers seeking, in some sense, to come back to a mature heroine.

Greeley’s couples are far from perfect: they stagger toward their goal of monogamy and family. Marriages fail as they do in the real world. Divorce is a common element in Greeley’s stories—seen as the logical and reasonable outcome of the death of a marriage, in contrast to strict Catholic teaching.

Before and between marriages, Greeley’s characters enjoy sexual relationships. Although they have sex with various partners, for the most part Greeley’s characters are serially monogamous, sticking to one partner at a time. Moreover, most of the sexual relationships in Greeley’s novels culminate in marriage and a nuclear family.

The specific sexual acts in which Greeley’s heroes and heroines indulge are strictly, even aggressively, “normal”—idealized. Homosexuality occurs in the novels but, as with Greeley’s priest characters, it is always a mark of moral evil. Lesbianism marks a Mother Superior’s evil. Similarly, a murderess is a lesbian. Only villains choose same-sex partners in Greeley’s novels, and the virtuous are decidedly “healthy.”

Masturbation is demonstrably the most universal sexual outlet for human beings—yet none of Greeley’s men or women masturbate. To be sure, the characters spend a great deal of time fantasizing about sex, but they never seem to seek release from their tension through self-stimulation.

James Joyce, raised Catholic, could describe the experience many young people suffer in a struggle with masturbation. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is described in real pain: the pain of his “fierce longings” succeeded by his “secret riots” and the pain of guilt and a “humiliating sense of transgression.” Greeley, for all his empathy for young people, is unable in any of his writings to deal with masturbation.

Greeley and his young characters maintain sexual fantasy at a certain pitch of intensity—a strategy that protects them from the pain of sexual conflict felt by Joyce’s hero.

Greeley was honored in 1993 by U.S. Catholic magazine for furthering the cause of Catholic women. His social stance is clearly pro-gender equality and anti-sexist. The epitome of Greeley’s women is reflected in his assessment of a rectory’s beautiful cook: “with her clothes off, God forbid, Brigid would be more devastating than any centerfold.” Greeley’s mythical women are indeed often idealized, but they are frequently subjected to pain, sacrifice, torture, and rape in the service of and love for a man—often a priest. The imagery of a woman in pain is a constant in Greeley’s work; descriptions of women’s feelings are shot through with sadomasochism. One character, for example, thrills to the image of herself naked on an auction block:

“I should have been offended at that disgusting image of him buying me on the slave block. Instead, I reveled in it. I would be delighted to be naked before him, powerless as he played with me and fondled me, considering whether I was worth his interest or not. Absolutely vile and repulsive. Yet it aroused me even more. Like it is doing now. What is wrong with me?”²⁵

Greeley, seemingly unaware of the sadomasochistic underlay of many of his myths, goes to great pains to establish the “health” of his women, citing especially the Song of Songs and the mystical tradition that sexual love mirrors God’s love for his people. Their asserted “normative normality” gives a clue to the “ideal” world Greeley imagines for his readers: a world where women revel in their status as salvific, if suffering, figures.

In Greeley’s ideal world, questions regarding birth control and abortions do not arise. Both issues are relevant to the status of women. Greeley’s adult women are sexually active, but unwanted pregnancies never occur. It must be assumed that they practice birth control. Birth control, in real life, is practiced and approved by the overwhelming majority of American Catholics. Here, Greeley the sociologist and the mythmaker combine without direct rejection of official Church teaching.

The question of abortion arises because Greeley subjects a number of his women—including teenaged virgins who are presumably not on the Pill—to rape over the course of his novels. Rape ties into the underlying tone of violence in many of Greeley’s myths. The rape factor allows Greeley to submit his women to sexual dominance while absolving them of any responsibility for their sexual activity; they remain “virgins” and become ”martyrs.” And while rape is not a particularly efficacious method of inducing pregnancy, in the real world pregnancies, nevertheless, do result from rape. Fortunately, the question never arises for Greeley’s women. As a result, Father Blackie and the other priests of Greeley’s world are spared the very difficult matter of advising women faced with unwanted pregnancies.

Greeley’s men and women turn to their priests for spiritual advice. It is noteworthy that Greeley’s world—unlike Sheen’s—does not exclude psychiatry as a source of enlightenment; indeed, one of his heroines is a psychoanalyst. Greeley renders his readers a considerable service by separating “real moral guilt” from neurotic guilt. Once the dross of mental illness is removed, however, there remains a residue of moral guilt, and it is this moral guilt that Greeley’s priests address.

GREELEY AND THE CELIBATE MIND

John Blackwood Ryan—Father, Monsignor, Bishop, Blackie—is a fictional priest-detective created by Greeley and featured in over a dozen of his novels.

“Blackie Ryan serves as a contrast to the shallow, selfish, insensitive, mediocre priests who abound in these stories. Blackie represents the priesthood at its best, the ideals in the priesthood that originally attracted me.”²⁶

The person of the author reveals himself or herself most clearly in the telling the story and in the mythopoetic values that prevail. In other words, what is revealed to be truly sacred and what has meaning? An author is the form-giver of the inner struggles of the characters and the adventures to which they are subjected.

In more than a dozen instances Greeley draws explicit comparisons between his character and the priest–detective Father Brown created by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a layman. Both fictional priests are important because each conveys to millions of readers an image of the Roman Catholic priesthood and Church. The insights garnered about the workings of the celibate mind that can be found in Blackie, however, are enriched by the fact that his creator is also a celibate priest. Any revelations are compounded by the fact that Greeley admits that his fictional creation sometimes speaks for the author.

Chesterton’s Brown enters the world of crime and detection seemingly at random or stumbles onto the scene of a crime “just by chance” in the performance of his pastoral work. Father Brown is virtually without political power; his personal connection with a case rests either with his link to a former sinner or by apparent chance. Father Brown’s entry into a case is motivated chiefly by a desire to move the criminal to repentance and reconciliation.

Father Blackie also holds a pastoral role in Greeley’s stories but, by contrast, the detective mostly enters into a case at the behest of a blood relative or a friend or client of the family. In other words, he comes into a case as part of an elaborate web of power involving patronage and obligation—as chaplain to one powerful Chicago Irish American clan. Father Blackie comes into the picture when this clan is threatened.

Each criminal puzzled Chesterton’s priest because the culprit could look like any body; the potential for evil lurks in every human heart. In The Hammer of God, when Father Brown corners the criminal, the following exchange ensues:   “How do you know all this? Are you a devil?” “I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart. Listen to me.”²⁷

In Father Blackie’s world, true crimes are committed only by the truly evil—those damned by their very nature. Greeley’s villains can usually be identified by their appearance: often times repulsive old men. In some sense these characters are exaggerated caricatures of “enemies,” and of the pastor who tortured young Greeley in the first years of his pastoral ministry. The satanic priest, Father Armande, has “breath like a sewer” (Happy Are the Meek); drooling and senile Harv Gunther tortures young prostitutes (Patience of a Saint); murderer Vinney Nelligan is a “dirty, kinky old man.” (Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice). Blackie can spot the truly evil, but needs to figure out which dirty, kinky old man is to blame, and then place him in the chain of causality.

Nowhere is the difference between Father Brown and Father Blackie more apparent than in the climatic scenes in which the culprit is revealed. Father Brown—unlike Greeley’s priests—abhors violence. His object is not to bring anyone to the gallows but rather to bring criminals to confession and reconciliation. Sometimes Brown simply allows the repentant murderer or thief to turn himself in or even to escape; he counters physical threat with moral admonitions. Father Brown is content to trust a sinner’s conscience and God’s mercy. An officer says, “Shall I stop him?” when a criminal is in the process of escaping. “No, let him pass,” said Father Brown with a strange deep sigh that seemed to come from the center of the universe. “Let Cain pass by, for he belongs to God.”²⁸

Greeley’s Father Blackie often acts as a kind of auxiliary to the regular police. He relishes political power and is privy to the CIA and highly placed Vatican contacts. And, like Kevin in The Cardinal Sins, he is a man capable of physical force and violence. In a scene from Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice Blackie recounts, “I jumped up, whipped the Beretta into position with both my hands, and jammed it across my desk into his forehead.” Later, the priest emphasizes his violent reaction. “(if) he had moved a millimeter closer to the gun he was in fact carrying, I would have bashed him, weak old man or not, on the skull.” The criminal is not led to repentance, but to a mental institution—a hopeless case.

In regards to violence, Brown—the product of a married layman’s mind—and Blackie—the product of a celibate priest’s mind—are strikingly at loggerheads. The discourse of confession—a dialectical process aimed at discovering a sinner’s true position before God—is at the heart of Father Brown’s universe. Father Brown reveals his humanity over and over in his interactions with other sinners who, like himself, are in need of compassion. It is out of his shared humanity that he interacts vigorously and salvifically with the criminal.

Greeley’s Blackie is a soul “hallowed by destiny.” Blackie has more the quality of the dramatic hero who, by Lukacs’ definition, is passive and lacks interiority. Lukacs holds that interiority “is the product of the antagonistic duality of the soul and the world.”²⁹ Greeley’s explicit desire is to show the church and the priesthood as instruments of God’s love. But Blackie’s struggles exist outside of him. He passively judges and brings others to justice. He is involved with tales of God’s love and salvation mediated through human love, but vengeance, torture, and retribution also have a prominent place. In Blackie’s universe the demons are in other priests and satanic, drunken, sandal-wearing, misguided, unfaithful, or otherwise irredeemable—unlike him—or the villains are reprehensible dirty old men.

The layman’s priest, Father Brown, is the incarnation of Chesterton’s understanding that there is even a Christian way to catch a criminal. The power of the sacraments and the sacramentality of human error and repentance captivate Father Brown. He follows clues with the sense of personal power conferred by simple lived truth or shared human struggle.

Author Greeley’s vocation is to be a storyteller, and he embraces that vocation as both sacred and sacramental. He claims that all of his “novels are about God’s love.”³⁰ He embraces “sacrament” in the broadest terms as whatever discloses grace—especially water, fire, food, drink, and sex. Blackie is not the central character of all the mystery series, but he is the element that “holds the stories together.” The celibate priest needs to coexist with power, money, and sex because they are essential elements of real life,³¹ and because “sex is edifying and religious and important.”³²

Central to every Greeley novel is his belief in the sacramental imagination that declares in word or picture that human passion is a hint of divine passion: “If God is love then surely S/He is present in sexual love.”³³

An understanding of Blackie Ryan is crucial to puzzle out Greeley’s celibate mind. Greeley says that Blackie was a character who lurked in his imagination of a long time and who “sometimes speaks in the author’s voice.”³⁴

What, if anything, can the mind of Blackie Ryan and his creator Andrew Greeley tell about the development and personalities of celibate priests?

GREELEY AND CELIBATE DEVELOPMENT

One basic question—and an area of justifiable fascination—is how does a man develop psychosexually without having any sexual experience? Greeley, Sheen, and Coughlin all began training for the priesthood during their adolescent years. Although none was bound by a promise of celibacy before ordination to the subdeaconate at around the age of twenty-three, sexual abstinence was expected. Greeley denies any sexual love with a woman in his young life.”³⁵

Celibate development and adjustment is not and, by its nature, cannot be identical to adjustment that centers on sexual pair-bonding and/or parenting. An examination of the developmental picture of priests offered by priests and novelists becomes crucial to an understanding of celibacy because the Catholic priesthood and celibacy have, popularly and historically, become inextricably intertwined.

Greeley treasures the compliment of a friend: “You’ve always been a teenager, Father Greeley. You just never grew up.”³⁶

One important key to understanding religious celibacy is evident by looking at adolescence itself. It would be naïve to infer that this relegates celibacy to a state of immaturity. Pope John Paul II was nicknamed “the eternal teenager” as a young priest in Poland, because he enjoyed the company and outdoor activities of his young students. Greeley has always enjoyed a good rapport with adolescents, and is justifiably proud of this pastoral strength.

Adolescence is frequently understood as a “period” of transition between childhood and adult status. It would be incorrect, however, to equate “adolescence” with immaturity or exclusively as a stage in growth. Certain basic life tasks are resurgent during this period of life, including the need for intimacy, security, independence, work, peer relationships, and consolidation of identity and values—all fueled by hormonal and sexual changes. But these tasks and adjustments are lifelong challenges.

Religious celibacy capitalizes on the sets of personality tasks and opportunities common—but not limited—to this period of development called adolescence. These involve idealism, authority, consolidation of sexual identity, professional affiliation, and asceticism.

Idealism

The idealism of youth is legendary. This quality in adolescence is born of the sense of “future” and its seemingly boundless and eternal opportunities. In addition, a new and growing awareness of “self” positions one to participate in making the world “better.” Both qualities are beneficial for religious ministry and clearly manifest in Greeley’s storytelling. An I-can-do-anything attitude draws a man to noble tasks, creative enterprises, and original solutions.

Idealism can also lead a person to overvalue himself and exaggerate native, healthy narcissism. A negative consequence of narcissistic thinking is idealization of the group to which one belongs. In the writings of Andrew Greeley, several of these groups appear. Irish Americans are most prominent, and are said by their author to embody virtues of political ability, poetry, and (at least in the case of the women) unparalleled sexual attractiveness. Priests form another idealized group, though these priests must be of a particular stamp—not too stodgy, not too stupid, not gay, and certainly not Marxist—in other words, priests who agree with Greeley.

Authority

Questions about authority—one’s own powers and the powers over one—are endemic to adolescence. The experience of one’s independence, and the desire for it, motivate a man to seek the conditions and states that confer and enhance native endowments and minimize inherent limitations. The priesthood is an attractive prospect for many men precisely because it does offer an attractive power base.

James Joyce describes in elegant prose the ontic status and special powers of the Catholic priesthood as perceived by many young Catholic boys of his day:

“No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself has the power of the priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them, the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine…”³⁷

Religious celibacy can and does exist outside of the priesthood, but within the priesthood it is subject to a strongly authoritarian structure and people who hold considerable authority over many of the elements of a man’s life. A major task of adolescence is to balance one’s own powers with and against the powers that be. The task is to make an honorable peace. The child-parent contest is the paradigm; the reality continues throughout the life cycle

Greeley’s conflict with authority figures is constant in his novels and in other writings, especially the autobiographical. He is not shy about depicting bishops as less than perfect—or even despicable. Blackie, who Greeley elevated to the episcopate in the course of his mythic career, is the embodiment of an ideal cleric. At the same time, Greeley has termed real life bishops as a group “incompetent and stupid,” and even psychopathic. The ongoing adolescent struggle between pleasing authority on the one hand and rebelling and subduing it on the other, is alive in Greeley’s writings.

Consolidation of Sexual Identity

Although adolescence is widely touted as the period of clarifying one’s sexual identity, the reality of consolidation is far from contained within the parameters of teenage years and early adulthood. Certainly, many people discover aspects of their sexual geography during adolescence, but much of the topography remains to be mapped out in early adulthood and mid-life. Even the wisdom of years is not immune from sexual discovery and fine-tuning.

Sexuality is a dynamic reality, comprising not only gender differentiation and sexual orientation—which in themselves have permeable perimeters—but the objects of excitation and the range and degree of sexual drives. Relationships, and the life experiences that one has been subjected to, influence all these—as do the consequences of the choices one has made.

Sexual integration is no small accomplishment even under the most favorable of circumstances. Celibacy is a very special manner of sexual adjustment.

Men who initiate celibate practice without sexual experimentation, or with severely limited or skewed experience, must find a variety of avenues to resolve natural sexual curiosity and establish and maintain sexual equilibrium. Sexual activity, let alone adventures, does not in itself assure integration.

Greeley advanced the economic theory of celibacy. He claimed that celibacy itself, plus training, practice of the ministry, and the grace of the priestly office, give the priest “deeper insights into every human yearning,” including the ability to support, advise, and assist married couples with their problems.

“For the Christian family, the example of the priest who is living his life of celibacy to the full will underscore the spiritual dimension of every love worthy of the name, and his personal sacrifice will merit for the faithful united in the holy bond of matrimony the grace of a true union.”³⁸

The priest—like every Catholic—is free to embrace his sacramental imagination: “a way of picturing reality in which God operates indirectly through the ordinary events of life.” The paradox is that the celibate is deprived of one of the most important sacramental avenues in Greeley’s schema of knowing the love of God—sex.

The priests in his books can pace Greeley’s imaginative process and difficulties in integrating sexuality with his celibate vocation. The Cardinal Sins depicts one idealized priest (underdeveloped in terms of Fr. Eugene Kennedy and Victor Heckler’s psychological study of the priesthood) pitted against an aggressively sexually active priest (mal-developed) whose sexual identity is undifferentiated, but whose ecclesiastical career is successful.

Thy Brother’s Wife tells the story of a priest who experiences one sexual lapse with a woman raised as his sister—mythically an act very close to incest. He abandons the woman to become a better priest. Ascent Into Hell follows a similar pattern: a priest flees from grace and the active priesthood, returns, resumes his celibate life. The priest’s struggle between marriage and celibacy is explicit: “Had he been wrong all along? Had he sacrificed marriage for a historical mistake?”³⁹

With the appearance of Blackie Ryan in Virgin and Martyr, however, the priest loses any real sexual/celibate conflict. He becomes a severed head, observing, judging, suggesting, fanaticizing, but never engaged in any sexual activity or any significant internal struggle with himself.

Greeley is on very solid historical and theological grounds when he addresses God as male and female—with a preference for the female. The eleventh century apse mosaic of the Cathedral of Torcello is inscribed Deus Pater Materque—that is, “God, the Father and Mother.” Greeley claims to be comfortable with his anima—his feminine side—and addresses her as “Lady Wisdom.” His myths demonstrate a greater comfort with the feminine than the masculine—not an uncommon feature in romantic novels or in the clerical psyche.

Greeley gives a strong indication of the level of consolidation within his own celibate/sexual differentiation in an incident he describes: he was sitting in a TV studio in Tucson for an interview following the airing of The Thorn Birds. A cardinal in Philadelphia and a married priest and the priest’s wife in Los Angeles, also participating in the remote hookup, were exchanging comments. The subject was celibacy. The married priest said his marriage was happy, and the wife agreed. Greeley later noted his own reaction: “I didn’t think I would be happy married to either of them.”⁴⁰ [author italics]

Sexual Themes

Eight sexually related themes combine with remarkable economy in the writings of Andrew Greeley. His myths explore the common and primitive nature of the unconscious, which is yet accessible to language: firstly, sexual anxiety that can reasonably be called “castration” because of its repetitious accretion of masculine prowess. The oedipal drama is played out in the conflict of the priests with their authority figures. In the celibate mind, the primal scene is acted out in the sexual adventures of others.

Many of Greeley’s women characters are subject to sadomasochism, while Blackie can demonstrate his strength with sadistic force. Sexual sacrifice is also a demand of the God who, by Greeley’s definition, is like his female character, Maria, ”illusive, reckless, vulnerable, joyous, unpredictable, irrepressible, unremittingly forgiving, and implacably loving.” Maria must give up her priest lover, and he must become celibate.⁴¹

The overall view of women in Greeley’s novels is that of a virgin/whore dichotomy, a common adolescent, imaginative solution to the threat of female power. Finally, the tendency to narcissism in the novels is underlined by Greeley’s frequent “explanations” at the end of his books, underscoring for the reader that they are about “God.” No matter if God or the priest or a woman is the focus of the action, “The hero of the novel is the novel itself.” The author is “like God” informing all the characters.

George Orwell observed that Graham Greene clothed theological speculation in “flesh and blood.” Greeley can be said to wrap flesh and blood—sex—in an elaborate theological myth.

Greeley is a good read; his celibate view of the world is attractive, in much the same way that the adolescent process is engaging with its relative innocence, hope, enthusiasm, idealism, seductive fantasies, and freedom from the ironies of human existence. Life can be imagined at a safe distance from the sexuality that informs it. Greeley’s imagination harbors a fund of knowledge about celibacy; his myths tell the reader what he knows.

Professional Affiliation

The choice of work or professional affiliation one plans to settle on is thought of as an adolescent task. “What are you taking in school?” “What do you hope to be when you grow up?” are cliché questions addressed to young people. The choice of priesthood—like any profession—offers rich opportunities and makes special demands. Celibacy, a requirement unique to the priesthood for affiliation, can be attractive as well as daunting. The thought that sexual conflicts and choices are settled once and for all, at least in principal, provides relief from one basic human struggle. The achievement of any professional identity is a long-term process of internalization and individuation, outlasting the original choice by a lifetime.

Asceticism

Self-control or self-mastery is one of the essential developmental tasks of adolescence. Youthful athletic, intellectual, religious, and military conquests all depend for success on the natural drive to “conquer” oneself that is heightened during this time. Lack of impulse control and addictive traits undermine a person’s ability to trust his own judgment. Choices made under stress are inimical to the achievement of celibacy. At the same time, an intuitive awareness of such a personality deficiency in himself can attract a man to a discipline and a system that he hopes will control him and his sexual instinct. Greeley describes some of these priests in his novels.

Prayer, work, service, and community bonding anchor celibate asceticism. Greeley demonstrates this asceticism in his life and in some of his priest characters.

Celibacy is an intriguing and valuable process. Novelists who have plumbed the depths of its richness provide a service to the understanding of human nature, religious striving, and sexual reality. Greeley reveals aspects of celibate development and reality in the myths he constructs from his imagination, from his sociological studies, and especially from his lived experience as a priest.

THE CELIBATE AUTHOR AND PERSONALITY

Does one type of personality predominate among the ranks of celibates? Life observation and the wide variety of priests portrayed in literature defy stereotyping. Greene’s Whiskey Priest, Cather’s Archbishop, Power’s Father Urban, Joyce’s Father Flynn, Bernanos’s Curé, Voynich’s Canon Montanelli, Silone’s Don Paolo, and the various priests of Farrell’s and Greeley’s Chicago all offer the reader a panoply of personality types from which we can distill images of priests. All are useful to the reader in constructing an understanding of men struggling to achieve the ideal of religious celibacy.

Have Greeley’s personality traits affected his construction of myths and influenced his storytelling?

It would be fruitless and foolhardy to attempt a reading of an author’s life or personality from one of his novels. For instance Bernanos’s Nazi sympathies could not be discerned from reading his Dairy of a Country Priest. Greeley offers readers a unique opportunity: he is a celibate priest constructing mythical priest characters at the same time that he offers an abundance of autobiographical revelations. What does the body of his work say about his celibate personality?

Greeley relates that some of his close friends and colleagues have called him paranoid. Certainly, from what Greeley writes, it would be unfair to use that as a diagnostic term. Greeley is the pioneer, the creator, the explorer who Abraham Maslow describes as, “generally a single, lonely person rather than a group, struggling alone with his inner conflicts, fears, defenses against arrogance and pride, even against paranoia.”⁴²

Every man who pursues celibacy has some personality type—a preferential psychic mode of coping with reality, reducing stress, establishing relationships, defining values, and channeling basic instinctive drives. Greeley’s work is marked by his personality just as much as Coughlin’s and Sheen’s productions were.

Greeley has clearly been energetic, ambitious, hard-working, and competent. No one could question that he is intelligent and an intellectual. He says in his first autobiography that he had never experienced a depression or a “dark night of the soul.” One quite remarkable assertion for a deeply spiritual, celibate person whose life demands an essential loneliness. He says that he has always been conscious that he is different—a square peg.

Authority

Authority relationships have always been problematic for Greeley. He records in detail his conflict with bishops and pastors. And he does not mince words in pointing out their inadequacies. He is self-sufficient, and has been resourceful in maintaining his autonomy within a highly structured organization. But he has experienced his own problems in exercising authority. Specifically, one of the greatest disappoints of his life was the small group community he had gathered around himself only to see it dissolve with acrimonious accusations that he was trying to “dominate” their lives.

Grandiosity and Projection

A hint of Greeley’s grandiosity and projection of blame can be seen in the founding and break up of his “New Community” of which he wrote:

“It may well become a revolutionary development of the Church. It may represent a major step forward in the Christian life comparable to the appearances of the communities of hermits in the fourth century, the monastic communities of the sixth century, the friars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the congregations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”⁴³

Greeley vehemently resisted suggestions that he was in any way to blame—least of all psychologically—for the demise of the noble experiment. “They were either unable or unwilling to make the kind of religious commitment I was challenging them to make.”⁴⁴ One favorite image—of himself as an “inkblot” for the entire Catholic Church—conveys with elegant economy Greeley’s projection and grandiosity.

Hypersensitivity

Greeley claims that he has been “too trusting” and as a result has left himself open to personal hurts and betrayals. But the body of his writings portrays a personality type of the exact opposite bent. He is hypersensitive and easily offended. His attacks on book reviewers have been brutal and dismissive.⁴⁵ He was incensed when he felt slighted, for instance, by being left off the list of “Contemporary Best-Selling Authors.”⁴⁶

Grudges and Enemies

Greeley holds grudges—and that’s with a capital “G.” He devotes pages and chapters in both of his autobiographies to attacking his perceived opponents, and relentlessly justifies his presumed misunderstood position—and self. Irish humor fails him when it comes to the long list of his enemies: academics who impugn his scholarship, the Vatican bureaucracy, a list of popes, Cardinals Cody and Bernardin, pastors of the two parishes he served, Eugene Kennedy and other priests who leave the ministry, and even priests who stay in the priesthood. For instance the National Federation of Priest Councils is “one of the worst collection of incompetent nitwits to whom it has ever been my displeasure to speak.” A respected Catholic journal becomes “that mom-and-pop journal.”

Greeley demonstrates a streak of self-importance and a shrill meanness and vindictive spirit toward anyone who ventures a criticism of any of his research, writings, wealth, and of his sister Mary Jule, among others.

Narcissism

Greeley links Blackie with Anne Maria O’Brien Reilly, a character from his novel Angels of September, who he identifies as one of his most mature heroines—“a laywoman who has been savaged by the Church through much of her life.” A colleague said: “Blackie and Maria are Andy’s vision of God.” Greeley agreed and elaborated: “ The passionately loving and implacably seductive Maria,” (fully sexually active) and the “ingenious, determined, mystery-solving Blackie,” (celibate) “…Only God is better, more lovely than Maria, more comic and resourceful than Blackie.”⁴⁷ Greeley linked the sacramentalities of sex and priesthood (celibate existence) mediated by storytelling.

For Greeley, the status of mythmaker confers authority—in all senses of the word—including the right to define the world.

“I think I know a little bit more about how it feels to be God. For like God, a storyteller creates people, sets them in motion, outlines a scenario for them, falls in love with them, and then is not able to control what they do.”⁴⁸

The conglomerate of Greeley’s personality traits has severely limited his capacity for intimacy. How much has this to do with his celibate striving and how much with his particular personality type? Celibacy does demand a special kind of aloneness, but given the range of observable celibates and the variety of novelistic interpretations of priests a reader must conclude that Greeley’s personality type is the foundation for—not the result of—his celibacy.

Coughlin and Sheen shared many personality characteristics with Greeley. Each also possessed a deep commitment to the Church and sense of a priestly vocation. Each was vigorously aggressive in promoting his chosen way of expressing his ministry and promoting it—and himself. Each left a particular “after image” of priesthood and celibacy beyond his presentation. But the picture of the celibate personality left by Coughlin and Sheen is not entirely analyzable from their work alone. Greeley offers the student of celibacy an additional advantage by way of his mythic priests and people. The novels are projections of the mind of a priest-celibate. Every element of his personality can be deciphered from his stories. He is his stories.

CONCLUSION

Myth alone does not completely describe Greeley’s stories. The reader must ask: How much of Greeley’s world is “representational,” depicting the real, observable and quantifiable world, and how much is “presentational,” arguing for a world that might be? The line between these two modes of writing is fluid. There is an obvious representational dedication in the work of James T. Farrell, in contrast to the presentational effort of G.K. Chesterton. Farrell’s work has a kind of photographic quality about it, extending from the everyday speech of his characters to their thoughts and dreams. Chesterton’s work is allegorical. Each of these writers displays the reverse side of the coin, evident in Farrell’s irony and in the morals illustrated by Chesterton’s allegories, but Farrell’s method remains representational and Chesterton’s presentational.

Greeley’s work is neither entirely presentational nor entirely representational. There can be no doubt that in his portraits of parish life—particularly those of the lives of his priests—Greeley is representational. Thus, priests do have sexual fantasies, some struggle successfully against their sexual instincts and some fail; some are alcoholic, some demonic. Priests, bishops, and the Church are open to some well-deserved criticism. American Catholics really do practice birth control, live in families, work for a living, go to Church.

In other areas, Greeley is presentational: most Americans are not part of the jet set. In general, however, even the presentational aspects of Greeley’s work represent attainable and even laudable goals: people ought to be able to rise economically, and they ought to take Church affairs seriously. They ought to take seriously the goal of a Church that could concede the desirability of birth control and of premarital sex and the reality of divorce; a Church that respects women, (though it continues to deny them an equal share of power); a Church centered on family, parish, and priest.

Greeley accepts birth control but not, apparently, abortion.

He accepts the inevitability of a certain number of failed marriages. He applauds a concentration of energies on injustice and suffering at home, on the beam in the believer’s (or in the parish’s) eye rather than on the mote in the world’s eye. In all these areas, Greeley is very close to the observed and quantifiable social reality of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

He is, moreover, just one tick off strict and accepted Church doctrine. However, in a monolithic and hierarchic organization like the Roman Catholic Church, even this one tick can cause serious trouble for a priest. To Greeley, who has been subject to the discipline of the Church, receiving criticism and rejection from those he most wanted to be loved by has hurt him deeply and personally. At the same time, both psychologically and in the ontic system of the Church, Greeley remains a priest.

Lack of maturity, indeed, may be said to characterize Greeley’s novels. For the novels themselves are almost literally adolescent: they are filled with energy and idealism, but lack consistency and artistic distance.

More importantly than any or all literary deficits, Greeley gives his readers permission to imagine religion mythically and to consider openly their sexuality as a dimension of God’s love. Whatever his motivation, he leads readers to question the celibacy and the sexuality of priests. Regardless of his own conflicts with authority, he reinforces and blesses his readers’ doubts about the credibility of the Catholic Church’s teachings on human sexuality.

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Chapter 5: Greeley - Double Exposure

The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.  - Friedrich Nietzsche

Andrew Greeley claims that priests possess a special fascination because of the celibacy associated with them. He is correct. Celibacy is a source of fascination. In his autobiographical account, Greeley delivers a double dose of fascination: first in the rhetorical style with which he deals with sex and defends celibacy, and second in the intriguing way’s in which he exposes himself.

Writing fiction brought Greeley a serendipitous result. During the process, he discovered the “anima” of his personality in the women characters that he, “like God,” created and fell in love with. Greeley posed Pygmalion as the positive myth for himself as a celibate at his time in history.

According to the myth, Pygmalion set out to sculpt a woman more desirable than any mortal. A goddess invested his sculpture with life, and he received the object of unfettered male fantasy: a woman so completely his because she was so completely the creation of his own desire—the product of his own imagination. Freed from the imperfections of human relations, Pygmalion enjoyed both the godlike satisfaction of having created life and the self-centered gratification of keeping his sexual relations reserved for women of his own creation.

Although this myth is precisely the one Andrew Greeley appears to embrace so enthusiastically for himself, some readers find such a metaphor offensive when applied to the sexuality of a proclaimed celibate for whom celibacy is meant as a symbol of service to the needs of others.

There is a strong temptation when reading Greeley—especially within the often stultifying confines of traditional Catholic treatises on celibacy—to feel that he is refreshingly honest, contemporary, and direct. The writings of Gandhi and Sheen reveal a celibate tradition burdened by anti-sexual and misogynist prejudices. The components of Greeley’s celebration of sexuality and women are neither so direct nor simple.

Achieved and integrated celibacy, wherever found, has been characterized by tolerance of others and modesty about oneself. The witness to the transcendent supports both qualities and a worldview in which all are as one.

Greeley’s sexual/celibate world, like his rhetoric, is complex and difficult to measure. It is one of sharp distinctions between friends and foes, between men and women, between the righteous priests of his literary creations (who often speak for him) and the inadequate real-life Church authorities who tolerate priest “pedophiles” and practitioners of the “gay lifestyle;” between his own heterosexuality and the “orientation” of his Cardinal Superior—which, although he does not question—uninformed others “have their doubts.”30 Even the eroticized parts of women’s bodies become distinct, quasi-religious icons in Greeley’s hymns to “Lady Wisdom.” Adolescents might more frankly and irreverently call Greeley’s icons “T & A”—tits and ass.

Greeley shows one sign of a troublesome quality similarly exhibited by Gandhi and Sheen—an implicit superiority toward non-celibates. Like Sheen, Greeley is reluctant to share his own “weaknesses,” in spite of the fact that he does include some narrative of his celibate development—no adolescent loves and no adult love affairs; he, however, preserves and delights in his imagination on women, the objects of his seventh- and eighth-grade crushes. His frankness about his sexual fantasy life holds some of the charm found in the desert fathers, but he appears unnecessarily aggressive about proving their value and the adequacy of his “male hormones,” as he puts it. The fact that strict Church doctrine views lustful thoughts with as much abhorrence as the actual breaking of vows becomes conveniently irrelevant.

Greeley differs markedly from Gandhi and Sheen is in that his use of these qualities is almost exclusively for self-acceptance. Gandhi’s celibate discipline served one of the greatest ethical causes of our century. Even Sheen’s mixed and defensive messages were deployed in the interest of the Church as a collective institution. Greeley is a loner who has been at war with many branches of his own institution—conservatives and liberals alike—and his writings seek to enlist his readers in his cause through a bewildering combination of polemic, flattery and scare tactics.

Greeley’s ability to combine contradictions—celibacy with flirtation, scientism with paganism, support of women’s causes with anti-feminism, requests for fairness coupled with calls for purges—is a powerful and familiar rhetorical strategy used regularly by advertisers, religious preachers, and political demagogues.

Knowing how to use adjectives effectively, Greeley employs their full range of repertoires. For instance, a geographically scattered panel discussion of celibacy on “Nightline,” following the airing of The Thorn Birds, becomes “transcontinental.” He becomes the “notorious sociologist from Tucson” who joins the panel. Father Hesberg, president of Notre Dame, becomes a man answering questions from a “confused, conservative alumnus.” Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia becomes a “third string sub” for Cardinal Bernardin, “who would not go on [the program] with me.” A married couple is summarily dismissed—both parties—as unsuitable marriage partners for Greeley. In the end, he grants himself, generically to be sure, the potential of being the most “fascinating” man in the world.31

The core of Greeley’s appeal is that unlike Sheen and Gandhi, he claims to prefer a dialogical approach to the celibate tradition rather than a dogmatic defense of the discipline. He argues that unless Church leaders accept the sexuality of priests and a “new” model for celibacy, “they will surely destroy celibacy in the long run.” While Greeley’s argument is appealing, he seems reluctant to give personal witness to what he preaches. If, as he says, celibacy is not served by denial or repression or pretense, why then does Greeley remain on the same allegorical level as Sheen when speaking of his own sexuality, merely exchanging Sheen’s rhetoric of self-reproach with one of archness and titillation for the reader?

Revelations of Greeley’s inner life are far removed from the witness of the desert fathers, who also shared their sexual fantasy life with their spiritual fathers; theirs, however, was marked with candor, distress, and concern that they could succumb to sexual compromise. Not so Greeley:

“So have there been women in my life…about whom I awake in the middle of the night with powerful hunger? With whom I can quickly imagine wonderful actions and fantastic pleasures? For that delightful delirium I am grateful, not ashamed…thus far the delights have led to no shattered promises or commitments.”

If masturbation indeed is his adjustment to celibate practice—as can be logically surmised from the revelation of his repeated nocturnal fantasies—why must it be denied in the first place, and why must it still remain an unspeakable word?

Greeley teases, yet at the same time archly blames his readers for the very thoughts he has conjured up:

“All abstract, you say? Anything less abstract than that, at this stage of the proceedings, you are not going to get, however much it might increase sales of the book. It would be telling, now, wouldn’t it?^”

The call for openness, never fulfilled, is typical of Greeley’s clever rhetorical strategy—one that allows him to appear so much more direct than Fulton Sheen while still repeating the identical defensive moves. Both describe the celibate as the man who points to “that which is Beyond.” Only with this difference: Sheen served tradition, dogma, the Church as an institution; Greeley’s service is more self-limited under the guise of serving sexuality (“Lady Wisdom”) and woman, both cast in the mold of their maker.

Thus, Greeley’s message, like Sheen’s, becomes mixed with the relative values of marriage and celibacy in the sexual-ethical order. Sheen seeks to be a eunuch for heaven; Greeley prefers to cast himself as a Platonic love person. Freed by his priestly vows from commitments to individual women, parish-priest Father Greeley can be all things to all the individual women in his flock.

Hermann Hesse wrote very insightfully about celibacy and fantasizing in Siddhartha.32 In his novel Steppenwolf, the protagonist has a dream in which “All the Girls of the World Are Yours,” a kind of mental theater in which the infinite potential love affairs with acquaintances and chance encounters are played out.33

Greeley has made his vocations as priest and writer similar theaters for safe sex. What is lacking in this totally understandable accommodation to celibacy is the sublimation of the erotic impulse into service, a resolution of negativity, and a manifest sense that all are one—essential elements in the model of achieved celibacy. Greeley’s psychic investment transferred from the literary women “characters,” he created, knew, and loved, to the breasts and thighs of a passerby, is no more a sublimation of the libido than are the mental maneuvers of an immature non-celibate.

From the start, Greeley uses a highly overstated comparison to distinguish him—and celibates in general—from all other men. Here is his definition: The celibate is the witness to the possibility of living in the world as a person powerfully attracted to women without being compelled to jump into bed with them. What a striking distortion. The measure of the celibate’s relationship to women is measured against a behavior which, if understood literally (the only way that gives the comparison meaning) could be viewed as pathological.

Greeley suggests that his women parishioners and readers are getting the best of the celibate and non-celibate male companion in his kind of priest—the best of both worlds. The idealization of the married state, and the bonding and healing role of sexuality within it, stands in strange and inexplicable contrast to the image of the non-celibate man as an insensitive and unsteady companion for women.

For Greeley the non-celibate is not equal to the celibate priest as a confidant and intimate companion of women—a point he argues from a bewildering range of positions. First from the personal:

“I am reasonably confident that my sensitivity to and sympathy for women is comparable with that of married men, probably better than that of most married men.”

And then this contorted bit of advice from his personal experience:

“A confidant relationship between a woman and a sensitive parish priest enhances both the woman’s and her husband’s marital fulfillment.”

It is hard to accept that Greeley isn’t being disingenuous when he makes such a recommendation—particularly in light of research that finds considerable potential for these confidant relationships to become sexual. His exaltation in his celibate freedom runs the risk of mocking the confines of other commitments:

There is also a tone of cynicism when Greeley talks about the unmarried priest having extensive experience garnered from other peoples’ lives, and thus being able to give advice to married couples that he does not have to validate from his own marriage. The celibate is free to take risks that no married man could; he can say things to others about their relationships that he does not have to live up to. He isn’t obligated to practice what he preaches. The exact opposite in fact—he’s forbidden to.

The only measure readers have of the sexually charged nature of Greeley’s one-on-one relationships with women is his deployment of rhetoric in the intimacy of the reader-writer dialogue. The archness and flirtation in some passages is surprising by any standard. His God is a woman with an Irish brogue.

“Lady Wisdom: Well, I’m not bad looking at all, if I do say so Myself. A lot better looking than that cabin attendant woman, though I’m rather proud of her too. I thought the arrangement of her curves was most ingenious. And the smile too, if you take my meaning— I get upset when people are too busy to admire my handiwork.

Me: You put someone like that on every plane I board and I guarantee I’ll admire her.

Lady Wisdom: You dirty thing! But you’re after missing the point. And that woman in the dining room? Wasn’t I after outdoing Myself when I thought up her breasts?

Me: You’re the dirty thing, enjoying them that way.”

If this is a model for a real-life confidant relationship, it’s a pretty strong come-on.

How does Greeley’s game of flirtation fit with Sheen’s tilt of moral superiority? Rather than make an unapologetic defense of his practice as a priest who indulges in enjoyable sexual fantasy rather than cultivating sublimation, Greeley deflects scrutiny with a series of strategic appeals and covers. He hides the shrewdness of his sexual savvy behind a screen of suspended adolescent sexual development. His characterizations of women as followers and readers are sugarcoated with a superficial appropriation of feminism. He deflects attacks against his own ambiguous use of priestly “fascination”—privilege is more like it—by calling for a crusade against the “greatest threat to celibacy”—homosexuality.

Again, his autobiography notwithstanding, the reader cannot speak of Greeley the person, only Greeley the writer. The latter forces the conclusion that he is a deliberate manipulator of contradictions. In the space of one page he can speak of “us” (that is, men) as both mature and adolescent in their sexuality without acknowledging or exploring the implications of that simultaneity:

“The celibate and the married person both experience such…fantasy.34 Unless we, celibate or married, are early adolescents devoid of control of our most immediate urges, we appreciate the joy of such reactions and respect both ourselves and the other person and our other promises too much to permit our response to go beyond minor delight.”

“…That a man could easily scream with desire for a woman who has smiled at him twice on an airplane flight.”

This fluctuation between mature and immature expressions of sexuality provides a kind of dissimulating cover; the adolescent persona allows him a way out of serious debate on celibate/sexuality or his own celibate practice. It all seems as harmless and simple as the world in a teen magazine: “So, those of you who were expecting ‘kiss and tell,’ eat your hearts out!”

A kind of rhetorical double play reaches dizzying proportions in his absorption of feminist concerns into what is in essence an antifeminist worldview. It is tempting to accept him at his word when he says he merely wishes “to fend off the polemical feminist reviewer,” but the adjectives are, in fact, inseparable. Although the author depicts himself as a defender of women within a misogynistic institution, this has considerably less to do with the emancipation of women than with the aggrandizement of their “champion.” The alternating use of “He” and “She” for God remains fundamentally locked in strict gender roles. True egalitarians have urged non–gender-specific language for the liturgy.

While God can be a “She” when “arranging for the organs by which human neonates are fed,” would the deity still be “Her” in the molding of Freud’s universal signifier? These binaries may be structured as a dialogue, but the predetermination of appropriate gender behavior is still religiously—zealously—adhered to. Here is Greeley on the subject:

“We men perhaps may teach women about the captivating power of God, His imperious and loving demands that we surrender trustfully to Him and give ourselves over completely to Him. They teach us about Her gentle, live-giving, healing grace.”

His description sounds like the same patriarchal ordering upon which power has been based for millennia.

When Greeley turns to sexual relations in his fiction, he uses oblique phrases such as “full-bodied sex person,” and “a nubile member of the opposite gender,” coupled with men’s magazine clichés: “the mature, devastating, and delicious cabin attendant”; “the mature and tasty cabin attendant.”

These mixed messages seem part and parcel of a familiar rhetorical power game. Greeley’s calls for enlightenment in the Church’s teachings on sexuality, and for fairness to women are not only sensible but well put. This crusade on behalf of women is, however, to be carried out within the classical authoritarian power structure, headed not so much by men in general as by one man in particular.

When speculating on women’s sexuality, Greeley seems to prefer mystical meditation to listening to (or reading) what real women have to say. He interrupts a reflection on the sexuality of various “persons” in order to remark, “Does the person of the opposite gender react analogously to you? Does she have her own fantasies while falling asleep? God knows.”35

Greeley’s final fierce attack on homosexuality does not cast him in a particularly flattering light, because it is confused. He identifies a scapegoat that can serve simultaneously as marginalized victim—the gay priest (and gay lifestyle). He confuses the evil victimizer (the pedophile), that is, with the gay.

Sexual orientation is not identical with the object of desire. There is no evidence that gay oriented priests violate their promise of celibacy any more or less than other priests. From his literary pulpit he can pour coals on the heads of sinners and under the feet of Church authority by calling the Church to account for their cover-up of sexual violations, especially of minors. The service of reform is mixed with the hysteria of his call for a purge of corruption that forms a narrative with strikingly similar parallels to the concluding chapters of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.36

Greeley courts women to join him in his campaign through a seemingly plausible, but actually tenuous argument: “one of the reasons for the continuation of Neo-platonic disgust for women in the Church is that some high-level leaders really dislike and fear women. They do not find them either attractive or tempting but repellent.”37

Greeley defends himself and his mode of living celibacy by accusing the Church of a double standard:

“I find it ironic that my novels are thought to be ‘highly inappropriate’ because of the shock they cause to those who haven’t read them but who are troubled by the fact that I wrote, while the not only inappropriate but immoral behavior of pedophile priests and the literally scandalous behavior of actively gay priests doesn’t seem to create any problems at all.”

Greeley concludes with a veiled declaration of himself as the coming moral leader:

“Typical of the head-in-the-sand response of the Church leadership to its gay lifestyle/pedophilia problem is the report on the state of the seminaries. You pretend, you cover up, you ignore, you pray it will go away. You do anything except act like a leader. I fear for the future. The celibate, to conclude where I began, is a man of fascination.”

Thus, the reader is led without explicit comment from the failure of the Church’s current leadership to the endangered future to the right man for the job. By this point the reader knows of only one celibate whose hands are clean, whose frankness is his sword and shield. And “God help those who are responsible.”

While Greeley is certainly an accomplished rhetorician, and exposes the reader to a plethora of his own fantasies about sex and judgments on the state of celibacy in the priesthood, he provides little evidence to support the conclusion that he has completely integrated his celibate/sexuality. Greeley’s also exposes his own heightened investment of being “a man of fascination.”

Conclusion

Although the tradition of religious celibacy is long, the list of autobiographical accounts is short indeed. Jesus Christ is revered by many as a lifelong celibate, yet there is no scriptural evidence to disclose whether or not this was so. Perhaps there is divine wisdom in his silence on his own celibate/sexual integration. Saint Augustine, for all the limitations of his times and understandings of sexuality, remains a giant in his witness to celibate integration. It would be unfair to expect contemporaries to meet his candor and theological witness.

Each of our contemporary apostles—Gandhi, Sheen, and Greeley—is admirable for offering his testimony, necessarily limited by his own personality and circumstances. Each has something valuable to teach about human sexuality and its varied expressions. Who can claim to have arrived at the full expression of celibate achievement and integration and at the same time have the talent to commit it to literary form? All witnesses to celibacy, almost of necessity, must be guilty of a few foibles that suggest some conflict along the road to the “perfect and perpetual continence” demanded by law for inclusion into the priestly caste.

Sheen avoids both a radically honest self-analysis and projects an intolerance and superiority common in “moral leaders.” Greeley seems inadvertently self-revelatory in his ogling of women and teasing of his readers, which covers a deficiency—an intolerance verging on scape-goating. Even Gandhi, whose honesty and service to humanity outshone both Sheen’s and Greeley’s, nonetheless fostered an intolerance for the “lustful” and manifested a lack of equal respect for women. Yet all three persisted in the pursuit of their ideal.

Perhaps this failure by all three to demonstrate complete integration—a radical honesty, humility, tolerance, and a sense of the oneness of all humanity—is due to the public nature of both their witness and their vocation—the demands of their positions of power. Perhaps celibacy can only be fully achieved beyond the sphere of mass culture; perhaps it can only find its testimony in the most intimate of dialogues and writings. Such a conclusion would diminish the hope that such testimony will become widely available for the would-be celibate or the non-celibate who values the practice. For this reason, the genre of the novel could be the most likely vehicle of expression for an experience that is at once so intimate and yet of such universal significance.

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Chapter 6: Greeley and Farrell A Bridge from Autobiography to the Novel

Chicago forms a kinship with thousands of people who have not been born or raised there; people who have never lived in Chicago or even visited there harbor deep feelings for the place. Chicago generates and invites a familiarity, so much so that many people experience a first visit as a homecoming.

A host of Chicago writers is responsible for this familial outreach. Each has peopled our imagination with characters, neighborhoods, and struggles that enhance our own family history. Among the most formidable of these writes are Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell. In describing Chicago each of them has in some sense described the color and texture of American culture and of the American family.

The novel form of literature can be a lens that focuses the problems of an age—or ageless problems— in a singularly powerful way. Where a visual image, painting or photograph, can stun or haunt one’s imagination into an awareness, the characters in a novel challenge one to action or transformation since they invite the reader to struggle through internal and social chaos endured in the novel. Such is the art of a novelist.

A scion of those who represent this artistic achievement is James T. Farrell, with his portrayal of society in transition in the person of Studs Lonigan. Studs Lonigan is one of those Chicago characters, like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Wright’s Bigger, and Bellow’s Herzog, who has become part of the American literary landscape and American family history. Studs is an urban Huck Finn whose struggles through home, school, and church; the streets and poolrooms of Chicago echo the adolescent sexual development of Youth, Everywhere USA.

James T. Farrell is the creator of Studs or, more accurately, the author who recorded the life and death of Studs Lonigan in the trilogy Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Judgment Day. Studs has an existence of his own. He has joined the realm of the mythic, where his persona transcends his author or his author’s life.

And Studs Lonigan is timely reading¹ in spite of its dated slang. There is no American novel—Studs was the first published in 1932—that speaks so clearly to the mood and the dilemmas of the final decade of the twentieth century. As one analyst pointed out, “Behind the irreverence, the flaming youth, and the artificial stimuli, were false patriotism, abnegation of ideals, the retreat from sustained hope, and the use of sex as a palliative.”²

Anyone who thinks that we are exaggerating Studs’ relevance to the first decade of the twenty-first century should reflect on Alan Friedman’s evaluation, delivered decades ago: “Judgment Day shows us a prostrate economy that has not only terrified the leaders of industry and politics; it has sapped the morale of the little businessmen and put fear and anxiety into the hearts of the young generation.”³

Certainly, the trilogy is a classic mirror of the past in which if we look we can see our present condition in a clearer perspective. Margaret Zassenhaus, the German physician who saved⁴ scores of Scandinavian soldiers from Nazi execution, said that the climate of America already in 1992 was eerily like the atmosphere of the pre-Hitler Germany she experienced. The fate of those who fail to learn the lessons of the past is apparent to all.

James T. Farrell, like Studs, was born and raised in Chicago. Irish parents and Roman Catholic schools influenced both. Farrell attended grade school at Corpus Christi and St. Anselm’s and high school at St. Cyril’s. Unlike Studs, who dropped out of high school, Farrell attended the University of Chicago for a couple of years. There he was deeply influenced by sociology, and much of his writing reflects his profound concern for the social conditions of Chicago and the nation as well as their spiritual (and material) poverty.

Farrell’s Studs was branded as “filthy” because of its frank descriptions of adolescent sexual development. Some scenes of masturbation were excised in early editions just as scene of Bigger Thomas “polishing his night stick” in the movie house was cut from Richard Wright’s 1940 edition of Native Son. An English edition of Studs was issued in 1932 with the disclaimer, “the sale of which is limited to physicians, social workers, teachers, and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”

Andrew M. Greeley a Chicago writer who can be compared with Farrell in the sense that he was deeply influenced by his Irish parents. His Catholic education extended through seminary and ordination to the Catholic priesthood, an alternative that Farrell considered briefly while he was in grade school.

Greeley is exquisitely sensitive to social conditions and often uses the Chicago setting as a metaphor for the social temperature and blood pressure of society, especially the society of the Catholic Church. He too was a student and even a lecturer in sociology at the University of Chicago. His books too have been branded “filthy” and “sleazy” (albeit equally unfairly) because of his frank portrayal of the sex lives of priests and bishops.

Greeley has done what no critic could presume to do: to compare himself not with Farrell, the Chicago Irish Catholic author, but with the life and character of Studs Lonigan, the prototype of Chicago Irish Catholic adolescence. When any author offers his readers such a personally profound and, at first glance, puzzling insight, it must be taken as a serious gift, a key to his own writing and person. Greeley makes the comparison he tells us, after reading the novel and remembering it well.

At the critical juncture—in the first few pages of his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest—when he is trying to introduce himself and his life and to orient his readers Greeley refers to Studs Lonigan’s life at least six times. Greeley compares his own father with Studs’. His critical loves, he teases, could have been like Studs’ Lucy. He confesses that the story of Studs and Lucy inspired tears but assures his bishop that there is no Lucy in his life. Greeley’s revelation needs to be examined in detail to understand the celibate’s comparison of himself with.

Greeley familiarizes his readers with himself by taking his ethnic and economic bearings from Farrell’s epic. Andrew M. Greeley was born in Chicago in 1928, a bare generation after Studs. Like Studs, he is a full-blooded Irish-American: his grandparents were born within a few miles of each other in County Mayo. Of the Chicago of his parents’ youth, Greeley writes,

In the first two decades of this century the Chicago Irish were still, on the whole, poor, not perhaps quite as poor as they’d been in the world of Mr. Dooley’s Bridgeport recorded by Finley Peter Dunne at the end of the nineteenth century but not yet quite as affluent and respectable as the painting contractor who was the father of James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.

Moreover, he connects his father to Studs’ father metonymously by beginning the next paragraph, “My father was.”

Greeley orients the reader to his own psychological valuation of relationships when he says (also in the first chapter of his autobiography),

I don’t cry much, but I did when I read James Farrell’s story of the summer romance of Studs Lonigan and Lucy Scanlan, one of the most touching accounts of love ever written.… If ever there were a vivid portrait of what happens when grace is refused.… Ah, but was there a Lucy Scanlan in my life? No.

When Archbishop Joseph Bernardin asked him about the basis for some of his characters in The Cardinal Sins Greeley responded that there was no “Ellen” in his life and concluded, “The storyteller in me realizes that a real-life counterpart of Lucy Scanlan or Ellen Foley would make it a far more interesting tale.”⁷

There is a quadruple identification here. First, Greeley identifies personally and psychologically with the love observed (he cried). Second, Greeley the writer identifies professionally with Studs: he judges it as a portrait of “grace…refused.” “Comedies of grace” is a phrase Greeley uses frequently to describe his own novels. The third identification is frankly autobiographical and factual. He tells a bishop that there has never been a Lucy Scanlan (Farrell’s character) or an Ellen Foley (his own character) in his own life. Fourth and most profoundly, Greeley teases the reader’s imagination and encourages the reader to fantasize with him.

Here the intuitive genius of Greeley emerges. He links himself, the storyteller, personally, intellectually, factually, and imaginatively with the protagonist of a great story told.

What follows here is a delineation of the comparison Greeley initiated. We will look at the Chicago, Irish, Catholic, sexual identity, and kinship manifested in Farrell’s Studs Lonigan and in Greeley’s autobiography and his novels.

Part I: Chicago

The Chicago of Studs Lonigan follows the axis of Fifty-eighth Street above St. Patrick’s parish and extends to Washington Park, with its lagoon (the parish is the geographic and mythic center). This is not so much geography as the topology of a culture, much as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is an axis for states of mind and conflicts of values.

The poolroom is on Fifty-eighth (the spiritual center for the gang). Lucy’s house is at Fifty-eighth and Indiana; Fifty-eighth and Michigan is where blacks are out of place.⁸ The plight of blacks is part of the Chicago streets, the site of the 1919 riots. Studs’ Fifty-eighth Street is a world in transition. The streets of Chicago are the theater in which Studs plays out his life, where he repeatedly ends up drunk and sick, where his hopes are dashed, and where his deepest convictions are tested to the breaking point in arguments and fights.

The transition of Chicago is portrayed dramatically in one of the final sequences of the trilogy. Studs lies dying in his bed. His father Paddy (Patrick) goes to St. Patrick’s to pray for his son. Coming home from church, Paddy gets into his Ford and drives “aimlessly” from Fifty-sixth Street to the streets and neighborhoods of his own youth. They are streets now swaddled in poverty, boarded up houses, closed factories, and still smelling of the stockyards. He stumbles onto a march led by the Trade Union Unity League, in which blacks and whites walk together and with children, and communist sympathizers of every brand (including The Irish Workers Club) parade through the streets where he grew up. They are no longer only Irish, no longer only white, and the neighborhood is no longer stable, predictable, or circumscribed.⁹

Many of Father Greeley’s novels, are set in Chicago or at least centered there. Some of his books contain street maps such as those in Angels of September and Patience of a Saint, in which the John Hancock building, site of Greeley’s apartment, is prominent. In Love Story and Rite of spring are maps of Grand Beach and New Buffalo on the Lake Michigan shore, places similar to the site of Greeley’s summer home. In St. Valentine’s Night, St. Praxide’s parish is in a vague area of wooded hills described as a “magic neighborhood” and a “spoiled rich neighborhood,” similar to that of Christ the King, Greeley’s first parish assignment after his ordination. There are others.

But Greeley’s characters do not explore Chicago’s streets. His streets instead locate the halls of power: religious, economic, and political. The streets, for Greeley, are the grids that unite the powerful and which extend via O’Hare airport to Washington, D.C. and the Vatican. Greeley’s axis is Lake Shore Drive, the northern suburbs with private homes and gardens, easy access to the lake and country club, and roads that lead to summer homes and to world travel, if necessary. But as in Studs’ Chicago, there is an Irish Catholic parish church at the center of life in each of Greeley’s novels.

Part II: Irish

Andrew Greeley begins an essay, “The South Side Irish Since the Death of Studs,” with these words: “I remembered enough about the story of Studs Lonigan not to want to read it again. I knew it would force me to think once more about a problem that is too painfully close to me, both as a priest and as a human being—the tragedy of the Irish.”¹⁰ This essay is one of Greeley’s most self-revealing pieces of writing; the revelation is both literary and psychological.

Studs moves in an Irish-American universe. His father, Paddy, was born in Ireland and emigrated with his family when he was a child. His mother, Mary, was the child of Irish-born parents. Almost all of Studs’ friends are Irish-American: Weary Reilly, Red Kelly, Arnold Sheehan, Tommy Doyle, Paulie Haggerty, Three-Star Hennesey, Vinc Curley, Slug Mason, TB McCarthy, Elizabeth Burns, Lucy Scanlan, Helen Shires (who is Protestant Irish).

The priests at St. Patrick’s, Father Gilhooley and Father Doneggan, are also Irish. In school and on the football field Studs occasionally interacts with Polish-Americans, and in the dance hall he meets a Swedish girl “with an accent.” Two of Studs’ crowd are Jewish: Davey Cohen and Phil Rolfe; Phil eventually converts to Catholicism and marries Studs’ sister. For the most part, however, the people in Studs’ world are Irish.

To be Irish-American in Studs’ Chicago meant to be part of an identifiable minority. It meant, in effect, to be assigned to certain neighborhoods, certain Democratic clubs, certain occupations, and even certain Catholic parishes: St. Patrick’s was known as an Irish church; and there were German, Polish, and Italian churches in other parts of the city. To be Irish meant to be part of a rising, relatively privileged, economic group on a par with the Germans—above the more recently arrived groups from southern and eastern Europe, but below the “old money.” At the same time, some social stigma clung to the Irish. This social stigma frequently produced an aggrieved and defensive ethnic pride.

Like Studs, Greeley is an Irish-American. More: all of Greeley’s novels concern Irish or Irish-Americans. The heroes and the villains are Irish. Irish-ness is essential to Greeley’s identity as is his priesthood. He attributes both his success as well as some of his failures to these realities. When he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago for the eighth time, he attributed it to ethnic and religious bias. He wrote, “the sign ‘No Irish Need Apply’…still hangs at the entrance to most intellectual literary circles and at the backs of most senior chairs in the country’s major universities.”¹¹

Concurrently, in another article Greeley commented on the same set of affairs by identifying himself as a “loud-mouthed Irish priest” and saying, “I am, damn it, still capable of standing by my own kind, come what may, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything—not even for a membership in the National Academy of Science.”¹² By “my own kind” it is clear that Greeley means the Irish Catholics. He expresses his pique in tones not unlike those Studs and his friends used toward their enemies.

There is a poignant passage in Greeley’s essay on the South Side Irish:

He is uncertain of his own emotions and the irrational powers, which he dimly perceives, reside in the depths of his personality. But if his anger is ever given full vent, he is afraid that he will kill and destroy—especially the parents about whom he feels so ambivalent.

He is afraid of failure and thus leads a narrow, constrained, restricted life, which, while it guarantees that he will not fail, also prevents him from achieving the success that his talents and creativity would make possible. Like his predecessor Studs Lonigan, a contemporary South Side Irish male is the master of romance daydreaming, and, like Studs, he even understands vaguely that he has the capacities to make the daydreams come true. To put the matter bluntly, the Irishman will not and cannot be himself because his mother won’t let him.

One suspects that it is not only the nieces and nephews of Studs Lonigan who are beset by strong self-destructive urges.¹³

Is Greeley also speaking of his own deep Irish self? John N. Kotre, Greeley’s biographer, begins his work with a description of Greeley’s “recurring dream” and speaks of Greeley the dreamer. The same biographer was cited in The Wall Street Journal, in which he speculated about Greeley’s self-defeating cycles in institutions and with individuals. Whatever else, there is no doubt that Greeley is thoroughly Irish—a full-blooded Chicago Catholic Irishman.

Irish and Alcohol

Greeley makes another very telling reference to Studs Lonigan in this essay on the Irish. He identifies the destiny of the Irish-American with Studs by way of alcohol:

Studs Lonigan loathed himself, and his whole life was a systematic effort to punish himself for his own worthlessness.… None of this has changed. The site has moved from Fifty-eighth and Indiana to Beverly, but the self-loathing and self-destruction continue. South Side Irish—a marvelously gifted and creative people—have been bent on destroying themselves for three-quarters of a century. It looks as though they are beginning to succeed.¹⁴

Although Greeley drinks little himself, he is conscious that the identification as an Irishman is deeply aligned with drinking. Greeley of course is correct that alcohol is an essential part of the spirit and poverty in Farrell’s novel, not merely in Studs’ life but in the Irish culture and family. Greeley’s own grandfathers were both alcoholics.

Both Studs’ father and brother are drunk at the moment of Studs’ death. His father ends up his tour of the neighborhood of his childhood in a speakeasy, and in his drunken stupor he speaks of “God’s will” and the “dark angel” and says, “I had to get drunk. I’m not a drinking man. I had to. When everything a man has falls from under him, he’s got to do something.”¹⁵

Drink is a link between being Irish and being Catholic— certainly for Studs and clearly in Greeley’s estimation. Jimmy Breslin describes a link with the meaning of being Irish in New York:

[T]here are great outward signs of Irishness. A network of neighborhood travel agencies keeps the Irish Airlines waiting room at Kennedy Airport filled with people taking advantages of low-cost tours. Saloon after saloon has a shamrock on its neon sign. And once a year everybody stops and goes to the St. Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue. After these things it ends.… Most people in New York with Irish names go back at least three generations before they reach Irish-born in the family. The heritage of being Irish is more a toy than a reality. A drink, a couple of wooden sayings, and a great personal pride, bordering on the hysterical, in being Irish.¹⁶

Drink was the death of Studs.

Part III: Catholic

There is no question that Studs Lonigan is a religious novel in a way that is similar to the way Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a religious novel, and Catholic. Hemingway’s protagonist seeks salvation through his symbolic baptism (crossing the river to flee the demons of war) and his identification with Christ’s passion and crucifixion (the bloody wounds he endures to save his loved one). Even if his final solution is nihilistic (God plays with humans only to torture them) the novel is a profound struggle demanding reflection on the place of religion in man ‘s/woman’s destiny and on the irony of existence and its temporality.

Georg Lukács is correct when he insists that such reflection is the melancholy of every genuine novel.¹⁷ I hold to the theory that every born-Catholic novelist is compelled to excise the religious demons of youth in at least one novel. For Farrell it was Studs Lonigan. For Greeley it was The Cardinal Sins.

The priests of St. Patrick’s church hold a central but circumscribed place in Studs Lonigan’s fate, from the opening chapters¹⁸ of the first volume which record his graduation from St. Patrick’s grade school, to the last chapters of the third volume, in which an anonymous “tall dark priest” anoints him on his deathbed.¹⁹

Farrell wrote that Studs was a tale of “spiritual poverty.” Greeley says that all of his novels are “comedies of grace”; they are “about God’s love…stories…of the ‘breaking in’ of God to the ordinary events of human life.”²⁰ Later I will address each author’s capacity for self-reflection. Here I want to compare the portraits of priests that each author paints.

Farrell’s Priests

Father Gilhooley is the pastor of St. Patrick’s. Our first glimpse of him is as “he pursed his fat lips, rubbed his fat paws together and suavely caressed his bay front. A fly buzzed momentarily above him.”²¹ He speaks of “Gawd” in theologically correct terms: good and evil, the value of a Catholic education, the dangers of life (i.e., sex—the “primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.”)²² But what really endures about his being is his obsession with raising funds to build his new St. Patrick’s church: “Father Gilhooley was probably happy, thinking of what a collection he would get, and of how many parishioners had received Holy Communion” Studs opines at Christmas Mass.

Father Doneggan is an assistant pastor. There is a detailed portrait of him during the same Mass. He appears quite admirable. He is devout, observant, but careful not to let his celebration become mere ritual. In his sermon Father Doneggan offers his congregation a vision of Jesus as a baby, a vulnerable and powerless human being, a vision Studs cannot accept as he sees Christ as a stern judge.²³ Studs even senses that Father Doneggan wants to be his friend; he feels that the priest is “someone a guy could even have a drink with.” Conviviality, however, is as close as Studs can come to true friendship and communication, and this limitation, no less than the bare stage of Studs’ mental theater, reflects his own spiritual poverty as well as that of the priest/church to meet human needs.

Father Roney, another assistant pastor, is the moderator of the youth club, the Order of Christopher, the goal of which was to organize the “best stuff of Catholic American manhood.” He stages a fake fight to teach lessons such as patience and fortitude. He administers the oath of “secrecy and the defense of his faith and his country” to the initiates for the protection of “Church and clergy wherever and whenever it may be needed.”²⁴

Father Shannon, “a plump bald-headed priest,” along with Father Kandinsky, his sidekick, visits St. Patrick’s to preach a parish “Mission”—the Catholic equivalent of a Tent Revival. He preaches an emotionally moving sermon that results in the youth of the parish coming to confession and communion in droves. Studs and some of the gang even swear off alcohol, briefly.²⁵

Studs participates in all of these church-related events, but his conversion is shallow. He ends up in the gutter, drunk, on New Year’s Day 1929. Mental impressions of priests are lasting: Father Shannon accusingly appears in Studs’s final delirium with Lucy Scanlan on his arm.

Then there is Father Moylan. On Sundays Studs’ father listens to Father Moylan on the radio, just as Greeley’s father listened to Father Charles Coughlin on his radio. Greeley hastens to assure us, however, that “Dad did not buy Coughlin’s anti-Semitism, by the way, not one bit.”²⁶ We do not know what else of the radio-priest’s message was bought; inasmuch as Coughlin/Moylan was the most famous and powerful person outside government in the 1930s, claiming forty million listeners each week, we can assume that there was in both Irishmen at least a modicum of approval.

Father Moylan was a man whose message exercised a powerful appeal for Studs’ gang:

“Well, Hoover is nothing but the tool of the international bankers, and he’s the guy who put the country on the fritz,” Red said.

“That’s just what Father Moylan has been saying on the radio,” Mugsy said.

“There’s a man for you. Boy, what Father Moylan doesn’t say about the bankers, and the Reds too” Kelly said.²⁷

A tall, dark priest precisely, solemnly, devoutly, and almost without personal interaction anoints Studs with the Last Rites (Extreme Unction). He is truly a man of mystery. He is an “outsider”: religion personified; not of this world and not able to save or transform—unlike the social circumstances such as the black population growth which did transform both St. Patrick’s church and Studs’ neighborhood.

For Studs, the Catholic Church is not a religion as much as it is an identity, defining his family, his friends, his school, and his community. Catholicism is primarily a matter of identity, rather than spirituality. Studs is born into a Catholic family and is therefore Catholic, no matter what his beliefs, attitudes, or conduct.

Religion does intrude from time to time on Studs’ consciousness, whereas spirituality and meaning do not. Studs does not apply the lessons of Jesus or the teachings of the church in his daily life—a life that consists for the most part of aimless wandering through the streets of Chicago, relieved by frequent squabbles with his family and his associates, binge drinking, and very occasionally, unthinking, almost anonymous sexual encounters.

Once in a while Studs goes to confession and receives communion. These episodes are intimately connected with his conflicting feelings about sex and, not coincidentally, death and hellfire.

Greeley’s Priests

In contrast to the priests in Studs Lonigan, who occupy a central but demarcated place, the priests in Andrew Greeley’s works are diffused throughout the texts. Every one of Greeley’s novels concerns a hero who either is a priest himself (as in The Cardinal Sins, Thy Brother’s Wife, Virgin and Martyr, Angels of September, Occasion of Sin, and the Blackie Ryan mysteries) or is someone very like a priest: a priest on a kind of leave of absence from his vows in Ascent into Hell (during which he discovers sex); a weird oversexed friar in The Final Planet; or a former seminarian in Lord of the Dance, Patience of a Saint, St. Valentine’s Night, Love Story, The Search for Maggie Ward, and Rite of Spring.

Other minor priest-characters in each of Greeley’s novels complete his tapestry. Priest-sex-church-social structure—all separate elements in Farrell’s work—are woven into one seamless garment in Greeley’s.

For instance, the life and destiny of Cathy, the protagonist of Virgin and Martyr, are inextricably bound to the love and torture she receives from her priests. Father Blackie, a Chicago seminarian/priest ministers to her via correspondence. Father Tuohy, a misguided liberal activist, who Greeley most unfairly compares to the Fathers Berrigan, marries and then divorces Cathy. He turns out to be homosexual. Father Ed, a “liberation theology” priest in “Costaguana” (literally “Bird-shit Coast”) loves Cathy but sells her to the local authorities to be tortured and raped. Finally Father Tierney, a drunken lecherous old priest, attempts to rape Cathy. Only Father Blackie Ryan, Greeley’s alter ego intervenes, an action that sends Tierney to an asylum.

What emerges from the tapestry of Farrell’s priests is a picture of human beings struggling, much of the time ineffectively, with the inexplicable conundrums of life and death: meaninglessness and powerlessness, racial injustice and anti-Semitism, social transition.

Farrell’s refusal to judge priests or even Studs, amounts paradoxically, to a Christian attitude from a former Catholic/atheist/Marxist. Studs Lonigan demands reflection. It invites the reader to bring his or her own experiences and judgment to the struggles of the characters. The voices of the author and the characters are clear and distinct, leaving room for the reader to listen.

Greeley’s portraits of priests are intimate. He produces a view of the world from the inside of the priest/church. Greeley’s stories are tales of revelation, vengeance, judgment, warning, and power. “Don’t fuck with God,” says Father Blackie. Greeley assures us that Blackie is a character that sometimes speaks with the author’s voice.

The church, even if ineffective, is a power, and its power is portrayed in intriguing and at the same time compelling imaginings that are not burdened by objectivity. The voice of the author and the characters merge and separate, somewhat indiscriminately. The result is more the musings of the author on a myth rather than an invitation to reflection. In fact, it is this very diffusion of character and voice that limits Greeley’s power as a novelist.

The most controversial feature of both Farrell and Greeley was their descriptions of sexuality.

Greeley argues correctly that his critics are unfair when they complain that his priests “never pray.” His priests do pray in every novel. What his critics mean, no doubt, is that the religious activities of his heroes—prayer, reflection, meditation, dialogue, and liturgy—tend to be eclipsed by their superhuman deeds. Greeley’s priests engage in such exciting activities—electing popes (The Cardinal Sins), making and unmaking saints (Virgin and Martyr and Occasion of Sin), colonizing new worlds (The Final Planet), solving murders (St. Valentine’s Night, Happy Are the Meek, Happy Are the Clean of Heart, Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice), undertaking love affairs (The Cardinal Sins and Thy Brother’s Wife)—that it is easy to miss their religious activities. The rift between religious activities and spiritual meaning so gaping in Studs’ life is not entirely healed in Greeley’s novels; but both do seek to heal the chasm with sex.

Part IV: Sexual Identification

Farrell

Studs is the epitome of adolescent struggle for sexual identification. His struggles are more explicit than those of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, but his goal of a firm sexual identity is no less clear.

He masturbates to be sure, but with richer fantasy, more social awareness, and less compulsivity than Philip Roth’s Portnoy.

As a fourteen-year-old boy, Studs idealizes Lucy Scanlan, the love of his life. This idealization emerges into a tender exchange of words and kisses in a tree in Washington Park, a scene in which Studs is tortured by the recurrent desire to “feel her up.” However, Studs does not initiate his heterosexual activity with the girl he loves but does so rather with Iris, the “Anybody’s” of Studs’ neighborhood. According to Studs’ friend Helen Shires, Lucy is jealous (or perhaps merely shocked) when she learns of Studs’ escapade with Iris. Studs tries to seduce Helen even as she speaks of Lucy:

Lucy! She seemed quite far away from him now. At times he liked her, and at times he tried to pretend to himself that he didn’t. He wanted to tell it all to Helen, and the words choked in his throat. The time they sat in the tree! Helen said she could fix things up for him with Lucy. He wanted to say go ahead, but something stopped him.… Lucy liked him, and it might do her good if she did a little worrying because he acted like he didn’t like her.… He told Helen that Lucy was all right, but he didn’t think he was interested in girls any more.²⁸

On both sides, the relationship between Studs and Lucy remains abstract, idealized and, imaginary for many years. There is a note of cruelty in the thought that it would do Lucy some “good” to worry. The ambivalence of adolescent sexual identity is betrayed in his thought that he “might not be interested in girls any more.”

Studs maintains his idealization but wishes to show off before someone:

Other guys had girls. Wished he had a girl, Lucy, a girl coming out only to see him play.… goofy!… But he still loved Lucy even if he hadn’t seen her in about four years.²⁹

Studs’ one chance to meld idealization/romanticism with mature sexual love ends disastrously. At a dance his sister Fran arranges a date between Studs and Lucy. Studs’ parents are ecstatic; Lucy is precisely the kind of girl they want for Studs. She is pretty, respectable, rich, and Irish Catholic. At the dance Studs behaves badly:

He was surly.… Lucy seemed to notice it.

“You know, Studs, a girl likes to dance with different fellows. Variety is the spice of life,” she said, during the next dance.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I know that old dark look of yours.”

He tried to smile. He wanted it to be over, and him and Lucy to be alone.

After the dance and before the cab ride to her house, Lucy says both insightfully and indulgently; “You’re just the same Studs…just like a little boy.”³⁰

The exchange in the cab ride home is focal for the understanding of Studs and his sexual development. At this time he is well aware that he is suffering from an untreated case of gonorrhea.

Suddenly, he was French-kissing her. He dug through her dress and touched her breast. She froze up, turned her face away.

“I’m not that kind of a girl.”

He tried, crudely, determined, unthinking, to pull her to him again.

“Please be careful,” she said cuttingly.

He looked out the window. He saw the lake. He grabbed her hand. He kissed her. She opened her mouth on the next kiss. He felt under her dress.

“I won’t hurt you. Come on,” he said huskily. He didn’t even think of his dose, all he had in mind was Lucy.

“I can’t…no…not here. If my mother isn’t home, maybe…”

“Why not?” he said.

“I can’t…it’ll be awful…I’ll ruin my clothes…please wait till we get home,” she begged.

He believed her. They kissed, and he felt her all the way home. She got out of the car rumpled, and rushed into the hallway. He paid the bill.

She opened the inside door, and stood holding it, blocking his entrance. She pursed her lips for him. They kissed. He tried to push open the door.

“No,” she said.

She pushed his hat off, and when he turned, closed the door on him. He watched her go upstairs. She didn’t look back.

He walked slowly out and away.

“That goddamn teaser!”

He felt that he’d been a goddamn chump, but realized what a bastard he’d been, trying to make her. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.³¹

And “in his mind” is where Lucy stays, for her actual association with Studs comes to an end with this episode.

She appears in Studs’ final delirium amid the phantasmagoric images of priests, nuns, his father, the pope (dropped on his buttocks, saying, “Do you receive the sacraments regularly?”), and his sister. They all dance around Studs accusingly. The vision continues: “Father Shannon, on the arm of Lucy Scanlan who was naked and bleeding from her young breasts, stopped before him and said, ‘Be a man.’”³²

Catherine, the pregnant woman whom Studs had planned to marry, loves him and recalls their sexual interaction as “beautiful.” She is the faithful one by his dying side. But bloodied Lucy is the final vision of his dream, standing among those chasing him and shouting: “Stop thief!”

Studs sees himself running from them all and shouting “Save me! Save me! Save me!” But there is no indication to him his pleas are directed since all of the powers- that-be in Studs’ world are accusing and pursuing him. The next person to speak is his mother, who announces, “He’s dying.”

Studs’ relationship with Lucy is marked by its adolescent idealization, romantic exploration (the tree), devastating and incomplete sexual exchange (the cab), and the preservation of the image in cruel fantasy.

The final appearance of Lucy on the arm of a priest sums up poignantly Studs’ experience that religion does not help one “become a man” in spite of its doctrinal demands. Studs remains an undifferentiated adolescent whose infantile sado-masochistic attitude toward women is never wholly absorbed by his masculine consolidation and ability to love the complementary sex.

Certainly Studs is not a homosexual, but he languishes in a sexual developmental lag that is a cross between the normal homosexual phase of development, which is popularly termed “the gang age,” and deeper elements of latent curiosity. One cannot ignore these elements in Studs’ character. “You were never one for the girls, Studs,” one of the gang reminds him, and indeed he never was. Studs clearly feels more comfortable around men, around his gang, than he does around women, with the interesting exception of Helen Shires, who eventually “comes out” as a lesbian. Moreover, Studs is approached at least three times by men. One such approach occurs when Leon, an effeminate music teacher and acquaintance of Studs, pressures him to take private piano lessons.³³ The teacher’s advances leave Studs with conflicted response. He has “no answer for Leon.”

When an old man in the park makes a pass at him Studs is frankly disgusted. Later he finds himself “strangely interested” in a group of black gays who invite his companionship.

Studs’ psychosexual struggles are intensified by the teachings of his church and the values of his gang. Both encourage his sexual conflicts to take the shape of a general violence—a “Madonna-whore” view of women— and prolongation of a confused phase of sexual identity.

Farrell is merely putting Studs through the normal adolescent paces. The fact that Studs fails to negotiate successfully the sexual trek from childhood to maturity only heightens the reflective force that confronts the observer of Studs’ journey.

Greeley

Does this have anything to do with Andrew M. Greeley, priest, sociologist and, novelist? Yes, because he is a champion of the imaginative aspect of religion, of the reflective force of story and symbol. They form the bedrock of his sociological theory of religion. “We are reflective creatures; we must reflect on our imaginative religion.”³⁴

Greeley is explicit when he draws sexual images of the women and men (especially priests) who people his novels. It is his imagination, his experience of sexual development as part and parcel of the human quest, and the religious experience that he poses for his readers. His graphic sexual imaginations make it apparent how Greeley identifies himself with Studs rather than Farrell.

Adolescence and certain stages of celibate development both enrich and limit the sexual imagination. The mental productions of Studs and Greeley reflect the rich fantasy enlivened and circumscribed by lack of experience. Descriptions of sexual activities, feelings, and attributes occupy a very large place in Greeley’s books. Greeley does not shy away from sacerdotal sex, a subject Farrell did not deal with and which Studs would find unimaginable.

Greeley practices celibacy. He clearly implies in his autobiography that he has never had sex with a woman. None of his writings betrays this truth. Accounts of sexual intercourse by an ordained priest in good standing are relatively rare in Greeley’s books, occurring only in The Cardinal Sins (1981) and once in Thy Brother’s Wife (1982) and in Virgin and Martyr (1985). These are Greeley’s most personally revealing novels. There are also allusions to, but not descriptions of, homosexual behavior by priests in several of his books. There are no scenes of masturbation in Greeley’s writing, in contrast to both Farrell and Richard Wright, the latter’s censored accounts from Native Son being published for the first time only in the 1991 Library of America edition.

Many of Greeley’s characters are priests who are not in good standing with church authority or who are quasi-priests: seminarians, boys preparing for the seminary, former seminarians, and a self-appointed saint (in the  1987 Patience of a Saint). These folk are given free rein, and their sexual activity is recorded.

Pain or torture of women is part and parcel of much of Greeley’s sex. In its most demonic form the woman is cruelly raped—often by the Mafia, as a sanction against her male relatives.

There is a special category of adolescent sexual play so frequent in Greeley’s novels that it merits its own category: mixed skinny-dipping along with references to Playboy centerfolds. These events merit further analysis in as much as they are part of a system of recurring symbols in Greeley’s writing along with water, fire, and the “empty tomb.”

Finally, all of the women in Greeley’s novels, be they schoolgirls, nuns, old ladies, are portrayed as sexually irresistible, with special attention given to sexually attractive bodily parts (legs, breasts, hips). One wonders where are the less comely, the less well endowed, the plainer women who people the real world? Only the uninitiated imagination clothes feminine beauty exclusively in a form worthy of Playboy magazine.

Greeley the author idealizes women. Nevertheless, there is an edge of empathy that Farrell the author consistently demonstrates. This element is just as consistently lacking in Greeley’s novels. There is, for instance, a graphic rape scene that concludes Farrell’s second volume. Weary Reilly rapes Irene³⁵ at a New Year’s Eve party. One can be moved to tears for the victim. A rape scene in Greeley’s Virgin and Martyr, much less explicit than Farrell’s, leaves the reader cold and evokes little empathy:

The commandante handed Ed a thick packet. Money? She thought. Father Ed sold me to him for money?

She went unresistingly to the police car, too numb from shock to fight back.

In the police station, Don Felipe was the first to rape her. She realized soon that he could not have sex without tormenting his partner. Only when he hit her bare buttocks with his riding whip was he able to force himself into her.

As the whip cut into her flesh, she repeated over and over to herself the incredible words: Father Ed sold me, Father Ed sold me.

Then the other police took turns raping and sodomizing her. Fifteen, twenty times. She lost count.

And that was only the first night.³⁶

Voices

When reading Farrell it is fairly easy to distinguish the voices of the characters from that of the author. The characters do not fracture sexually; that is, there is a precision to their mythic existence that allows them to struggle freely even with their own sexual confusion, as Studs does. By contrast, Greeley’s voice is quite frequently confused with that of his characters, both male and female.

For all their elements of merchandising, book jackets do tell something about the contents of the book. A nude woman, seated, surrounded by ells of red velvet, graces the cover of Greeley’s first novel. This cover, Greeley tells us, was his personal choice and decision. Images of beautiful languorous women in dishabille continue across twenty covers of Greeley’s fiction. The packaging provokes some of Greeley’s twenty million readers to attend to the word picture signaled on the cover.

Furthermore, if one compares the female body as presented by the two writers one is quickly struck by their differing grades of objectivity. There is a nude scene in The Lord of the Dance³⁷ in which Irene Farrell is sitting in her bathtub and sipping a vodka martini: “Her body, a sponge for sensual pleasure, soaked up the reassuring warmth.” We are told, “She had lost fifteen pounds” (without telling us what her original weight was from which the fifteen pounds were subtracted) “only she didn’t really need to lose them. Irene turned away from the mirror, embarrassed as she always was by the image of her swelling breasts and full hips.”

After Irene slips into an appealing bit of lingerie, her daughter Noele comes into the steamy-mirrored, powder blue-carpeted room. “‘You’re totally beautiful…I want you to be the prettiest mother in the parish.’” Greeley’s voice and his personality seem to infuse with that of his character so that she is at once seen and seeing (as in the bathroom mirror), desired and desiring. One gets the impression that the author has somehow failed to understand the concept of detachment. Would Irene, who is embarrassed by her nakedness, even when alone in the bathroom, ever characterize her own body as a “sponge for sensual pleasure?” And who would be more likely to conceptualize the woman as being the “prettiest in he parish,” the teenaged daughter or the parish priest?

This casual confusion of sexes pervades Greeley’s writings, his nonfiction as well as his novels. For instance, in commenting on celibacy and sexuality in his autobiography, Greeley recounts an instance of sharing a television commentary with other notables such as Cardinal Krol, Father Hesburgh, and a person he lists as a “sometime priest.” Greeley reflects on the experience with these words: “The sometime priest told how happy was marriage. His wife agreed. Secure in the tiny studio in Tucson, I noted cynically to myself that I didn’t think I would be happy married to either of them.”³⁸ Cynicism is perhaps the least significant element of that particular self-revelation.

Farrell wrote a nude scene that illustrates the distinction. In this interchange Margaret, the daughter, is in the kitchen and is nude. Her mother comments:

“It’s a sin to be seen in your pelt,” Mrs. O’Flaherty said from her bedroom off the kitchen, where she sat in her rocking chair, sewing.

Naked, Margaret stood over the stove, waiting for the coffee in the white enameled coffee pot to heat. She was a well-built woman weighing about one hundred and thirty pounds, her hair brown and warm but not very thick, her eyes blue, her lips thin, her arms slender, her breasts small and upright, her pubic hair a large dark swab. The mother dropped her sewing, drew out a clay pipe, filled it, lit the pipe, stood in the doorway puffing, watching her daughter smoke a cigarette.

“My mother, may the Lord have mercy on her soul, would have skinned me alive if I went around in my pelt,” the mother said.

Margaret went into the pantry by the sink and reappeared with a cup and saucer.

“Shame! For same!” the mother said.

“What are you talking about?” Margaret asked, a rasp of anger in her voice.

“I wouldn’t be seen showing myself in me pelt.”³⁹

Farrell manages to withdraw from the scene almost completely, letting the women’s billingsgate carry the weight of his argument. He rarely intrudes.

In particular, Farrell’s description of nakedness is detached. Margaret weighs “about one hundred and thirty pounds.” This is not a subjective or affective characterization, but a measurement. Some of Farrell’s other details are less impersonal but no less detached. Margaret is a “well-built” young woman, with brown hair which is “warm but not very thick,” she has blue eyes, thin lips, slender arms, and small upright breasts. Even her pubic hair is represented anesthetically: it is a “swab,” that is to say, a mop.

Margaret does not view her nakedness as erotic. At first, she does not even appear to know that she is naked or at least that there is anything remarkable in such a condition: “What are you talking about?” she asks her mother.

Sex and Society

The sexual struggle of Studs and that in Greeley’s novels is central to the message of both authors. The church does not face up to or understand sexual reality. Authority is corrupt and ineffectual. Society must look elsewhere for salvation from its spiritual poverty.

For Greeley the answer is in smaller community units that allow priest and people to make their own decisions regarding such matters as divorce, premarital sex, and birth control (cf. Cardinal Virtues (1990). For Farrell the remedy and the hope are in social movements that can relieve the poor and ensure social justice. In his own way each author is saying that there is no salvation in the church as it is.

Greeley’s popularity was at least partly based on his sensitivity to the sexual and social tension of the times. Greeley, like Farrell, does understand the common person and his or her discontent. This struggle is demonstrated repeatedly as Greeley puts his finger squarely on the pulse of the new American proletariat that thinks of itself as “middle class”; but it is a middle class that owns not businesses, not even houses and cars, but mortgages and loans. Of the housing shortage after World War II, the shortage that produced Levittown and thousands of suburbs like it, Greeley writes:

It was easy for social critics like Pete Seeger a few years later to make fun of the “ticky-tac” suburban houses that were to spring up on the fringes of most of the cities of the country. But Seeger was a rich kid who went to Harvard; he never lived in a cold-water flat. So he never knew the joy of having for the first time your own bathroom and separate bedrooms for the different members of the family.⁴⁰

Greeley’s readers, his “parishioners” as he called them, live between the brat’s squall and the boss’s snarl and always in terror of the pink slip.

In fact, it may be that Greeley’s novels, portraying the Chicago of money and glamorous settings, the commodities exchange, the power lunch, the yacht, and the characters with connections in the CIA and the College of Cardinals, function as a kind of opium to his readers. Nevertheless, in its mythic structure—its identity, politics, violence, and tortured sexuality—Greeley’s vision steers uncomfortably close at times to positions described by Farrell’s Father Moylan.

Greeley attributes the volume of his writing in part to his celibacy. Indeed, his novels are a witness to his celibate/sexual adjustment and his sociological expertise. Having said this, we are left with one final puzzle: how do we distinguish author and character and account for the kinship between the two?

Part V: Kinship, The Vital Link

Three problems remain in understanding the kinship of Greeley and Studs. The first is the style employed in Farrell’s portrayal of Studs in contrast to the style of Greeley’s novels. Second, there is a problem of “spiritual poverty,” the term Farrell used to describe Studs’ world. How could the spirit of an atheist/Marxist be linked with the spirit of a Roman Catholic priest? Third, what does the confusion or clarity of the voices of the author and characters have to do with the kinship?

Style

Farrell and Greeley have very different styles of writing, and they approach the Chicago Irish Catholic reality by very distinct methods. Farrell the author is an Andrew Wyeth Jr. of words. His characters are drawn finely with care and precision. The details of their inner psychic struggle are delineated clearly in their facial structure, gestures, carriage, expression, and in the atmosphere and settings through which they move.

Andrew Greeley the author is the Andy Warhol of the religious symbol: bold, pop, impressionistic, impulsive, and vague in depth. As Greeley said, “When I type, I talk aloud…I write what I hear…when I have a clear and powerful insight and I am writing with attention to it, the words fairly dance on the page before me. I say things I am not conscious of ever having thought before, in ways that surprise me.”⁴¹ This is reminiscent of W. H. Auden, who told an interviewer that he did not know what he thought about a subject until he spoke about it.

To extol one form of writing is not to denigrate the other. Respecting each approach—a consideration of style—can aid us in appreciating what each messenger has to say about the world in which we live.

Greeley’s honesty is admirable when he states unequivocally in his autobiography that his motivation in writing his novels is primarily market driven (much like Warhol), and he describes the facility with which he can produce a book by dictation or computer in a matter of weeks.⁴²

Farrell began writing the Studs Lonigan trilogy in June 1929 and completed it in January 1935. In the 1958 edition of the work he reflects on his motivation, especially in defense against those who claimed that his work was salacious:

A man does not make sacrifices, take economic risk, put his future on the line, and give some of the best part of his years of young manhood to write a sensational shocker. Such books are hammered out in haste, often in a few weeks or months.⁴³

Greeley’s novels cannot be dismissed as pap merely because they are hammered out in a few weeks or months. Certainly they lack the refinement of Farrell, and none of his priest characters approaches the sensitively nuanced portrayals of Bernanos, Silone, Greene, J. F. Powers, or Jon Hassler. Greeley’s style is more reminiscent of Danielle Steele or Jackie Collins than of Richard Wright or Saul Bellow, and his production schedule is more like that of Joyce Carol Oates than of Farrell. Greeley can boast of “eight best-sellers in five years,”⁴⁴ a stark contrast to Farrell’s trilogy, which sold a mere five thousand copies in a similar period. For all his numbers, of course, Greeley has not produced an American classic.

If Greeley’s style is breezy and thin, his intent and his themes are not. Greeley says repeatedly that his novels are about God, God’s love, and God’s intervention and revelation in people’s lives. The Catholic Church and church people, especially priests, carry the weight of his argument. Bishop/Monsignor John Blackwood Ryan, Ph.D. (Father Blackie), rector of the Cathedral of the Holy Name, is the one priest “character who has lurked in my [Greeley’s] imagination for a long, long time, while sometimes he speaks in my voice he has an identity and integrity of his own.”⁴⁵ Greeley attributes to Blackie his most memorable phrase, “never, I repeat never, fuck with the Lord God.”⁴⁶

Despite Greeley’s style and intent, he does demonstrate an acute awareness of the spiritual poverty of church, priest, and layman. Greeley’s piercing insight into human failings and the limitations of the sacred endear him to millions of readers and encourage many to think critically about religion.

Spiritual Poverty

What is the underlying link between the spiritual poverty that is expressed in such distinct styles? Farrell maintained that the spiritual poverty of Studs’ environment limited his chances and conditioned his brain. What did Farrell mean by this remark? The term spiritual poverty, which might be remarkably appropriate from the pen of Greeley, seems a strange one from a naturalist writer like Farrell. Could it be that the Irish Catholic origins prevail?

Leave aside for a moment one of our basic assumptions mentioned earlier: that Farrell remains Catholic in spite of himself. We contend that a mutual grounding in sociology is the link between Farrell and Greeley.

The word spirit become less strange when we recall that Farrell was strongly influenced by Max Weber, for whom spirit was a basic principle of sociology. Weber’s best-known book is titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And Farrell’s study of Marx had led him naturally to the philosophy of Hegel, whose first influential book was Phanemonologie der Geist, literally, Phenomenon of Spirit—Geist is often mistranslated as Mind. Hegel distinguishes between mind (Sinn) and spirit (Geist) and wrote at length about the evolution of the spirit, including, for instance, the spirit of peoples and of art and culture. Spirit clearly transcends mind for Hegel, for Weber, and certainly for Farrell.

The ideal of mind is clearly comprehended by spirit, and we begin to understand what Farrell meant by the term when we consider Studs’ mental universe. Beyond the words that Studs hears in his mind, beyond, that is, the clichés that ricochet through his mental labyrinth like billiard balls, Studs’ mind contains images of himself and of other people.

Studs cannot tolerate representations of himself as the child of privilege, as his mother’s pampered firstborn, as a favorite of his sister Frances. He engages in a vigorous purge of such self-images. Studs wants to make sure that none of these unacceptable characters sneaks onto the stage, and in addition, he excludes any of their friends, allies, or relations. The only conscious self-image Studs permits himself is his fantasized self: “Lonewolf Lonigan,” a tough guy with a gun, who, surrounded by darkness, hated and feared, wounded and in pain, has to fight the odds by himself.⁴⁷ The Lonewolf thus stands as the emblem of Studs’ spiritual poverty.

Spirit, for Weber and Hegel, transcends mind. They, for example, speak of the spirit of a people and of an age. At the same time, however, this transcendent aspect of spirit is incorporated into an individual’s consciousness and takes the form of a representation of other people and other consciousnesses.

For Studs, therefore, other people are very threatening. In his spiritual vacuum he must represent them as cartoons. In Studs’ deathbed delirium, when he is too weak to control and marshal his energies against these images, they rampage through his mind the way the furious mobs raged through Chicago in the racial riots of 1919. Studs’ father, dressed in a clown suit, a fat priest in a black robe with a red hat, Sister Bertha with “the twisted face of a maniac in a motion-picture close-up,” George Washington, the pope, President Wilson, Father Gilhooley, Red Kelly and his father Police Sergeant Kelly, Mrs. George Jackson (a woman Studs picked up in his brother-in-law’s betting parlor), Mrs. Dennis P. Gorman “in the red robes of the master of ceremonies of the Order of Christopher,” Father Shannon “on the arm of Lucy Scanlan,” and Studs’ sister Frances “in a transparent nightgown.”

The mental riot, of course, occurs in the course of Studs’ illness; but the cartoon-other people are only liberated by Studs’ loss of control. Indeed, throughout the book we can see Paddy Lonigan as a clown, Sister Bertha with the twisted face of a maniac, and Frances in a transparent nightgown. In fact, throughout his adolescence and young manhood Studs devotes a good deal of energy to suppressing the inevitable riot, to policing his mental stage of these Bacchae.

Greeley, in his sober novels, gives form to the kinds of images that Studs could only face in his delirium or in his drunken bouts. The images of Studs’ imagination, from his fantasized self, Lonewolf Lonigan, to the bleeding Lucy Scanlan find echoes in Greeley’s pages where Father Blackie often finds himself in a similar position. Greeley understands Studs’ spiritual poverty and gives it a new voice and continued reality.

Voices: Author’s or Characters’?

Again, Greeley’s voice tends to be diffuse, creeping into both male and female characters seemingly indiscriminately and in an undisciplined way. Perhaps this is the price of a Warholian style. Many Greeley novels demonstrate that he lacks the “writer’s naiveté” and the “novelist’s objectivity” which Lukács considers necessary for the storyteller to produce a great novel.

Greeley has protested vehemently that all of his characters are the products of his own imagination; perhaps this limits his mythic differentiation and greatness. Both qualities are born out of long, hard, disciplined and unfortunately necessary painful introspection wherein one knows oneself. In the words of psychiatrist David Berenson, the price of self-knowledge is the experience of “optional humiliation.” A person who has paid the price therefore knows the non-self as well as the self and can transcend both in his characters. In other words, all of Greeley’s characters are tools or aspects of his own striving and therefore cannot have lives of their own, as does Studs.

In his article on the Irish and Studs, Greeley demonstrates clearly his confusion of author and character when he writes,

Dubious about his masculinity, harassed by his mother, nagged by his sister, lacking a confident father to imitate, and paralyzed by guilt, Studs was already bent on self-destruction when he graduated from St. Anselm’s in 1916.⁴⁸

Of course Studs graduated from St. Patrick’s in 1916. Farrell graduated from St. Anselm’s grade school. The slip is symbolic of the deeper confusion of author and voice that pervades Greeley’s own work.

Earlier in the same essay Greeley mentions “St. Anselm’s church (built by Father Gilhooley to ‘save the neighborhood.’” Of course Father Gilhooley built St. Patrick’s.⁴⁹ Later Greeley says ambiguously “Who will celebrate the agony and the glories of Christ the King, the way Jim Farrell celebrated St. Anselm’s?”⁵⁰

From a literary point of view what makes Greeley’s ambiguity and confusion so striking is that he misses Farrell’s personal transcendence in the work, his objectivity. Farrell does not confuse himself with Studs or his own past with that of Studs. Psychologically what makes the confusion of character and voice so striking is Greeley’s profound identification with Studs at the same time that he seems oblivious to the hopeful vertical transcendence implied by his identification. In other words, if one can effectively reflect on the fate of the tragic hero, in this case Irish self-destruction, one can avoid it oneself.

Greeley indulges a flight of fancy in which he imagines Studs not dead but moving to Beverly—a locale in several Greeley novels—to Christ the King parish, where Greeley served as assistant pastor for a time. Greeley endows his fantasized Studs with a summer home in Grand Beach, where Greeley himself has a home. Greeley’s fantasy “saves” Studs from his fate—death at age 29—to make of him something he could never be, “a loyal parishioner, a fine father and husband, a distinguished citizen.” Greeley would have Studs marry Lucy Scanlan rather than Catherine, his pregnant fiancée. “Yes, indeed,” says Greeley, “Studs Lonigan, I know you well. What a shame we never met.”⁵¹

We contend that the key to understanding Greeley’s comparison of himself with Studs the character rather than with Farrell the author lies in the precision of voice in the later and the diffusion of voice in the former.

Farrell as an author is consistent in his voice. Danny O’Neill speaks for him, not merely as a minor character in the Lonigan series but as a major speaker in Farrell’s O’Neill-O’Flaherty cycle (A World I Never Made; No Star Is Lost; My Days of Anger). Farrell can also point to the prototypes or inspirations for his characters from the friends, acquaintances, and situations of his youth. Studs is based on an admired schoolmate, a few years Farrell’s senior. Because of Farrell’s careful craftsmanship the creation of his characters can arise, and they can take their mythic existence unimpeded by the person of the author.

By identifying with Studs, Greeley gives eloquent testimony to the greatness of Farrell’s creation. Lonigan qualifies admirably against Georg Lukács’s demanding criterion:

The need for reflection is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel. Through it, the writer’s naiveté suffers extreme violence and is changed into its opposite (This is only another way of saying that pure reflection is profoundly inartistic.) And the hard-won equalization, the unstable balance of mutually surmounting reflections—the second naiveté, which is the novelist’s objectivity—is only a formal substitute for the first: it makes form-giving possible and it rounds off the form, but the very manner in which it does so points eloquently at the sacrifice that has had to be made, at the paradise forever lost, sought and never found. This vain search and then resignation with which it is abandoned make the circle that completes the form.⁵²

Farrell portrays the ironic struggles of “the making and education of an ordinary American boy.”⁵³ His mythic garb, which makes him accessible, is that he is a Chicago Irish Catholic adolescent. Farrell reflects simply and profoundly on the melancholy of Studs, “There but for the grace of God go I.… There but for the grace of God go…many others.”⁵⁴

John Chamberlain draws on personal youthful Irish experience to reflect on the profundity of Studs. “We have no mere slice of life here,” he writes. “If anything we have a sermon. ‘The wages of sin is death.’ But the sermon, like the politics, is implicit in the artistic arrangement of the material.”⁵⁵

Even though Greeley’s novels lack the “form-giving” elements that Lukács says are necessary to complete the novel form and establish the melancholy reflection, he does identify with Studs. That intuitive kinship means that on some level he does understand the sermon. He has reflected and can embrace the irony instinctively even if he did not duplicate it in his own style.

Chicago writers have been generous in bestowing characters that challenge our need to be understood, empowered, and loved in this hostile world. We now need to turn to a wider group of writers who reflected the meaning of celibacy, not via autobiography, or as priest-authors, but novelists who found the truth in their fictional priest characters.

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The idea that defect, shadow, or other misfortune could ever cause the church to stand in need of restoration or renewal is hereby condemned as obviously absurd.  -  Pope Gregory XVI, 1832

The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is in a profound crisis. Its name is SEX. Its symptom is sexual abuse of minors by clergy. But its core is celibacy.

Understanding the dimensions of the present catastrophe in one of the world’s great religions is not simple. The conflict is not only conditioned to resist investigation by centuries of tradition, but is also elegantly bound up in an elaborate structure of secrecy and power.

A SYMPTOM

Hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the United States—five thousand named since 1950—have sexually abused minors.

Outrage over sexual abuse of minors by clergy in the beginning of the third millennium, especially in the English-speaking world, has not been limited to liberal or conservative elements either in the Church or the general public. Questions about clergy integrity are not limited to the offending clerics, but involve the Church hierarchy and its participation in covering up abuse by priests. Questions remain of just how high and how broad the conspiracy to conceal crimes goes.

Here I address why this symptom of corruption in the Catholic Church is so dangerous to the internal stability of the universal church.

The first question is: “How did wide ranging public indignation spring up, seemingly so fully matured after January 2002, in response to the Boston Globe’s investigative reports of abuse?” Excellent and powerful as this reporting indeed is, in itself it was not sufficient to destabilize an unconditioned populous—a national and world wide church—unprepared to accept the truth and gravity of a situation.

Make no mistake. Sexual abuse of minors by priests—men bound by a vocational requirement of perfect and perpetual chastity and presented to the public as sexually safe—is a major social and religious problem. It is criminal.

There is no doubt that for decades bishops and religious superiors have known about the abuse by priests, covered it up, transferred the offenders, intimidated the victims when they could, “bought their silence” when persuasion or intimidation failed. Volumes of court documents indicate that cardinals and bishops lied and conspired to keep immoral and criminal activity from the public.

The irony of the scandal of sexual abuse by priests and bishops is that secrecy was meant to save the Church from scandal.

My ethnographic research between 1960 and 1985 established a base line that 6 percent of Catholic priests involve themselves sexually with minors. (Cf. A Secret World, 1990. or Celibacy in Crisis, 2003)

In 1993 sociologist Father Andrew Greeley estimated that between 5 and 7 percent of Catholic priests abuse minors. The John Jay Report commissioned by the American Bishops concluded that 4 percent of priests from 1950 to 2002 had abused minors. The numbers run from 7.6 percent in Boston, 8.2 percent in New Hampshire, and in 1983 11.4 percent of the priest active in the Los Angeles Archdiocese were abuses and 75 percent of all parishes there had at least one abuser on its staff over the 50 year period studied.

Forget the polemics. Sexual abuse by priests is a significant problem.

Beyond the numbers, the atrocities of clergy sexual abuse against minors are the tip of an iceberg. Sexual abuse defines the symptom of an institution rocked to its very foundations, gasping for air and trying desperately to keep its head above water. Or less kindly, in the words of one bishop, “the institution to which I belong is rotten to its core.”

The second question is: Why has the impetus for an-as-yet-ill-defined Reformation surfaced now and primarily in the United States? After all sex is universal. Sexual offences of clerics and religious controversies are not new.

One reason for the current upheaval is that the critical mass of men and women abused by priests has grown to a point where the numbers of responsible priests ministering can no longer balance the number of offending priests. The best estimates state that each abusive priest has between ten and fifty victims. Father Greeley estimated victims in the hundreds of thousands.

Additionally, during the twentieth century Catholic priests became familiar and prominent on the American horizon. They no longer operated under the radar of public scrutiny.

In fact the Church sought an ever-higher public profile to match its growing influence. These factors conditioned the American public to consider priests through bifurcated lenses. First, priests were accorded greater respect, and even reverence, than ever before in “Protestant America.” But also, priests were judged in an ever more realistic light—against American democratic principles.

Cinema is an example of one element that prepared the American public to think the (Catholic) unthinkable—priests can be sexually active. Mixed with the stories of strong priests—who fight sin and evil, stand up to oppressors, protect the poor, and sacrifice themselves for their flock, celibate all—were vignettes of less ideal clergy. Movies touched, however deftly, on problems of clerical immaturity, masturbation, homosexuality, sexual abuse of women, or conflicted loving relationships, abuse of minors and abortion.

The Movies—that particular American medium that creates and reflects an “image”—featured priests at first idealistically under the strict eye of Catholic censors. More recent portrayals have intimated at a spectrum beyond the heroic.

Movie-goers witnessed the evolution of the Catholic priest’s public image from immigrant protector and leader of small ethnic communities—predominantly Irish or Italian—to super stars and idols for millions to less honorable and more pedestrian souls.

Mid-century movies portrayed priests as strong, masculine champions of the poor, with no hint of sexual feelings or awareness. The roster of actors portraying priests contributed to an image of power and sensual appeal without sexuality: Spencer Tracy as Father Tim in San Francisco (1936.) Pat O’Brien as Father Jerry in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938.) Karl Maldin as Father Barry in On the Waterfront (1954.) Anthony Quinn as the saintly Pope-to-be Kiril Lakota in Shoes of the Fisherman (1968.) Robert DeNiro as Father Des Spellacy in True Confessions (1981.)

Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley in Going My Way (1944), and Frank Sinatra as the poor, frail pastor in Miracle of the Bells (1948) neutered and sentimentalized the image of the priest, and in the words of Garry Wills, “celebrated all the Church’s faults as if they were virtues.”

Movies in the last three decades of the twentieth century hinted at individual priests grappling with sexual problems of conscience, including abortion (The Cardinal, 1963.)

Minor clergy characters began to appear as a well meaning but ineffectual pastors (M*A*S*H, 1970) or a “childish masturbator” (The End, 1978.) A starkly negative view of a priest emerged as a manipulator and frankly sexual sinner (Monsignor, 1982)

The issue of sexual abuse and clergy was hinted at in two movies both released in 1995: Sleepers, shows the struggle of a priest who had himself been sexually abused as a boy, and Primal Fear peeks at an Archbishop who is an abuser of young boys and girls.

The Priest a 1994 an English made-for-TV movie that made it to big screen theaters in the States, sympathetically portrayed two priests, one heterosexual and one homosexual, both sexually active.

Documentary films recording the crisis have proliferated. The degree of knowledge and awareness of priest and bishop abuse of minors is so prominent that comedians, situation comedies, and editorial cartoons are common-place. Some

In spite of contradictions during this half-century transition, church officials reinforced the equation that priest equals celibate. An official spokesperson for the American bishops asserted on television as late as January 2001that “99 and 44/100 % of priests are celibate.” The average American neither challenged the statement nor was convinced by the hyperbole.

A third element prepared the American public to face the problem of sexual abuse of minors. From the 1960s on legislation defending the rights of children proliferated.

Reporting laws required health professionals, teachers and others to report suspected child abuse to State social services. Federal legislation put the full weight of its pocketbook behind the movement in 1974 when it refused funds to States that lacked reporting laws.

In 1994 in Rome a long-time staff member of one of the Congregations of the Vatican stated: “The Vatican cannot understand why the American Bishops can’t control the courts and the media better” in response to the question, “Why has Rome not helped the US bishops in the sex abuse crisis?”

The American hierarchy, indeed, has desperately tried to control the courts and the media—and still do to a degree. Coordinated efforts from the central offices of bishops in Washington D.C. aimed a counter attack in the 1990s on any news story about priests abusing minors. They dismissed all reports—“a smear campaign,” “anti-Catholic, anti-church, anti-priest” or “biased reporting.” Even Vatican spokesmen supported the thesis that there was, in fact, no crisis, simply a media driven attempt to exploit and sensationalize isolated misbehavior by a “few bad apples.”

These church efforts failed finally because court documentation and the media forces, led by the Boston Globe’s reports beginning on January 6^th, 2002, tipped the balance. A readied public became an informed public. Those who were reluctant to believe the worst were roused to anger—outraged at the deception by their leaders who knew of abuse and conspired to conceal it. Lay people—along with the civil authorities—demanded an accounting.

Lawyers representing the Church fight furiously to exonerate abusing priests and justify the involvement of bishops and dioceses in the crisis. Statutes of Limitation have saved hundreds of priests—but not all—from serving jail time. Civil suites have proliferated beyond count.

THE UNITED States has a highly refined tort system that has made civil litigation more possible than in European countries. High profile, high stakes jury awards and cash settlements in favor of victims sobered church officials—thirty-two-and-a-half million (119.6 million jury award) for eleven victims in Dallas, Texas (1997); seven-and-a-half million payout (32 million jury award) for two victims in Stockton, California (1998); five million plus payment to one victim in Los Angeles/Orange (2001). All of these settlements were awarded prior to January 2002. Since then several dioceses have made group settlements—Orange County, California, 100 million, Boston, 85 million, Louisville, Kentucky, 25.7 million and many others.

Awareness of the depth of the crisis evolved slowly. But even the highest church authorities now relinquish some measure of denial as cardinals and bishops are no longer immune from depositions and court appearances. Previously unheard of in American history until this time, cardinals and bishops suffered the indignity of becoming targets of Grand Jury investigations.

The crisis is not simply abuse of minors. It involves three distinct elements of concern: sex, money and loss of credibility in moral authority. These storm clouds on the clerical horizon were harbingers of the massive forces that combine—like a Midwest tornado—to threaten the very foundations of the church’s sexual assumptions.

Beyond the symptom of sexual abuse by clergy is the threat to the problematic equation—on which all of the church’s reasoning about sexual behavior rests—that “priest equals celibacy.” When that myth dissipates the whole sexual structure of Catholic teaching about sex falls like a house of cards.

A PROBLEMATIC EQUATION

Central to my understanding of the present crisis is the disintegration of the myth that priest and celibacy are an identical and inseparable reality.

Two questions have to be addressed: What are the core constructs and main factors that laid the foundations for the climate of crisis and reformation? And What does religious celibacy that affects only clerics, have to do with the disruption of the faith and confidence of millions of faithful who practice their religion for the most part within marriage?

Three super star American priests of the twentieth century sold the priest-celibate image to millions of Americans at the same time as they conditioned the Catholic faithful for Reformation.

Father Charles E. Coughlin, his celibacy unquestioned in the public mind, championed the link between religion, social justice, and democracy. In spite of his obnoxious anti-Semitism—an authentic echo of the traditional Catholic teaching of the time—he gave the average Catholic a voice—the courage to speak up and an expectation to be heard.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen charmed a nation with his radio and television presentations. Doctrinally orthodox, especially in sexual matters like birth control, he, nonetheless, encouraged Catholics to think for themselves.

Father Andrew M. Greeley has been the single most powerful clerical force preparing for a Reformation by forming a bridge from mythical clerical stereotypes to penetrating analysis of hierarchical figures. No American priest has been more influential than Greeley in encouraging Catholics to confront sexuality and the church hierarchy.

Never shy about addressing church problems or problematic churchmen, Greeley has been a consistent critic of bishops. He has called them to account for their inadequacies, intellectual and spiritual limitations, and failures. Since 1985 he attacked the problem of sexual abuse by priests, and chided the bishops for dragging their feet and their cover up of the problem.

Greeley is himself a champion of clerical celibacy at the same time he introduced a generation of Catholics to fictional churchmen—cardinals and Vatican officials—who were believable and sexually active. Although other writers have dealt with the same subjects, Greeley’s stature as a priest and sociologist added a dimension of authenticity.

The practice of clerical celibacy remains largely ill defined and unexamined in practical terms.

Celibacy has long been the Sacred Cow of the Catholic Church. Supposedly irrefutable, it remains unquestionable and unexamined by church standards. Only idealistic reflections or arcane reaffirming and defensive treatises are tolerated and considered authentic.

In spite of the monolithic defense of the law of clerical celibacy by the Catholic Church the very word has lacked sufficient definition and distinction to make meaningful dialogue possible.

Is celibacy a religious ideal? Or is it an image? Is it a vow or promise? Is it a regulation necessary for ordination to the clerical office? Is it a state of non-marriage or singleness whether on not one is sexually abstinent? Is it simply a situation of sexual abstinence in or outside of marriage—for an indeterminate amount of time? Is celibacy a life adjustment? Is a celibate one who has made a promise of sexual abstinence regardless of his sexual activity? Does a man qualify as a celibate merely by his acceptance into a group that demands a claim of celibacy but not necessarily a practice for inclusion in its ranks?

The deficiency of an adequate vocabulary of celibacy has rendered a great disservice to the practice, process, and achievement of an important human resource, because it has relegated it to the realm of magic (mystery) and incomprehension rather than reality.

And what of the culture of celibacy? For instance, if every lawyer in the United States, in order to practice his profession and receive its benefits and status, were required to be male and unmarried, committed to perpetual and perfect chastity would it change the legal profession? Would it change the culture of law?

That question is a “no brainer” when applied to the legal profession. But the reality of the social significance is mostly ignored when one considers the Roman Catholic priesthood. But clerical celibacy does constitute a culture, a fraternity, social standing, an ethos, with ethical expectations and a mode of operation inherently wedded to secrecy. It is a culture with practical world-wide repercussions.

More critically, Celibacy is a system. This system—with its celibate/sexual agenda—is the true vortex of the current monumental and epic crisis of the Catholic Church. Clergy sexual abuse of minors—the topic in 2002 that riveted the attention of a nation and shook the foundation of a centuries old religion—is merely the symptom of a far deeper and wide ranging problem in the system—its teaching and practice.

The Celibate/Sexual agenda of the Roman Catholic Church includes the questions of: masturbation; pre-marital sexual activity; sexual activity after the death of a spouse or post divorce; contraception; the homosexualities;. abortion; the requirement of non-marriage, perfect and perpetual chastity for ordination to the priesthood; a married priesthood; ordination of women; and the appointment of bishops.

Those who claim that these issues are completely settled and require no dialogue only intensify the crisis of confidence in the authority of the church and expose it to ever-greater disdain for its hypocrisy.

It is precisely the public glimpse into the hypocrisy of the secret celibate system revealed in the priest sexual abuse issue that has inspired an unprecedented degree of rage against the hierarchy of the church and mobilized historic demands for accountability, transparency and reform.

This book explores the reality of religious celibacy and the secret system of which it is a part. It contributes to a deeper understanding celibacy and to the development of a more adequate vocabulary for discourse.

SOURCES FOR DIALOGUE:

CELIBACY IN LITERATURE AND LIFE

In part one I offer a reflection on the life work of three priests, Charles E. Coughlin, Fulton J. Sheen and Andrew M. Greeley and a critical analysis of the autobiographical accounts of their celibacy by the latter two priests. Each has had a tremendous influence on the development of the twentieth century American image of priests and celibacy. Another chapter of this book offers a similar analysis of the autobiographical account of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Finally other chapters explore the view of clerical celibacy/sexuality evidenced in novels by E. L. Voinich, Ignazio Silone, James Joyce, James Farrell, Graham Greene, J. F. Powers, Georges Bernanos, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis.

The reality of celibacy—with all its powerful contributions to culture as well as its aberrations and perversions—is a neglected area of the study of human sexuality. It is a far more vital area of life and culture than most people think.

Years of exploration have convinced me that celibacy is not just an incidental facet of one religion. Its image—its face—is not just another face in the crowd. Like the face of Helen that “launched a thousand ships” it has been capable of instigating reformations in the past and still has the potential to ignite revolutions.

A Reformation is upon us and its name is the sexual/celibate system of the Roman Catholic Church. Celibacy’s portrait is painted in literature and its history written boldly in the lives of priests. Let us explore.

I am not posting here the sequence of the material as it will be presented in final form.

Two research assistants have been indispensable to this 15-year effort.

The representation of defilement dwells in the half-light of a quasi-physical infection that points toward a quasi-moral unworthiness. - Paul Ricoeur

In 1930, Father Charles Coughlin was the voice of the Catholic Church for many American families. Father Andrew Greeley records a warm memory from his childhood home: Sunday dinners when his family was eating pot roast and noodles and listening to Father Charles Coughlin or Monsignor Fulton Sheen on the radio. He could not have imagined at that moment that someday he would join them as a star whose name would be widely recognized and whose ideas would be discussed around many American dinner tables.

In truth, Coughlin was not a personal champion of celibacy—his practice has been severely compromised by history—but that made no difference to his public portrayal and reception. He was a priest. In the mind of his public he had to be celibate.

Father Charles Edward Coughlin’s fame was real in the 1930s; his tarnished reputation endures. His message of social justice and legacy of organizing labor have been mixed with defilement. His celibate practice was imperfect. Unlike Sheen and Greeley, who both have written about celibacy in their autobiographies, traces of Coughlin’s sexual/celibate adjustment have been pieced together from his school history, court records, and—most prominently—from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation along with observations from his friend and parishioner, psychoanalyst Leo H. Bartemeier.

THE TIMES

In 1928 there were few, if any, prominent voices urging social justice or seeking vital social reforms. The novels of Upton Sinclair and Jack London that had previously popularized the struggles of the poor, were replaced by writers who preached the doctrine that business should be left alone by government so that the forces of the market could work.¹

Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, summarized the political consensus of the day in words that sound eerily timely in the early twenty-first century:

“The budget must be balanced annually, whatever the cost to the economy; the gold standard was sacred and must be preserved at all costs; socialism was the nation’s greatest menace, and ‘free enterprise,’ if left alone, would provide jobs for everyone…And finally, of course, business should run the country.²”

The loudest voices in the 1920s belonged to advertising, public relations, and boosterism. Successful writers like Ernest Elmo Calkins proclaimed that business was the world’s greatest benefactor, and columnist Walter Lippmann agreed:

“…the more or less unconscious and unplanned activities of businessmen are for once more novel, more daring, and in a sense more revolutionary than the theories of the progressives.³”

A Horatio Alger mentality prevailed, in which the businessman emerged as the hero of the age; “The mood of the times stressed individualism.” Collective bargaining was relegated to the trash bin; it was simply un-American. The outlook of the working class was that a man got ahead by himself and not by joining unions.⁴

Frederick Lewis Allen described the atmosphere where chauffeurs, valets, nurses, cattlemen, grocers, motormen, plumbers, seamstresses, and speakeasy waiters were playing the stock market and listening to radios to follow their investments. When workers owned shares of stock, they preferred to think of themselves as businessmen.⁵ The realist novelists John Dos Passos and James T Farrell wrote about ordinary people, plasterers, painters, and mechanics, dabbling in the stock market and quoting pamphleteers on salesmanship and positive thinking. As long as the prosperity of the 1920s held, the lack of a voice for workers and social justice was not keenly felt.⁶

After the stock market crashed on October 23, 1929, the attitude and atmosphere in America changed dramatically. The ordinary people who had bought shares of stock on margin were sold out—and so were those who had banked their money. The Bank of United States, for example, which catered to poor immigrants, engaged in speculation; when the market collapsed, the bank’s officers passed their losses on to the depositors. It folded in the middle of the night on December 11, 1930.

Moreover, between 1929 and 1932, almost six thousand other banks closed, costing mostly working-or middle-class depositors, almost three billion dollars. Retail sales fell, merchants went bankrupt, sales and production workers were laid off in increasing numbers. One insurance company reported that 23.8 percent of its policyholders in forty-six large cities were unemployed in December 1930. In spite of the fact that 76.2 percent of workers remained employed, the spectacle of one million people riding the rods and living in “Hoovervilles” caused deep anxiety in a people who had expected prosperity to be a permanent part of life. Even in 1938 more than ten million people nationwide, or 19 percent of the population, were still unemployed.⁷

Such were the times and the circumstances in which Father Coughlin was to raise his voice.

THE MAN

Charles Edward Coughlin was born October 25, 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, the son of a third generation Irish-American family who had originally settled in Indiana. When Charles was a child his father, Thomas, worked as a sexton at St. Mary’s Cathedral. His mother, Amelia Mahoney, had herself dreamed of becoming a nun; she dedicated her son to the priesthood even before his birth. Charles grew up literally breathing the atmosphere of the Catholic Church. Coughlin seems to have chosen the priesthood as a career early in life and, like Greeley, never looked back.

Amelia first dressed her son like a girl and allowed his hair to grow in long curls; she even sent him to his first day of school in a kilt. Whatever the mother’s motivation in cross-gender dressing—Ernest Hemmingway was subjected to similar treatment—it did little to curb the young Coughlin’s natural aggression. There are accounts of him roughhousing with his friends, yelling loudly, and ripping his clothes in minor scuffles in the streets. Distinct from Sheen or Greeley, Coughlin was a natural athlete; his natural aggression found an outlet in rugged sports—rugby, football, and baseball.⁸

After grammar school at St. Mary’s, Coughlin attended St. Michael’s College in Toronto. This was a minor seminary—a boarding high school—that prepared students for the priesthood. Like Greeley and Sheen, he proved himself an outstanding student; he studied public speaking and, like Sheen, excelled on the debate team. He capped his high school career as president of his class and starting fullback on the varsity rugby team.

After graduation, Coughlin enrolled in St. Basil’s Seminary. Priests of the order of St. Basil the Great—known for scholarship—conducted St. Michael’s and St. Basil’s. Coughlin joined this religious group and was ordained a priest on June 29, l916. After ordination until 1923, he taught English, history, Greek, and coached football and drama at Assumption College near Windsor, Ontario.

Although Coughlin continued his excellent academic performance during his theological studies his training with the Basilian’s had been interrupted by a brief and unexplained exile for a year to one of the Order’s high schools in Waco, Texas, where he taught philosophy and coached baseball. Another piece of the mystery of Coughlin’s career was that his relationship with the Basilian’s was completely severed in 1923 when he joined the Archdiocese of Detroit.

As a diocesan priest Coughlin served as assistant to pastors, first in Kalamazoo and later in downtown Detroit. He was appointed pastor of the small farming community of North Branch where he served for only six months. In 1926, he was assigned to Royal Oak, Michigan. At the time, Royal Oak was a small and poor suburb of Detroit. An additional obstacle to the development of a new parish was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, with its nativist and anti-Catholic agenda, which had an active chapter in the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, one of Charles Coughlin’s first acts on his arrival was to build a new church. This new structure—the Shrine of the Little Flower—with a seating capacity of six hundred, was much too large for the thirty-two Catholic families in the parish. But Coughlin led his parish to growth and prosperity even in the direst days of the Depression. He not only filled the pews and paid for his first church, but built a larger, architecturally notable round church with the altar situated in the center. Coughlin remained in Royal Oak for fifty-three years until his death on October 27, 1979.

All this would constitute an unremarkable biography of a suburban parish priest were it not for the extraordinary power, influence, and, ultimately, the notoriety Coughlin achieved on the national scene by way of his radio ministry.

THE RADIO PRIEST

On October 17, 1926, Coughlin began a Sunday afternoon radio broadcast, “The Golden Hour of the Little Flower,” apparently to help finance his new parish. And he reaped almost immediate results. Even in the first weeks after Coughlin’s broadcasts began, people started to flock to his parish masses; mail was sent to him—in the first years by the hundreds and increasingly by the thousands each week. Most of the letters contained small contributions.⁹ By 1930 he had begun broadcasting over the CBS network nationwide. His reputation spread, the mail sacks multiplied, and the contributions kept coming in.

Part of the key to Coughlin’s radio success was his voice. It was a deep voice that he could modulate into higher registers for effect. Coughlin would frequently manipulate his trace of an Irish brogue to add intimacy, warmth, and color. Andrew Greeley often employed a parallel technique in his later writings.

One writer who listened regularly to Coughlin described, “a voice of such mellow richness, such manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and integrating charm, that anyone turning past it on the radio dial almost automatically turned to hear it again…without doubt one of the great speaking voices of the twentieth century…It was a voice made for promises.”¹⁰

This voice could be heard regularly on radios throughout most or all the nation from 1926 until the end of 1940. His message, however, in the decade of the 1930s transmogrified from that of a kindly pastor expounding religious or biblical themes, often intended for children, into that of a shrill anti-Semitic demagogue and Nazi sympathizer. Although even his early broadcasts took an occasional shot at the Ku Klux Klan or at the perpetual enemies of Catholic sexual teaching—the proponents of birth control and abortion—Coughlin’s voice was pastoral, nonpolitical, and non-controversial.

All that would change with his January 12, 1930 broadcast—a stinging denunciation of Communism.¹¹ From this time on, the topics of his programs took a social and political direction.

The reasons for the shift? By this time, Coughlin had achieved acceptance, even wide popularity and a degree of financial success. His mail-box-parish drew comments and support from all parts of the country. People shared their plight and he listened. Men in important positions in the church and business—for instance his superior Bishop Gallagher and Henry Ford—began to pay court and listen to the new media celebrity.

It would be unfair to assume that, at this stage of his career, vanity alone emboldened Coughlin to speak out on political and economic issues. He had some genuine concerns for the weakened and vulnerable position of ordinary workers; he had an understanding of social encyclicals and Catholic teaching on the rights of the working class; he had the disposition of an activist; and he now had the power base.

In 1930 Coughlin knew that a large segment of the American public was disenchanted with the language of business, deprived of the language of trade unionism, and unwilling to adopt the language of Communism. He was determined to speak for them in language everyone could understand. He would lend them his voice. Eventually, some forty million Americans would listen.¹²

Although Coughlin’s political message was vague at first and his focus initially blurred, he did zero in on the temper of the times. He preached that the real reason for concern was not the failure of business confidence but human suffering: the suffering of his listeners’ unemployment, deprivation, and dispossession.

The Depression was not just a slump in the market, “but a problem deeply rooted in the economic system.” He hinted that the solution, “lay in a concerted effort to redefine the structure and goals of American society at home.”¹³ In his early political broadcasts he lamented the economic condition of the country—millions of homes in America without adequate water, plumbing, electricity, heat—but he did not propose an alternative.

Even in his exploratory attempts to help his audience find some understanding of their dilemmas and define solutions for them, Coughlin generated emotion against an ever-widening circle of enemies. Communists—of the Bolshevik, intellectual, Jewish variety—were a frequent early target. The Left spoke for the most hopeless in America, for displaced “Okies” and black people, for immigrants and the starving. The Communist Party in particular, proved tremendously attractive, not only to these classes, but to many artists and intellectuals. An editorial in “The New Republic” said that the Communist party:

“Can offer an end to the desperate feeling of solitude and uniqueness that has been oppressing artists for the last two centuries, the feeling that has reduced some of the best of them to silence and futility and the weaker ones to insanity or suicide. It can offer instead a sense of comradeship and participation in an historical process vastly larger than the individual.”¹⁴

BEYOND PASTORAL CONCERN

Coughlin’s attacks on Bolshevism were political and economic, in contrast to Sheen’s attacks on Cold War Communism that the latter saw as a spiritual enemy of freedom. Both garnered popular support from their sympathizers. The greatest numbers of anxious employed were terrified of Communism, which they associated with the violent overthrow of the government, to be followed by the confiscation of private property, “race mixing,” atheism, free love, and the destruction of the family.

Birth control was a consistent object of Coughlin’s attacks; but since there were few effective methods in the decade of the thirties that subject was tolerated as appropriately Catholic and did not raise great controversy.

Negative reactions and controversy erupted immediately when Coughlin began to attack the power system—bankers, businessmen, international financiers, and American capitalism generally. He blamed the economic power brokers for the social plight of the poor. Wall Street was the villain.

In order to help his listeners organize the contradictory and fragmented data that swirled around them, Coughlin constructed a narrative to make sense of their world.

World War I served Coughlin as a convenient end point. That traumatic experience saw millions of Americans under arms for the first time in fifty years—more than a hundred thousand of them died, and two hundred thousand were wounded, gassed, or shell-shocked. Moreover, the war stimulated enormous changes in society, including overproduction of goods the change in the status of women, and the place of racial minorities in the work force. Coughlin’s choice of World War I as a starting point for the economic troubles of the 1930s thus makes good rhetorical sense.

With moral indignation Coughlin broadened the scope of his inquiry into the causes of the depression to include underlying conditions of class division and distribution of wealth. Coughlin was able to steal some of the Communists’ thunder by first citing—and then denying—the reality of government overproduction to supply goods for Europe’s war as a cause of Americans unemployment. His references to Wall Street bankers and foreign interests are clear harbingers of the scapegoating that would soon poison Coughlin’s voice.

He proposed a corporatist economic program, in which social classes are maintained, including a proprietary class, but in which everyone is guaranteed a slice of the pie. Coughlin attempted to satisfy both sides: the capitalists, by guaranteeing a right of ownership, and the workers, by guaranteeing public control over wages, working conditions, and benefits. Coughlin’s words thus offer something to everyone at a minimal cost.

While Coughlin’s political economy was deficient, his demagoguery was masterful. Without a doubt Coughlin was having a political impact. He was an important factor in the first presidential election of Roosevelt and in rallying support for the New Deal. He was a principal in the formation of the United Auto Workers and influential in recruiting their membership. He taught and propagated the significant Catholic social teaching on justice, property and the rights of workers, promulgated in the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum), and Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno). Coughlin was not just a parish pastor; he was a priest-social-activist—and he was a star.

By 1934 Coughlin was a power broker: He had been a house guest at Campobello before the presidential election; received a personal invitation to FDR’s inauguration; could attract as many as 20,000 people to a rally at New York’s Hippodrome; and inspire his followers to inundate the White House with letters. Coughlin also took credit for the heavy turnout in urban Catholic areas in the November 1932 elections. Ten U.S. Senators and seventy-five Congressmen petitioned Roosevelt to appoint Coughlin an advisor to an economic conference in London.¹⁵

But Coughlin was not happy with the reforms of the political system. He was disappointed and angry at what he considered a personal betrayal and a series of rebuffs from FDR.

Coughlin’s attacks on his “enemies” became more frequent, direct, and shrill. His violence always tended to be directed against certain well-defined groups: Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, African Americans, bankers and financiers, the British government, the Roosevelt administration, and—especially—the Jews.

Coughlin’s choice of these groups appears puzzling a first glance: he attacked both the Klan and African Americans, both financiers and Communists. And “Jews” included, in the 1930s, both Lord Rothschild and Leon Trotsky. Coughlin’s social and economic program cannot be defended as the work of some kind of “radical moderate,” steering a middle course between rapacious bankers and wild-eyed Bolsheviks, between vicious Klansmen and pushy Negroes. Fascism is not a middle ground between capitalism and Communism, between race-hatred and race mixing. Coughlin was not walking a middle ground between extremes. His star was out of orbit.

SOCIAL ORGANIZER

On November 11, 1934, Coughlin proposed the formation of the National Union for Social Justice. This date not only marked a definitive break with FDR and the New Deal, it marked a bid for greater power and a voice of command. This new phase ushered in an escalation of anti-Semitic attacks and mobilized the formation of a Third Party to post a presidential candidate in the 1936 election. Coughlin blatantly endorsed pro-Nazi propaganda, even plagiarizing speeches of Joseph Goebbels.

Coughlin’s mellow voice became increasingly more strident in its political criticism and demands for its own brand of economic reforms. His National Union began to publish a journal, Social Justice, which was circulated until 1942. It would expand his sphere of pronouncements beyond the radio. The movement and the journal expounded his theories and organized cells to discuss social issues and promote activism. Coughlin’s voice still had power, but it was becoming more disaffecting and less winning.¹⁶

Coughlin’s tone turned bitter as his persona transformed from Presidential advisor and New deal promoter to demagogue. Coughlin’s support and followers decreased in proportion to his exaggerated attacks and criticisms of the President. The caliber and quality of Coughlin’s supporters also shifted dramatically from his first distressed, but hopeful radio audience. They now became a rabble.

In mid-1938 Social Justice announced the formation of the “Christian Front.” This amounted to groups of followers who held Chapter meetings, drank late into the night, praised Coughlin, berated the English, cursed the Jews, and ridiculed FDR.¹⁷ The head of the Anti-Defamation League reported that many Jewish people were beaten by Christian Front members who screamed that they were, “Father Coughlin’s Brownshirts.”¹⁸

There is no doubt that Coughlin provided the ideological and inspirational foundation for the Christian Front, in spite of the fact that an FBI investigation into a 1940 armed conspiracy attempt by a New York chapter could not prove Coughlin’s direct involvement.

Coughlin, protected by his priesthood, could play it both ways. He could orchestrate mass demonstrations without appearing to have actual responsibility for any hateful out come. A vignette from a Farrell novel serves a more accurate description of his modus operandi than any journalistic account. The scene is a rally; the priest speaks:

“They didn’t do the pick and shovel work to make America what it is today.  Oh no, not they!”

The speaker gets an audience reaction. As his sarcastic tone increases the audience becomes more attentive and the speaker continues: “It was the Christian who did the pick and shovel work to build America!” the speaker yelled, accompanying his words with flourishing gestures. The audience roared in agreement. As the applause died down, a stout woman with a pudgy face yelled in a loud voice: “Name them!”

“My fellow Christians, I don’t have to name them,” the speaker replied, smiling unctuously.

A lean woman, whose face was beginning to crack with wrinkles, jumped to her feet.

“I’ll name them!” She cried in a shrill, high-pitched voice. “I’ll name them! The dirty Jews!”¹⁹

The fiction of James T. Farrell also offers an enlightening contrast between Coughlin’s early followers and his later ones. Thinly disguised as “Father Moylan,” Coughlin is the subject of a street corner discussion by the sons of Chicago’s middle class in 1930. They conclude: “There’s a man for you. Boy, what Father Moylan doesn’t say about bankers, and the Reds, too.” ²⁰

In a later work, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade, Father Moylan’s xenophobic and anti-Semitic diatribes no longer interest ordinary well-adjusted youth. Only guys like Tommy, the mal-adjusted loner, chronically unemployed, heavy drinker, and harboring hate for Jews and admiration for Hitler, respond to Moylan’s message. Farrell’s fiction shows—with a power and concision that escapes historical description—how Coughlin’s changing persona first attracted, then alienated, the disaffected American middle class, and how at last Coughlin claimed only the weakest and most desperate.²¹ The fictional portrait of the priest turns out to be more revealing and accurate than the priest in real life.

Fanatics had now replaced many of Coughlin’s respectable followers. One by one radio stations dropped Coughlin and by the end of 1940 he found himself, “with virtually no access to the air.”²² In the spring of 1942 the Postmaster General refused to allow Social Justice to be mailed: even Coughlin’s printed voice was silenced. At the same time, the Attorney General of United States warned the Archbishop of Detroit that Coughlin would face formal charges of sedition if his activities did not cease.²³

For thirty years, from 1942 until 1972, Coughlin’s voice was confined to the pulpit of his parish church. In Coughlin’s career and his silence there are mysteries about his priesthood, his personality, and his celibacy that give important clues to understanding priests, sex, and celibacy in both literature and life.

FASCINATING MYSTERY

Father Andrew Greeley claims that priests are among the most fascinating men in the world and that their celibacy makes them so. There are, however, other elements that add mystery and interest to the priest: one is his relationship to his Church—his power vis-à-vis a veritable Leviathan.

The priest is an organization man even more fully than any corporate executive or military officer. Theologically he is “another Christ,” his commission eternal; he holds the authority to forgive sins; there is a party line he is expected to support. All this and more is under the direction and control of ecclesiastical authority.

When popes or bishops censure, silence, or discipline priests, the full weight of church control comes into public view. There are, however, multiple layers of power, intrigue, and ambiguity within the hierarchical system. This is the atmosphere where the priest who is a star maneuvers. What mysterious, fascinating elements of power does a priest who has star status wield within the church system?

His religious superiors, in spite of the fact that many bishops, arguably most, were not anti-business, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or fascist, never successfully curtailed Coughlin’s mission and message. Of course, those elements were not the sum and substance of Coughlin’s teaching. He did promote social justice and workers rights. There was enough ambiguity and support of Catholic teaching in his message, and sufficient support of his thinking in high places to save him from official censure.

Coughlin did receive criticism for his political involvement; after his first mutterings in 1930, William Cardinal O’Connell of Boston openly objected, but his opposition was to a priest speaking about politics at all rather than a rejection of specific ideas.

His Detroit superior until 1937, Bishop Michael Gallagher, generally protected Coughlin, in spite of controversy. Edward Mooney who took over the reigns as Archbishop of Detroit in 1937, made repeated efforts, soon after he arrived, to silence Coughlin. That autumn when Coughlin attacked the CIO for supposed Communism and anti-Christianity, Mooney rebuked him; Coughlin knew that Mooney wished to censor his broadcasts. Coughlin’s response was to cancel his radio program and appeal to the Pope’s personal representative in the United States, the Apostolic Delegate. In January 1938, the broadcasts resumed. Coughlin commented on his victory:

“The archbishop had overstepped himself. I was more than he could take on. I had lots of friends at the Vatican, people who could not agree with me publicly. But they knew that I spoke the truth. They knew that I recognized the Communist threat to the Church. Well, they finally reached the Pope, and when they did, he came to his senses and he saw the righteousness of my ways. So, of course, instructions were sent here to halt any restrictions on my activities.”²⁴

Coughlin was not merely blasting the establishment. He was popularizing papal teaching on social justice; this garnered him support from some unexpected quarters, including some church liberals. Father John A. Ryan, professor of theology at Catholic University, one of the most prominent and influential Catholic liberals of the time supported Coughlin to the extent that he, “was performing a useful service by bringing the messages of the encyclicals to the masses.”²⁵ And Coughlin got good grades from liberals for promoting labor unions.

Was Coughlin anti-Semitic? Yes, without a doubt. It is also clear that there was enough anti-Semitism within the American Church and in Rome during the 1930s to tolerate, and even support, Coughlin’s preaching. In 1938, an Irish priest, Denis Fahey, published a book titled The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, which blamed Jews for every secular and liberal reform since the Renaissance.²⁶ Fahey saw these reforms as negative and destructive. Coughlin’s anti-Semitism was at its most vocal when he discovered Fahey’s “theology of history.” Coughlin was inspired by yet another theologian to justify and re-infuse twentieth century “scientific anti-Semitism” with longstanding medieval religious prejudice

Was Coughlin a fascist? Coughlin’s economic program—private ownership, but the means of production rigidly controlled by government—was classically fascist. He generally praised such avowed fascists as Franco and Mussolini, and he broadcast and published what can only be described as German propaganda even in the months after Pearl Harbor. Coughlin’s anti-Semitism dovetailed with the Nazi program.

Certainly Coughlin never described himself as fascist, and never used the term in connection with the National Union for Social Justice, though he did endorse “corporatist” economic policies under which everyone gets a piece of the pie, but the government does the slicing. At the very least, Coughlin took a leaf from the success of the various fascist movements including the vilification of certain groups, including the Jews, to build a radical political movement in the U.S. that he would control. If Coughlin was not an actual fascist, he was so close it makes no difference.²⁷

There were in the 1930s, and still are, Fascist regimes that support Roman Catholicism. This support of Church interests merits silent acceptance if not out right endorsement in the Vatican. Fascism had been seen as a bulwark against Communism and other enemies of religion and a protector of the Church’s rights. Coughlin had support where it counted.

Coughlin held in his grasp the three elements of power needed to pave his way successfully through the authoritarian maze of his Church—to maintain his voice. He enjoyed a broad-based popularity—even beyond a Catholic constituency. His Message was ambiguous enough, no matter how offensive to some churchmen, to draw support at some elevated level of the hierarchy. And, importantly, he had significant and substantial means of independent financial support. In distinct synergies these were also elements of the power at work in the careers of Sheen and Greeley.

By way of contrast to the hierarchical tolerance for Coughlin, Thomas Merton and Pierre Teilhard were famous priests silenced for periods of time by church superiors. They lacked the same “unassailable” power matrix of the stars.

COUGHLIN’S SECRET WORLD

Coughlin, like every Roman Catholic priest, was required to make a lifelong promise of celibacy prior to his ordination. Coughlin left no written account of his thoughts on celibacy. Certainly, he never married, but throughout his public career Coughlin was pursued by rumors of affairs with members of both sexes. He left a considerable paper trail in his FBI file.

Coughlin’s biographer cites several well-known accusations against Coughlin. It had been reported that Father Coughlin, as a young priest, was caught in the act of sodomy with another priest, who was defrocked.²⁸ The only documentation Marcus could locate was an unsigned, undated memo circulated within the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith.

Coughlin’s mysterious conflicts within the Basilians—the interruption of his theological studies, and his unexplained departure from the Order—could have been the result of this or similar incidents. Although there is logic and precedent to give plausibility to such conclusions, one must be cautious in reading effect and cause into sexual affairs.

A court document from the income-tax evasion trial of Dr. Bernard Gariepy before a Detroit Federal Judge in 1949, records testimony that Coughlin paid Dr. Gariepy $68,000 over a three-year period for “taking liberties with Gariepy’s wife.”²⁹

In over seven hundred pages of FBI files we obtained under the Freedom of Information Act contain several references to Coughlin’s sexual indiscretions. One tantalizing file is an unsigned typewritten note date-stamped October 12, 1937. The principal subject of this note is the questionable loyalty of composer Cole Porter and his valet. It claimed they listened to German propaganda every day at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. But the last paragraph cites Coughlin, “How come that Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest, wears civilian clothes when he is in New York, and registers at a hotel under the name of Smith. And what parties—wine, women, and ____“³⁰

When the FBI’s anonymous informant wrote “wine, women, and ____,” it is clear that his ellipsis referred not to “song” but to homosexual encounters.³¹ The reports put Coughlin in the social company of the homosexual elite—Cole Porter, Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward.³²

Moreover, Coughlin did in fact sometimes travel under assumed names: in 1937 he traveled incognito to England and Europe. A letter from the Assistant Executive Officer of Military Intelligence, to J. Edgar Hoover reports that Coughlin visited Jackson, Mississippi, under the name “Eddie Burke.”³³

After 1942, all the entries concentrate on Coughlin’s sexual life. A memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to Clyde Tolson, his assistant and close friend, dated April 15, 1942 cites a confidential source: “…Father Coughlin at the present time was being treated by a reputable Detroit psychiatrist for certain sexual difficulties. It was also stated that Father Coughlin had in his employ a maid or a secretary with whom Father Coughlin had had relations, and who was also being treated by the same psychiatrist.”³⁴

J. Edgar Hoover conveyed the same information to the Attorney General in a memorandum dated April 20, 1942. High-level memoranda flew in all directions. One operative reported to Hoover: “a confidential source: (name deleted) told me that Father Coughlin was known to be a man of very unsavory repute; Reverend (name deleted) had investigated Coughlin; (source) has proof that Father Coughlin has a mistress;  It is (source’s) understanding that Reverend (name deleted) presented his evidence to some of the leaders of the church, but that no action was taken.”³⁵

The Bureau went to a great deal of trouble to probe these allegations. They conducted interviews in Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio, Washington, D.C. and Boston. Obviously, the FBI and the Attorney General’s office considered the source of the information credibly enough to give him at least three extended interviews.

Can one guarantee the trustworthiness of anonymous and secret letters and FBI files? Hoover was out to curtail Coughlin’s activity. It is clear that Hoover and some of his top aides took pains to investigate Coughlin and wrote reports that clearly reflect some knowledge of the goings-on in the Waldorf-Astoria, and with Coughlin’s penchant for traveling in disguise.

The “reputable psychiatrist” referred to in a number of the FBI reports was Dr. Leo H. Bartemeier. He and his wife were among the charter members of Coughlin’s Oak Park parish. Bess Bartemeier even in the days before 1930 frequently cooked for Coughlin to help the priest and his struggling new parish. In later years Coughlin was a frequent guest at the Bartemeier table.

After Coughlin’s death, Bartemeier revealed the key to Coughlin’s thirty-year silence. It was not the threat of law suites by the United States Attorney General, which were real, but not daunting to Coughlin; he bragged he had better lawyers. It was not sudden obedience to his bishop, who he had successfully defied for several years. That was a cover story circulated in May 1942 by church authorities to explain Coughlin’s retreat from public view.

Coughlin felt the effects of a voice more powerful than his own. That voice silenced Coughlin’s magnificent voice in any public forum, on any subject, and shackled him to his parish pulpit as long as that man lived.

The personal threat was delivered by phone from J. Edgar Hoover to Coughlin on the February 1942 Sunday morning after Mass, at the exact time trucks from the U.S. Attorney General’s office were loading files of Social Justice and all Coughlin’s other operations for transport to Washington.

Coughlin rushed in a panic to the Bartemeier home to confer with his long time friend at a juncture he felt was the greatest crisis of his life. Hoover had proof of Coughlin’s homosexual activity. That proof, communicated in the verbal exchange between Hoover and Coughlin, was sufficient to silence Coughlin’s public voice until May 24, 1972 when he gave his first unrestricted interview to Heritage magazine. J. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972.³⁶

COUGHLIN’S TRAGEDY

In another dimension could one imagine Coughlin being cured of his violence and anti-Semitism by the sainted Sheen’s reason? Or could one imagine that Greeley, the popular paper back writer, could transform Coughlin’s life into a comedy of grace? Or is the irony of the mellifluous voice being silenced by the whisper of government blackmail too overpowering to be transformed into anything but tragedy?

This is a troublesome perspective. Tragedy is a Greek form, depending, on a wicked and blinding God. To the Christian consciousness, a blind God is “unthinkable.”

The priest-as-Prometheus imagery does have a certain delicious irony. The Catholic tradition on the one hand—with its emphasis on grace and redemption—contrasts the Faustian career of the Reverend Charles Edward Coughlin on the other.

To understand we have to move temporarily from the language of religion—which emphasizes sin and salvation—to the language of behavioral science, emphasizing causes and conditions.

The story of Coughlin’s rise and fall resembles a Greek tragedy. Coughlin, the young, heroic Voice, is blinded by ambition and challenges forces greater than himself, only to end up out of control, pursued as a criminal—isolated, and finally silenced.³⁷ Beyond mere ambition, however, Coughlin’s rise and fall depended on his historical circumstances, on his personal abilities and education, on his clerical status, and on his psychological makeup.

The importance of Coughlin’s historical setting is clear. Had he been born forty years earlier, before the radio, before the Depression, and before the rise of modern fascism, he might have become a clerical William Jennings Bryan, a gifted orator in the populist cause with a religious dimension. Forty years later, after the end of the Cold War, in a time when discourse defines itself as “postmodern,” he might have become a clerical Ross Perot, attracting millions of disaffected Americans. In neither case would his ministry have electrified, so to speak, such a substantial part of the American public at a time of national emergency.

Coughlin’s personal abilities and education also played a part in his tragedy. The 1930s produced a flood of angry orators. Many remained ineffective; others ridiculous. Coughlin’s power depended in large part on his beautiful voice and his rhetorical skill, honed by years of preaching, debate, and drama, at a time when radio communication was nearly universal.

Coughlin intuitively sensed the importance of a coherent social theory for a population in turmoil. He had the wisdom to offer a translation of solid religious teaching about workers rights and social justice for popular consumption. Coughlin’s status as a priest was important. He created the image of a strong authority figure, who “gave permission” to millions of Catholics, schooled in obedience to question their society and their government, much as Greeley would one day give permission for his readers to question church teaching about sex.

The psychoanalytic quest—like the riddle of Oedipus with which it is so closely bound—somewhat resembles a detective story. Something is dramatically wrong, whether in the individual’s life or in the public life of Thebes. The task of the detective—whether analyst, king, or literary critic—is to discover the underlying cause of the blight. Coughlin is like a tragic figure in that he rose brilliantly, but fell just as quickly in his hubris and his blindness.

This raises the question: what was Coughlin blind to? The answer is: himself.

THE PERSONALITY OF THE STAR

Coughlin’s personality characteristics are vital to his story. He was a man of action—impatient, always harboring a tendency toward aggression and violence. He hungered for attention and acknowledgement. He demonstrated a magical view of money and status; and most importantly, a pattern of wooing authority figures, then rejecting them. These impulses inspired Coughlin to strike out for new territory on the airwaves and in politics. Coughlin’s situation thus virtually conspired to bring about both his rise and his fall.

TURMOIL: A review Coughlin’s public life strikes one as a constantly troubled existence. Coughlin was frequently attacked and attacking, even on a physical level, when for instance, he ripped the glasses off and punched the face of a Boston Globe reporter for having the audacity to dispute his preposterous claim that Judge Felix Frankfurter was a Communist.

After a deranged attacker threw chicken feathers over him at a public rally, Coughlin began packing a pistol, “a thirty-eight caliber chrome Smith and Wesson revolver with a white pearl handle which he carried under his clerical garb.”³⁸

AUTHORITY: Coughlin enjoyed and used his clerical status to his own advantage, personally and professionally. Coughlin’s relations with his ecclesiastical superiors, however, were far from smooth. At times he openly defied them; at other times he simply paid lip service, and went his own way. Coughlin’s obedience to his Bishop depended on convenience.

Coughlin admired leaders he perceived to be strong. But there was an excessive and personal quality to Coughlin’s attachment to authority figures. In the case of FDR, Coughlin’s overzealous adoption of Roosevelt was followed by an over-zealous hatred of equal proportions. Coughlin fell in love, so to speak, with Roosevelt, only to reject him bitterly when Roosevelt did not return his fervor.

Coughlin’s attitude toward dictators also betrays his love-hate relationship with authority. One biographer speaks of Coughlin’s “admiration for strong, dictatorial rule.”³⁹ Hitler was the “big man” who Coughlin admired and feared.

Fiction helps us understand the dynamic: Writing of the motives of candidates for MI-5—the British intelligence service—John Le Carré’s fictional Smiley notes that he eschews prospects who burn with hatred for Communism, since such people are already half in love with the Soviet Union and will likely defect. Even Stalin, like Hitler and Mussolini, and like Franklin Roosevelt, was for Coughlin one more hated and beloved father figure.

Coughlin’s love-hate relationship with authority is key for an understanding of his attraction to violence, manifested in his tendency to scapegoat particular groups and mark them out as targets for violence, and in his grandiose thinking. All of these tendencies combined in his psychological underdevelopment and narcissistic attitude toward the world.

ENEMIES: The conjunction of Coughlin’s anti-Semitism with his sadomasochism is very apparent in the way his anti-Semitism developed. At first, Coughlin complained, not of Jewish machinations, but of the preferential treatment accorded to Jews suffering in Nazi Germany and Fascist Spain while the suffering of Catholics in Republican Spain, Mexico, and the Soviet Union went “ignored” by the press. This grievance recalls a childish complaint that a parent unfairly prefers another sibling.

By 1936, Coughlin openly began to instigate violence against Jews by his followers. Coughlin pursued his enemies politically and personally and incited others to action.

His contemporary, Fulton Sheen, used his priesthood and power very differently. Sheen considered his opposition as intellectual adversaries and spiritual dangers. People, if informed, could reason and make free choices to improve conditions. The common features of Coughlin’s groups of enemies are, first, their distance from or opposition to Coughlin himself, and their relative power.

Greeley is clearly free and purified from Coughlin’s racial and religious biases, but psychologically they share many common characteristics especially in their treatment of enemies.

GRANDIOSITY: As early as August of 1936, according to FBI files, Coughlin was talking about sending an Army to overthrow the anti-clerical Mexican government. He bragged to a government agent that he could handle any opposition from Roosevelt.⁴⁰ Coughlin fantasized about vast wealth as well as about armed might. Again from the FBI file, a letter dated September 10, 1940 notes a speech by Father Coughlin in Dubuque, Iowa that June, in which he recounts his opportunity to stop Hitler if the government had only listened to him. A news account quotes Coughlin:

“In 1933, March 4, there was an inauguration of a New Deal in the United States. Germany also had a New Deal with the inauguration of Adolf Hitler. There would have been no Adolf Hitler had the Democracies given Bruening [a German political opponent to Hitler] the 30 million dollars he had asked for. Now they can spend 30 billion dollars and Hitler will be their master. There is a page of history for you. I was in Washington on March 4, 1933. Some of Mr. Bruening’s friends asked me to please plead with the administration for 30 million dollars from here. I did, and was refused. Hitler would not have risen to power if there had been one single grain of Christian charity in the treasury of the so-called democracies.”⁴¹

In his own mind, Coughlin could authorize money from the United States Treasury as easily as he could command it from Germany.

At an earlier time, Coughlin had bragged that the “big man” had supported Social Justice with substantial contributions. In fact, Germany evidently did contribute money to Social Justice—but not to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, as Coughlin boasted. Records show the government could prove payments of only thirty-six dollars over four years by a German agent—little more than pocket change—in order to remain on Coughlin’s mailing list to keep their clipping service current.

Coughlin’s grandiose boasting and his denial of actual responsibility for real crimes are thus opposite faces of the same coin.

FANTASY and IMAGINATION: If Coughlin’s boast of support from Hitler was mere illusion, perhaps encouraged on general principle by the German government, it is nevertheless interesting psychologically. Coughlin refers to Hitler as the “big man,” an obvious reference to a childhood fantasy of a father at once terrifying and empowering. His boasts of vast wealth and an enormous armed following are likewise fantasies traceable to a very early period. The project of boasting itself indicates a difficulty of negotiating between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic—a difficulty arising early in the “phallic” stage of development.