Andrew Greeley’s The American Catholic is pro-Catholic, but not exactly pro-Catholicism.

This book is, to begin with, readable. Andrew Greeley writes sentences, real sentences that address the ear and the mind with peppery style, full of “deader than a doornail” and “a hell of a lot” and even “I do not know”— an excellent thing in a sociologist, particularly a demographer who fills his book with charts and statistics. He likes facts, hard facts, surprising facts; The American Catholic: A Social Portrait abounds in them, and is as perceptive as it is informative.

The book is frankly polemical, an essay in public-relations work for Catholics. They need it. While ethnic prejudices in general are either declining or at least in public disfavor, anti-Catholicism is doing just fine. Catholics—especially “ethnics”—are thought to be bigoted blue-collar types, on whose narrow natures liberal nurture can never take. John Leonard can even take a swipe, yea, in the polite pages of the New York Times, at the “church of inquisitors and clerks” in spite of which (not by means of which) Christianity has survived. Anti-Catholicism is embedded in American rhetoric: our vocabulary of devil-terms includes dogma, medieval, crusade, inquisition, and so forth, and the irony imparted to words like heresy, litany, pious, and orthodox reflects (and indirectly reinforces) the liberal image of Catholicism as encouraging—and imposing—stupid docility. This attitude toward the institutional church has naturally led to contempt for those who have worshipped in it. Moreover, these notions have been accepted and per-

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

Featured Tags

This book is, to begin with, readable. Andrew Greeley writes sentences, real sentences that address the ear and the mind with peppery style, full of “deader than a doornail” and “a hell of a lot” and even “I do not know”— an excellent thing in a sociologist, particularly a demographer who fills his book with charts and statistics. He likes facts, hard facts, surprising facts; The American Catholic: A Social Portrait abounds in them, and is as perceptive as it is informative.

The book is frankly polemical, an essay in public-relations work for Catholics. They need it. While ethnic prejudices in general are either declining or at least in public disfavor, anti-Catholicism is doing just fine. Catholics—especially “ethnics”—are thought to be bigoted blue-collar types, on whose narrow natures liberal nurture can never take. John Leonard can even take a swipe, yea, in the polite pages of the New York Times, at the “church of inquisitors and clerks” in spite of which (not by means of which) Christianity has survived. Anti-Catholicism is embedded in American rhetoric: our vocabulary of devil-terms includes dogma, medieval, crusade, inquisition, and so forth, and the irony imparted to words like heresy, litany, pious, and orthodox reflects (and indirectly reinforces) the liberal image of Catholicism as encouraging—and imposing—stupid docility. This attitude toward the institutional church has naturally led to contempt for those who have worshipped in it. Moreover, these notions have been accepted and per-