Books, Arts & Manners: How to Lose the Catholic Church

How to Save the Catholic Church, by Andrew M. Greeley and Mary Greeley Durkin, preface by David Tracy (Viking, 258 pp., $16.95)

This book not only has what must be the most arrogant title of the year, what with the Greeleys (Father Andy and Sis) ghosting for the Holy Spirit, but it is also, on a somewhat lower level, a blatant apologia for the insurgent neo-Gnosticism of the American Catholic Church. What used to be considered a kind of borderline heresy, “Americanism,” has now become a full-fledged virtue of the liberal imagination—ironically, in short, it is the new triumphalism of the age.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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How to Save the Catholic Church, by Andrew M. Greeley and Mary Greeley Durkin, preface by David Tracy (Viking, 258 pp., $16.95)

This book not only has what must be the most arrogant title of the year, what with the Greeleys (Father Andy and Sis) ghosting for the Holy Spirit, but it is also, on a somewhat lower level, a blatant apologia for the insurgent neo-Gnosticism of the American Catholic Church. What used to be considered a kind of borderline heresy, “Americanism,” has now become a full-fledged virtue of the liberal imagination—ironically, in short, it is the new triumphalism of the age.