Sipe - Serpent & The Dove (Celibacy in Literature) PDF

T HE S ERPENT AND
THE D OVE
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T HE S ERPENT AND
THE D OVE
Celibacy in Literature and Life
A. W. Richard Sipe
Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

Dedicated to Marianne, My Bridge over Troubled Water
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sipe, A. W. Richard, 1932
The serpent and the dove : celibacy in literature and life / A.W. Richard Sipe.
p. cm. (Psychology, religion, and spirituality, ISSN 15468070)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780313347252 (alk. paper)
1. CelibacyChristianity. 2. Chastity in literature. I. Title.
BV4390.S467 2007
253'.252dc22
2007026995
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright 2007 by A. W. Richard Sipe
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007026995
ISBN-13: 9780313347252
ISSN: 15468070
First published in 2007
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
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C ONTENTS
Series Foreword by J. Harold Ellens

Preface
Introduction by A. W. Richard Sipe, B. C. Lamb, and Harris Gruman
P ART I B IOGRAPHY , C ELIBACY ,
THE S EARCH FOR F ACT
vii
xi
xiii
AND
CHAPTER
Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis
CHAPTER
Gandhi and Friends: The Sexual/Celibate

Twain Meet
21
Irish American Priests: The Road from

Hero to Human
27
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
The Radio Priest: Charles E. Coughlin
32
CHAPTER
The Television Priest: Fulton J. Sheen
52
CHAPTER
A Mixed Message: Fulton J. Sheen
68
CHAPTER
The Paperback Priest: Andrew M. Greeley
74
CHAPTER
Double Exposure: Andrew M. Greeley
103
vi
Contents
P ART II F ICTION , C ELIBACY , AND

THE S EARCH FOR T RUTH
CHAPTER
A Bridge from Autobiography to

the Novel: James T. Farrell
113
CHAPTER
10
Child Abuse in the Old Sod: James Joyce
137
CHAPTER
11
Father and Fatherhood: Ethel Voynich

and Graham Greene
147
CHAPTER
12
Vocation, Lost and Found: J. F. Powers
156
CHAPTER
13
Will the Real Priest Please Stand Up:

Ignazio Silone
195
Notes
231
Index
257
S ERIES F OREWORD
The interface between psychology, religion, and spirituality has been of great
interest to scholars for a century. In the last three decades a broad popular
appetite has developed for books which make practical sense out of the sophisticated research on these three subjects. Freud expressed an essentially
deconstructive perspective on this matter and indicated that he saw the relationship between human psychology and religion to be a destructive interaction. Jung, on the other hand, was quite sure that these three aspects of the
human spirit, psychology, religion, and spirituality, were constructively and
inextricably linked.
Anton Boisen and Seward Hiltner derived much insight from both Freud
and Jung, as well as from Adler and Reik, while pressing the matter forward
with ingenious skill and illumination. Boisen and Hiltner fashioned a framework within which the quest for a sound and sensible denition of the interface between psychology, religion, and spirituality might best be described or
expressed.1 We are in their debt.
This series of General Interest Books, so wisely urged by Greenwood
Press, and particularly by its editors, Deborah Carvalko and Suzanne I.
Staszak-Silva, intends to dene the terms and explore the interface of psychology, religion, and spirituality at the operational level of daily human
experience. Each volume of the series identies, analyzes, describes, and
evaluates the full range of issues, of both popular and professional interest,
that deal with the psychological factors at play (1) in the way religion takes
shape and is expressed, (2) in the way spirituality functions within human
persons and shapes both religious formation and expression, and (3) in the
viii
Series Foreword
ways that spirituality is shaped and expressed by religion. The interest is

psycho-spiritual. In terms of the rubrics of the disciplines and the science of
psychology and spirituality this series of volumes investigates the operational
dynamics of religion and spirituality.
The verbs shape and express in the above paragraph refer to the forces
which prompt and form religion in persons and communities, as well as to
the manifestations of religious behavior (1) in personal forms of spirituality,
(2) in acts of spiritually motivated care for society, and (3) in ritual behaviors
such as liturgies of worship. In these various aspects of human function the
psychological and/or spiritual drivers are identied, isolated, and described
in terms of the way in which they unconsciously and consciously operate in
religion, thought, and behavior.
The books in this series are written for the general reader, the local library, and the undergraduate university student. They are also of signicant
interest to the informed professional, particularly in elds corollary to his or
her primary interest. The volumes in this series have great value for clinical
settings and treatment models, as well.
This series editor has spent an entire professional lifetime focused specically upon research into the interface of psychology in religion and spirituality. These matters are of the highest urgency in human affairs today when
religious motivation seems to be playing an increasing role, constructively
and destructively, in the arena of social ethics, national politics, and world affairs. It is imperative that we nd out immediately what the psychopathological factors are which shape a religion that can launch deadly assaults upon
the World Trade Center in New York and murder 3,500 people, or a religion
that motivates suicide bombers to kill themselves and murder dozens of their
neighbors weekly, and a religion which prompts such unjust national policies
as pre-emptive defense; all of which are wreaking havoc upon the social fabric, the democratic processes, the domestic tranquility, the economic stability
and productivity, and the legitimate right to freedom from fear, in every nation in the world today.
This present volume, The Serpent and the Dove: Celibacy in Literature and
Life, is an urgently needed and timely work, the motivation for which is
surely endorsed enthusiastically by the entire Christian world today, as the
international community searches for strategies that will afford us better
and deeper religious self-understanding as individuals and communities.
This project addresses the deep psychosocial, psychospiritual, and biological
sources of human nature that shape and drive our psychology and spirituality. Careful strategies of empirical, heuristic, and phenomenological research
have been employed to give this work a solid scientic foundation and formation. Never before has such wise analysis been brought to bear upon the
dynamic linkage between human physiology, psychology, and spirituality in
the life and calling of celibacy.
Series Foreword
ix
For fty years such organizations as the Christian Association for Psychological Studies and such Graduate Departments of Psychology as those at
Boston University, Fuller, Rosemead, Harvard, George Fox, Princeton, and
the like, have been publishing important building blocks of research on issues
dealing with religious behavior and psycho-spirituality. In this present project the insights generated by such patient and careful research is synthesized
and integrated into a holistic psycho-spiritual worldview, which takes seriously this special aspect of religious tradition called celibacy. This volume
employs an objective and experience-based approach to discerning whether
celibacy is a constructive or destructive calling, whether those who profess
being called to the vocation of celibacy really follow that vow in real life, and
whether following such a calling is a wholesome and responsible course for
a human life and person.
Some of the inuences of religion upon persons and society, now and
throughout history, have been negative. However, most of the impact of the
great religions upon human life and culture has been profoundly redemptive and generative of great good. It is urgent, therefore, that we discover
and understand better what the psychological and spiritual forces are which
empower people of faith and genuine spirituality to give themselves to all
the creative and constructive enterprises that, throughout the centuries, have
made of human life the humane, ordered, prosperous, and aesthetic experience it can be at its best. Surely the forces for good in both psychology and
spirituality far exceed the powers and proclivities toward the evil that we see
so prominently perpetrated in the name of religion in our world today, particularly in the destructive abuse of children by religious leaders who profess
to live by the vocation of celibacy.
This series of Greenwood Press volumes is dedicated to the greater understanding of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality, and thus to the profound
understanding and empowerment of those psycho-spiritual drivers which
can help us (1) transcend the malignancy of our earthly pilgrimage, (2) enhance the humaneness and majesty of the human spirit, and (3) empower the
potential for magnicence in human life.
P REFACE
Celibacy is one mode of coming to terms with ones sexuality. It is hard, however, to get the real life story of a person who claims complete and perpetual
celibacy. Autobiographical communications about celibacy are rare and perhaps not completely possible. The potential advantage of a rst-hand view of
celibacy would be having the celibate persons vision of that relatively rare
lifestyle. Whether the personal witness to celibacy is spoken or written, it
is likely to be affected by the inclination to distance the image and ideal of
celibacy from the personal self.
An authentic autobiography of celibacy must fulll certain criteria that
likely include the following: First, any such narrative should record ones
developmental relationship patterns, many of which precede any celibate intention. Nevertheless, early experiences vitally inuence a persons eventual
sexual/celibate pattern of adjustment. Family background, education, ethnic
and cultural xes, character traits, sexual preferences, unique talents, and
loves and hates all come into play. Self-knowledge is fundamental to any successful celibate pursuit.
Second, celibacy is dynamic; it is a process of internalization and actualization of the celibate ideal from intention to achievement. Celibacy does not
ordinarily begin with practice, but with the formation of an image of celibacy,
often personied in one person believed to be a practicing celibate.
That step involves the achievement of a degree of self-knowledgemeasuring ones own capacity to live with the sexual discipline and deprivation necessary to be celibate. Having some degree of self-awareness readies
xii
Preface
a person to proceed further in seeking knowledge about the process of celibacy and
what it involves in realistic terms.
Because celibacy is neither abstract nor extraneous to the individual striving for it, these inevitable steps precede the experimentation and practice of
celibacy. If, in time, celibacy takes personal root, it is often capped by a more
or less formal vow. It is from a stable internal base that celibacy can be said
to reach achievement once its integration is woven into the ber of ones
person. That is when celibacy becomes an integral part of ones sexual self.
Such self-revelation is never simple.
Finally, celibate achievement is accountable and, to a degree, measurable.
By their fruits you shall know them. Although celibacy is capable of many
faces, it is also capable of wearing many masks. In all of its variations, permutations, individualizations, frustrations, failures, or perversions, certain qualities measure its authenticity: service, complete self-honesty, awareness of the
oneness of the human condition, and the capacity to love.
I have written books on theoretical and practical aspects of religious celibacy. The previous few paragraphs summarize my vision of the essence and
process of celibacy through the lenses of my experience, research, teaching,
and counseling. The goal of the following chapters is to elucidate further
the principles of religious celibacy, rst, through the eyes of those who have
lived it and given their autobiographical testimony and, second, through the
visualization of ction writers.
The essence, process, practice, and achievement of celibacy are best recorded in two of my books, A Secret World (1990) or Celibacy in Crisis (2003).
All of the chapters are written against the framework of my understanding of the process of a celibate vocation and are predicated on the following
denition of religious celibacy:
Celibacy is a freely chosen, dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an
honest and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratication, in
order to serve others, productively, for a spiritual motive.1
I NTRODUCTION
A. W. Richard Sipe, B. C. Lamb, and Harris Gruman
We do not apply the scientic method to faith nor faith to science,

but both science and faith are part of the same dimension.
Pope John Paul II
In his short story The Ministers Black Veil,1 Nathaniel Hawthorne writes
of a clergyman in a small New England town who covers his face with a
black veil after his ance dies. It is unclear whether his action is a lesson, a
perverse joke, or a symptom of madness, but what is apparent is that by not
removing the veil as days turn into weeks and years, his celibate vocation
takes on a strange power and mystery. By shouldering the most profound
personal solitude, he becomes the most public gure in his community. His
ministry has a quality of marvel, and his service becomes the focus of his
parishioners greatest hopes and fears.
Through the allegory of the black veil, Hawthorne reveals what is at stake
in the true spiritual vocation: the individual who becomes a witness to the
transcendent. Such a person must go beyond the external institutional structures of religion and step into a sphere outside social norms, a sphere in
which sexuality, power, and human potential take on new meanings, where
the dangers of aloneness and the daunting struggle between ones own hopes
and fears are ever present. It is a sphere open to misunderstanding, demanding necessary sacrice, service, and suffering for a cause in which the individual can also be ridiculed or abused.
The betrayal of vocation, however, has as much to do with institutional
and social forces as it does with individual weakness or evil. Whether it
xiv
Introduction
ultimately succeeds or fails in bearing witness to the human capacity for the
spiritual, every vocation is constructed from a unique compromise between
collective and personal experiences.
In these chapters, I explore the secret world behind the black veil through
literature. As an adjunct professor teaching part time in a major Roman
Catholic seminary from 1972 to 1984, I struggled to develop a course
The Person of the Priestaimed at helping seminarians develop a pastoral
identity. I wanted to go beyond the standard ascetic works, which were well
known but frequently abstract, ethereal, and easily undigested because they
proved personally impractical and unconnected to the daily realities of a minister and his own sexuality.
I turned rst to autobiographies of religious celibates who wrote at least
a chapter on celibacy as a personal testimony. This genre is rare, but the few
writers who attempted it are worthy of attention.
While reading Edwin OConnors The Edge of Sadness 2 and the works
of J. F. Powers, I was struck by the accessibility and realness of these ctional representations of priests. I recalled the profound inuence Victor
Hugo3 and the French revivalists, Leon Bloy,4 Georges Bernanos,5 Franois
Mauriac,6 and Paul Claudel7 played in my own growth and development.
Their novels helped me reect on my vocation and identity during my own
preparation for the Catholic priesthood in the 1940s and 1950s, and they
have remained wellsprings for meditation to me. Fundamentally, I wanted
to make celibacy and the priestly vocation and its mystery more practical
and intimate for my students instead of explaining them only as a theologically dened charism.
The work of priest-novelist Andrew Greeley formed a bridge for me between autobiography and ction and had the additional advantage of recognition and accessibility to the seminarians I was teaching at the time. He
spoke for many Catholics in the second half of the twentieth century. The
expertise of B. C. Lamb has given substance to my understanding and reading of Greeleys work, 23 novels and more than 33 volumes in all.
Using ction to explore psychic reality and human behavior is not a new
idea. Sigmund Freud recommended that one who wants to fathom the workings of the human mind should not turn to psychological treatises but to literature. And, of course, he practiced what he preached, exploring literature
from Oedipus to Hamlet and Faust. Robert Coles taught popular courses in
the undergraduate, medical, and law schools at Harvard that made moral
understanding vibrant through novels.
My experience has been that the institution of the church obfuscates and
diminishes the radical reality of lived (or failed) celibacy behind the unexplored (and from its stance, an inexplicable) idea of charism. It bypasses
the real mystery by positing mystery, which in practical terms amounts
to magic.
Introduction
xv
THE MEANING OF MYSTERY

In my work, I have deliberately shifted the terms of debate from the organizational forms (mandated celibacy) to spiritual content without abandoning a rational mode of communication or epistemology. The church demands
sexual abstinence from anyone professing a vocation to the priesthood,8 but
it does not take celibacy seriously enough to teach it.
I have used a secular body of psychological and social theory to explain
the reality of charism as a phenomenon grounded in psychobiological sublimation in a way that is not at all hostile to the quest for celibacy, as can be
demonstrated in the novels I have chosen to explore.
I disagree with William James, who asserted that psychosexual theories
of religious behavior are inevitably hostile to spiritual experience.9 In my
effort to understand rationally the irrational truth of celibacy as a spiritual
experience, I have, in fact, taken a new tack on Jamess course of using that
very process of rationalization in science and social life as a means of preserving mystery and eschewing magic. I am unapologetic about my call for
inquiry and education for celibacy and for a shift from celibacy as a discipline
of traditional authority back to celibacy as a charism of spiritual experience.
I realize that this approach may have the uncanny status of a rational defense
of the irrational.
VOCATION
The quest for vocation by the ministerthe man of God, the man of mysteryis a narrative of existential and social struggle made accessible through
the sensitive and insightful work of authors of ction. Where nonction narratives of vocation and celibacy fail because of the public exigencies of institutional religion, or remain unwritten as a result of the personal humility
of achieved spirituality, the author of ction can provide us with a glimpse
behind the veil, one that serves neither institutional nor personal demands
but rather a disinterested desire to understand and broaden the limits of the
human condition.
I knew that sex was, and still is, an area of human reality that has not been
fully incorporated into Christian understanding and theology, thus often leaving celibacy an empty moniker. I also knew that sex and power, both spiritual
and political, are vitally intertwined with the question of religious vocation. The
hundreds of ongoing stories of clerical struggle, failure, and triumph amassing
in my ethnographic study compelled me to do what I could to aid young men
in their struggle for ministerial integrity, self-awareness, and reverence for the
dimensions of sex and the use of power inherent in their vocation.
The 2002 blast of public exposure of priest sexual abuse was still 25 years
in the future when I began this quest for understanding.10 Somehow even then,
xvi
Introduction
I needed to nd a pedagogical approach adequate to the commitment my students were making and the questions they were asking: What is the essence
of the power and mystery that surround the religious minister? In short, what
is actually contained in the reality of the charism of celibacy? Does it emanate
from some interior, psychological/spiritual space, or does the community of
faithful who want to believe that God can be among men in visible, tangible
form confer it? Or does the institution, backed up by legal and political force
of immeasurable proportions, confer it? Is it only grace? Answers are necessary. Celibate practice needs more than clichseven pious ones.
What is the place of women in a realm that severely restricts or positively
excludes them from power? How is it that access to the power and mystery
is reserved for one gender? What does sexual activity, grounded in the most
corporeal realities of the evolution of human biology, have to do with the
spiritual and the mystery of the Unseen? Is sex incompatible with ritual
purity and spiritual power? What does sexual orientation have to do with
ministry? Are men of homosexual orientation or limited sexual drive better
or less suited to enter the mystery than other men?
How are we to bridge limited popular perceptions that the minister is the
so-called ideal man or, contrarily, that all ministers are charlatans? How do
we nd our way through the maze of claims and counterclaims that there
is a man of God worthy of that title and the trust it implies? It is a house of
mirrors constructed by perceptions and wishes, failures and aspirations. But
which is the real reection, and what is the reality being mirrored?
How does a ministeror any man or womanmaintain idealism, direction, and spiritual balance, keeping one eye on the Unseen and the other on
the practical necessities of existence? How does one shoulder the burden of
helping others do the same?
In other words, how does one form a pastoral identity? How does one
become a minister of God, engaging all of the inevitable dragons, internal
and external, real and mythical, known and unimagined, while maintaining
ones integrity as a sexual being as one enters the realms of power and taps
resources beyond self and institution?
The challenges to integrity are protean, and the dangers of corruption
are as many and as daunting as any faced by the protagonists of our greatest
novels. That thoughtthat the intuition that writers of ction and works of
ction could help people who want to understand the reality of ministry and
pastoral careled me to base my course on works of literature. I had already
experienced the power of ction in my own life.
THE TRUTH OF THE NOVEL

The novel has a so-called truth standard that is as rigorous as it is mysterious. Quantication of data and repeatability of sequence are of no value to
Introduction
xvii
its intuitive appeal, yet the success of a narrative does depend on its meeting
real criteria.
Through its unfolding in a particular stream of carefully chosen words,
images, and allusions, narrative bridges the unique and the universal at the
moment it accomplishes communication between a writer and a reader. To
be a worthy protagonist of ctional narrative, a character can be neither a
statistic nor an aberration.
The statistical person already has a home in the studies of sociologists,
anthropologists, and historians. The aberration is comfortable in tabloids,
psychiatric journals, and Ripleys Believe It or Not. Both of these types declare
their truth in the very fact that they exist. But the protagonist of ction declares his truth in the fact that he need not exist in order to be believed. He
must be recognized as true against that most demanding judge: the intuition
of a reader.
The relevance of such an epistemology to these chapters resides in a
shared valuation in the literary and the spirituality of uncertainty and ambiguity, a mutual need for a third term between reality and perception. Lets
call it narrative irony, or the Unseen.
I chose to present chapters on a sample of novels that would comport well
in their time and topic with my previous study. These are all novels of the
twentieth century, allowing me to focus on an important yet delineated period in the history of spiritual vocation. This also makes the novels roughly
coextensive with the lifetimes and life experiences of the priests in my ethnographic study.11
The novels are also what I would like to call serious popular novels: serious because, unlike most commercial novels, they are motivated by the ethical quest to understand the human condition; popular because their authors
sought and obtained a wide readership.
They are classic realist novels whose authors decided against pioneering new ground in poetic language in order to write works that would be
accessibleafter a century-long owering of realist ctionto all literate
people, challenging them existentially rather than linguistically. In other
words, their form is user-friendly, whatever the demands made by their content. Furthermore, all of these novels, regardless of their authors nationalities, were written to transcend particularities of national culturethat is,
with an eye to translationand all of them found a wide readership in the
United States.
I have incorporated lengthy quotations from the novels in my reections
on them. This does not absolve the reader from the enjoyment of reading the
whole of the original texts, which will provide a real understanding of my
arguments.
Although the novels I chose for consideration in these chapters have
Roman Catholic priests as protagonists, in the course of my research I have
xviii
Introduction
reviewed texts about Protestant ministers, by Hawthorne,12 Sinclair Lewis,

W. Somerset Maugham,13 and others. They also offer particularly relevant
and compelling case studies. I hope to remind readers that the signicance
of the questions presented not only extends beyond the Catholic priesthood;
it touches on all human experience with sex, power, and the quest for the
transcendent.
The search for vocation is always a highly charged struggle with sex,
power, and witness, but the quality of that struggle changes dramatically
with the degree to which it is a social or existential one.
ORGANIZATION OF THE CHAPTERS

The rst chapters in this book look at crises in the institutions of vocation. One cannot speak about clerical vocation and celibacy at the beginning
of the twenty-rst century in any realistic terms without taking into account the sexual abuse crisis that festers within ministry, especially prominent among Roman Catholic priests and bishops. Public awareness raises
fundamental questions. Do religious institutions harbor and encourage the
manipulation of sex and power? Do they promote the degradation of women
and charlatanism? Do institutional doctrines and rules inhibit or destroy
the vocations of those who fail to abide by them? Is personal witness to the
achievement of vocation, both spiritual and celibate, impossible within the
institutional sphere?
Through careful readings of three autobiographical accounts of celibate
practice by Mohandas Gandhi, Fulton Sheen, and Andrew Greeley and a
biographical account of Charles Coughlin, I explore the severe limits placed
on ministry and sainthood. Each of the purported celibates supports his
celibacy through subtle appeals to its moral superiority over other sexual
practicesan intolerance I have found incompatible with a fully integrated
and achieved celibate vocation. The hypothesis that emerges is this: that public nonction witness to celibacy is, to a degree, antithetical to its practice
and that the self-exposure is revelatory of the limitation and perhaps impossibility of celibacy. Fictional narratives thus become the most fruitful
vehicle for expressing and testing its truth.
The Irish Catholic culture that has infused the U.S. church is the link
that unites our famous priests and provides a transition from biography to
the ction of J. T. Farrell and James Joyce as well as that of the Irish-born
Ethel Voynich and the Englishman Graham Greene. Through their portrayals, I explore the broader social and historical signicance of the quest for
vocation: power through resistance or conformism, the social meaning of a
life and death guided by spirituality, and the failure and potential to overcome
the misogyny of a patriarchal society through sexual/celibate life in the service of vocation.
Introduction
xix
The chapters on J. T. Farrell and James Joyce speak for themselves. Priests
are real, worthy, and awed human beings, and sexual abuse by some clergy
has been a long-known if deliberately hidden reality.
Two novels, written from the apparently opposed viewpoints of anticlericalism (Ethel Voynich)14 and devout Catholicism (Graham Greene),15 treat,
with surprisingly similar sensitivity and sympathy, the case of a priest whose
love for his natural offspring impinges on the demands of his ministry. In the
conict between being a father and being a Father, the meaning of celibacy is
perhaps most accurately comprehended as the sublimation of personal affections for communal ones, thus allowing a more signicant exploration of vocation and its limits than do novels of sexual temptation and lapse. Whereas
the latter can be assimilated and integrated into a process of achievement, a
child remains present as both a symbol of the potential for meaningful vocation and an impediment to its practice.
THE SPIRITUAL VOCATION IN

A SECULAR WORLD
The core of my thesis on celibacy in life and literature is dened by a consideration of the celibate vocation and the social challenge through a close
reading of two major social novels of the spiritual vocation, Ignazio Silones
Bread and Wine and J. F. Powerss Morte DUrban.
These two novels comprehend the sweep of twentieth-century Western
society, in which, at one moment, resistance and a meaningful life and death
appear still possible (Silone) and, at another, only conformity or failure seem
to be options (Powers). In both cases, however, spiritual vocation functions
as a litmus test of the possible, and the actual practice of celibacy is one of its
most telling signs.
J. F. POWERS: THE COMEDY OF THE GOSPEL

Morte DUrban holds deep personal ties for me. I rst became aware
of J. F. Powers not through his novels or short stories but because of
George G. Garrelts, the assistant pastor of my home parish in Robbinsdale,
Minnesota, in 1945. Garrelts, who had been friends with Powers since their
grade school days, was an intriguing young priest and remained fascinating
as a married man, father, and college professor until his death in 2005. As a
newly ordained priest, he was a walking advertisement for vocations: tall,
athletic, inspiring, with a keen sense of humor, piety, and accessibility.
Father Garrelts, at the time, was a Catholic radical, and Powers remained
so. The Catholic Christian radical of 1945 was very different from the 2006
brand of the Christian right-wing radical or Opus Dei member. He was a
pacist in the strict sense. Powers spent four years in prison during World
xx
Introduction
War II because of his principles. He believed in voluntary poverty in the

mold of the Catholic Worker (one step away from Communism), and the corporal works of mercy formed the framework of his spirituality.
I have been marked indelibly with this ideal of Christianity even if I am a
rather poor example of its lived reality.
If Garrelts left any echo in the priests of Morte DUrban, I have never divined where. On the other hand, Powers dedicated his last novel, Wheat That
Springeth Green,16 to G.G.G., and I think I see some shadow of Garrelts in
those pages and an occasional glimpse of him in some of the short stories.
In 1993, Powers read a version of the chapter in this collection and wrote
the following:
Ive read the MS and made a few comments. I enjoyed most of it. Some of
it is done in a manner that is just too educated for me to follow closely and
may or may not be true, for all I know. I dont consider myself an intellectual, but the times are such that I am often mistaken for one. What I
am good at, though, is guessing and that is how I get by. I hope the book
does well.
It is, of course, Powerss guessing that makes his intuition about the priesthood so valuable and accurate.
Between 1996 and 1998, I traveled to Collegeville, Minnesota, six times
each year trying to help St. Johns Abbey there deal with a sexual abuse crisis that had emerged from the shadows into the public sunshine during the
1990s. Powers was living in a small workmans cottage near the university.
During each visit, he would invite me to a supper he had prepared. He always
refused my invitation to dine at an area restaurant. I told him that I had to
confess that he served the best meal in Collegeville. I was the grateful
object of a corporal work of mercy. His last note to me in 1998 was a simple
word of encouragement for my discouraging work, capped with a wisp of
humor and signed, Jim.
Powerss life was transparent. He lived what he believed and was the
Christian radical to the end. He reviewed a draft of the Silone chapter for
this book, also. His comments and suggestions were invariably sensitive; that
chapter itself is a better piece for his input, and I have included it there. He
was like Silones Don Paolo Spada: a priest beyond the boundaries of any
institution.
In Morte DUrban, J. F. Powers took on the difcult project of narrating
the struggle for meaning in the inhospitable climate of the world of commerce in the United States of the 1950s. That he chose as his protagonist a
Catholic priest by no means mitigates this aim of grappling with what Max
Weber called the disenchantment of the world in such a calculating society.
In fact, the man of mystery in a disenchanted world becomes Powerss ideal
Introduction
xxi
vehicle for testing that societys apparently innite power, its necessity as the
medium of human interaction. Four prominent themes present themselves
for consideration: (1) the road to eternal habitations is paved . . . ; (2) vocation after disenchantment; (3) urbane celibacy: good cars and evil women;
and (4) death of a spiritual salesman.
IGNAZIO SILONE: THE ESSENCE

OF THE PRIESTHOOD
My youthful radicalism also introduced me to Silone. Inspired by Garrelts, I spent a summer at a Catholic Worker farm in Upton, Massachusetts,
in the bosom of a community practicing voluntary poverty, farming, and
stained glass art. I had met Dorothy Day previously, but it was there and
then that I learned that she read Bread and Wine once every year, a practice
that she continued until the end of her life. It was only years later that I fully
understood its signicance.
Silone, like Dorothy Day, was a Communist during his twenties. He left
the party disillusioned, but he never lost his sense of the dynamic struggle
between the promises of social redemption and spiritual transcendence. His
creation, Don Paolo, captures the essence of a priest: outside the institution
but true to it nevertheless.
The signicance of Silones contribution to the questions about the celibate vocation comes to fruition through a comparative reading of the two
versions of his novel (1937 and 1956). Although his ideal of the spiritual
vocation as resistance to society remained constant, his understanding of
the roles of sexuality, gender, and celibacy underwent a striking process of
reevaluation and development. That process has direct relevance to current
debates on church reform and encompasses (1) Silones ideal of the spiritual vocation; (2) spiritual vocation as a narrative of struggle; (3) sexuality,
women, and the established church and Silones rst draft of celibacy; and
(4) hopeful revisions: Silones second draft of celibacy.
Timothy Radcliffe, former master general of the Dominican Order, expressed succinctly the same lessons of the novels: Learning to live our
chastity well is not primarily a question of the will, bottling up our wildest
passions, but a way of life that sustains us in the truth of what and who we
are.17
Harris Gruman deserves credit and my gratitude for applying my theory
of celibacy to these two novels. His sensitivity to the radical nature of celibacy and his familiarity with Judaism and Communism infused a fresh view
of Silone and Powers and educated me to a new depth of understanding of
the celibate process.
This project, which began in 1975, has been through many versions, revisions, and attempts to organize the material in a useful way. This material
xxii
Introduction
has not been published previously. This effort remains for me like Freuds
process: terminable and interminable. I will continue exploring the meaning
and mystery of religious celibacy unto death. It is my vocation.
The title of this book, The Serpent and the Dove, is obvious in its allusion
to symbols for sexuality and purity. Since the time of Freud, no one has to
apologize for the immediate association of a serpent with a phallic symbol.
The dove of purity is not without its sexual association in Christian iconography as the bearer of the impregnation of the Virgin through her earthe
Word made esh through its instrumentality. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
wrote in his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Only through the body does the
way, the ascent to the life of blessedness, lie open to us. Celibacy cannot be
seriously explored without coming to grips with sexuality in a realistic and
practical manner. Without both elements, celibacy is deprived of reality and
mystery and is reduced to myth and magic.
I have not included in this collection other essays prepared on the same
subject, for instance, Sinclair Lewiss Elmer Gantry.18 That novel presents
a vocation without a protagonist. In Lewiss satire of evangelism, vocation
becomes the vehicle for corruption in a corrupt world. The parallel plot of
Frank Shallard, and its horrifying conclusion, however, acts as a guide rail to
Lewiss narrative, reminding us that all vocations do not produce charlatans,
but also that Everyman may not be t for a religious vocation. These broad
parameters of tragedy and satire construct the space explored more subtly in
the social novels of vocation included in this volume.
Willa Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop 19 and Graham Greenes Monsignor Quixote 20 explore in narrative form the importance of intimate male
friendship to the strengthening of spiritual vocation and, especially, the celibate vocation. This is an important area for investigation because the question
of homosexual orientation as a consideration for ordination has become a hot
topic in recent days. Cather, who had personal experience of same-sex friendships, treats the more traditional bonds among fellow clerics and the tension
between their personal loyalty, affection, and the demands of their ministry
with a delicacy and insightfulness that is hard to match in literature of vocation. In Monsignor Quixote, Greene explores institutional limits through the
story of friendship between a parish priest and a Communist mayor in which
the personal bond liberates them from the ethical compromises of their previous commitments, and Cervantean irony is overcome through Quixotic hope.
PROCESS OF THIS STUDY

For two years after I published A Secret World in 1990, I engaged two
research assistants, B. C. Lamb and Harris Gruman, who joined my quest to
understand celibacy through literature. Neither of them came from a Roman
Catholic background. I considered this a distinct advantage for the kind of
Introduction
xxiii
objective reading of texts and intellectual dialogue I desired. They have been
indispensable in this effort. They explored my theories of celibate process,
and I learned from them some things about literary criticism.
They were the prototypical struggling graduate students at the time,
and they were grateful for the employment my wife and I offered them to
explore new areas for study. They have not been involved in this project for
more than twelve years, and both said they would be satised with any acknowledgment at all for our work together. They bear no responsibility for
any inadequacies in this nal version, but I want to give them full credit of
coauthorship with the hope that it will encourage others to carry on a vision
of a lifetime: to divine the origins, meanings, and process of religious celibacy
wherever they may be found.
B. C. Lamb, PhD, JD, Baltimore, Maryland, has his degree in comparative literature from the University of Maryland and his law degree from the
University of Baltimore. He is currently a criminal defense attorney in Baltimore. He continues his studies in the relation between language and society;
he possesses a more complete understanding and profound analysis of Father
Andrew Greeleys body of work than any other scholar that I am aware of.
He is a longtime mainstay of Saint Johns United Methodist Church, an inclusive inner-city congregation. He is a remarkable man with wide literary
and civic interests that he continues to develop in service to his community.
Harris Gruman is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a PhD
in comparative literature from the University of Maryland. Together we
attended the International Conference on Celibacy at the Vatican in 1993.
His wife is from Italy and has her doctorate in Italian; she lectures at Harvard. They have two children. Currently, Harris is director of Massachusetts
Neighbor to Neighbor, which builds political organizations in low-income
communities across the commonwealth. He began his organizing career
with 14 years of experience in Baltimore, working on affordable housing and
health care. He also worked in Colorado as statewide health care organizer
and in Hungary and Poland as a coalition organizer for the Institute for
Transportation and Development Policy. At Neighbor to Neighbor, he has
led organizing campaigns to increase child-care funding, the minimum wage,
and universal health insurance.
I am honored to have this book included J. Harold Ellens series
Psychology, Religion and Spirituality. I feel at home in the tradition he preserves and enhances: that of Seward Hiltner who was a mentor to me when
I studied at the Menninger Foundation in the 1960s. I am a fortunate writer
to have had the same editor and index specialist on every book I have published. Marge Nelson has edited for Johns Hopkins University Press among
many other publishing rms. She knows my thinking and has helped me
develop whatever exists of my style: clarity above all. The pleasure of getting
this book to press has been increased by the attention of Debora Carvalco
xxiv
Introduction
of the Greenwood Publishing. Along with these are other masters of the
language I need to thank: Denys Horgan for his reading of the chapters on
Coughlin and Joyce, and Eugene C. Kennedy who was encouraging in reading a very early version of the manuscript and the nal version of the chapter
on Farrell. Andrew Chan and Kourteny Murray continue to solve my current technical and research questions. They deserve credit for the degree to
which I have reached my goal of communicating clearly and providing easy
reading. The rest, including all criticisms, belong to me.
These colleagues are examples of people who understand vocation. Each
follows his or her path and continues to forge new trails, but all are people
who have remained loyal to the ideals of their youth. Their integrity is a
continuing inspiration to me. Their friendship remains a consolation beyond
time and words.
pa rt i
B IOGRAPHY , C ELIBACY , AND

THE S EARCH FOR F ACT
CHAPTER
F OUNDATIONS OF
A C ELIBACY C RISIS
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
Contrary to what past and present popes say, the Roman Catholic Church
is in a profound crisis whose name is Sex. Its symptom is sexual abuse of
minors by clergy, but the misunderstanding of sex and celibacy burns at
its core.
Some Catholic Church apologists complain that the media are stirring up
anti-Catholic, antipriest, antireligion propaganda via the sexual-abuse crisis.
History speaks otherwise. Sexual abuse of minors by religious authorities has
been a continuing problem throughout the centuries of organized Christianity.1 Sex, magic, and heresy consistently have been enmeshed throughout the
centuries.2 Sex and celibacy concerns have been particularly entangled since
the time of the Protestant Reformation. Faust is but one example of the literary perpetuation of child abuse generating the power of literary and artistic
expression; notable examples are Johann Wolfgang von Goethes Faust, Charles
Gounods opera of the same title, and Hector Berliozs La damnation de Faust.
The historical Faust (Johann Georg Faust, 14801540) was a professor of
alchemy and magic at various universities in Germany, including Erfurt. It
was here that he was purported to declare before a Franciscan friar, I have
gone further than you think and have pledged myself to the devil with my
own blood, to be his in eternity, body and soul.
The Serpent and the Dove
Rainer Nagele says that Faust probably was a priest;3 at the very least
he was a minor cleric. He took a doctorate in divinity from the University
of Wittenberg, and he was the product of Catholic pedagogy. Some scholars
speculate that he was a victim of abuse, presumably by a cleric.
Complaints of pedophilia followed Faust from one place to another. (University students were much younger during the Renaissance.) Soon after
Faust would begin teaching at each new place, one of the professors would
inevitably complain to the local bishop, and the churchs invariable response
was to move Faust along to another placethe pattern so well documented
in the U.S. crisis. Faust was a contemporary of Protestant reformers Martin
Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, who feared and hated him; the latter pictured him with a rabid dog. He stood in some quarters as the embodiment of
all that was Catholic. His story became legend, with his biography published
rst in German and translated into English (1587). Christopher Marlowe
published The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus in 1616.
Understanding the dimensions of the present catastrophe in one of the
worlds great religions is not simple. The church is conditioned to resist investigation by centuries of tradition. Every conict is elegantly bound up
in an elaborate structure of secrecy and power. The honesty of the Desert
Fathers places their accounts of monastic and clerical vice and virtue in a
category all by themselves. But a fund of literature from Boccaccio4 and
Chaucer onward records the sexual misadventures of Catholic clergy. Explicit literary critiques and satires like those of Erasmuss The Praise of Folly
and Franois Rabelaiss Gargantua are not common among modern works.
This nding is not really surprising because the breakup of medieval cultural unity on the one hand and the growth of secular society on the other
have somewhat marginalized the institutional church. When the church was
the intellectual and cultural universe, controlling all science and philosophy, liberal arts, law and ethics, broad-based satires like those of Erasmus,
Rabelais, and Chaucer had force and interest. After the wars of religion and
the Enlightenment, adherence to the Catholic universe was seen as a matter of personal choice (except in Spain and Ireland), and works such as The
Praise of Folly were not possible. Implicit criticisms, however, abound, and
so do afrmations, as in G. K. Chesterton, Flannery OConnor, Anthony
Burgess, and Georges Bernanos. Implicit criticisms can be found in James
Joyce, J. T. Farrell, and Graham Greene. The contributions of each to the
portrait of celibacy in this age will get careful attention here as well as
notice of current lms such as Priest (United Kingdom), Mala Educacin
(Spain), El Crimen del Padre Amaro (Mexico), and The Magdalens (Ireland).5
Literary and artistic expressions of reality have tremendous durability, and
they cannot be dismissed easily as scurrilous, biased, or blasphemous because they become more compelling as inevitable historical documentation
renders them undeniable.
Thousands of Roman Catholic priests in the United States aloneve

thousand named since 1950have sexually abused minors.6 Outrage over the
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 in the general public. Literature about priests cannot be read in exactly the same way now as it was
understood before the year 2000. To understand the scope and structure of
the sexual abuse and its relationship to sex and celibacy, we have to turn to
medical and psychological literature.
Questions about clergy integrity are not limited to the offending clerics
or to the single problem of child abuse, but rather they involve the whole
panoply of clerical sexual activity plus 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.
Why is this corruption in the Catholic Church such a dangerous symptom, even threatening to destabilize the foundations of the universal church?
The hierarchy has blamed the written wordthe press, the mediafor distorting the problem and causing the crisis.
But how did wide-ranging public indignation spring upseemingly so
fully matured after January 2002in response to the Boston Globe investigative reports of abuse? Many people date the crisis of the Catholic Church to
that date and publication.
Excellent and powerful as the media reporting indeed was, in itself it
would not be sufcient to destabilize an unconditioned populous. But the
secular media form only another source of understanding sex and celibacy in
life whether or not it is considered literature.
My basic thesis is that the world knew about this type of violation and
other clerical sexual activity previously buried in the Catholic unconscious.
I knew this was so from work as a therapist, from allusions, innuendoes,
mimesis, and narratives in novels. The problem has existed so long and has
involved so many victims and their families around the world that when the
documents could be printed in a secular newspaper and talked about openly,
many of the public were ready to say, Yes, I know, it happened to me, and
now I know it happened to others. I know it is the truth.
The world, victims families, and the victims themselves could then hear
once-silenced voices. Inexplicable pain and suffering, family tragedies, immoral and criminal activity, educational and economic failures that formerly
made no sense to people and their families come into focus when sex with a
priest is factored into the equation. The men they trusted had betrayed them.
They were sexual victims of men who said they were dedicated to religion
and celibacy, so they had to be sexually safe.
I expect that the reality of publicly exposed clergy sex will generate a
great many literary portrayals beyond journalistic accounts.
It is abhorrent to many unbiased people to think that priests and bishops

who are extolled as moral leaders could be the source of moral corruption.
And yet it has been so and not only recently.7
THE VICTIMS OF CELIBATE VIOLATION

Certainly the crisis of sexual abuse of minors is an extreme of clergy
behavior, but it opens a door to the sexual/celibate life of priests and bishops. The consequences of being abused are deep and long lasting. A victim
cannot just put behind him or her this kind of abuse. The scars of abuse and
betrayal by the trusted last forever. The mass of people abused by clergy
has kept growing to a point at which a majority of Catholics who have not
been abused know someone who has. The scope of the crisis requires us to
look into scientic literature as a background to come to terms with the
autobiographical and ctional representations of sex and celibacy in the
clergy.8
Sexual Footprints
The consequences of sexual activity with clergy advertised as celibate are
both psychological and physical. The vehicle of the damage and trauma is
sexual.9 Abuse of a minor, even more so, forms the basis for sexual dysfunction of some kind in the victim.
Some priests portrayed in literature manifest confusion about their sexual
identity. This confusion is one of the rst and most painful penalties a male
victim pays in the aftermath of sexual abuse by a priest. Sexual functioning,
even if it does not get mired in paraphilias, is often impaired and crippled
for normal functioning. The confusion of sex with violence can result in
sadomasochistic behaviors and rape, which are among the dire social consequences of abuse beyond personal tragedy.10
Freud originally taught that premature sexual exposure and abuse were
the genesis of all neuroses. He later modied his theory to state that actual
abuse was not necessary but that even infantile fantasies of sex with the
forbidden could cause the same psychic result and trauma. One of the reasons for Freuds change of heart was the sheer number of the accounts of
early abuse he heard. It was not popular in the nineteenth century to believe
children when they contradicted or countered elders. This attitude plagues
assault victims even today. Also, the social status of the family members who
were the alleged abusers made Freuds conclusion impolitic and doubtful.
Nonetheless, Freuds original observations and conclusions, in spite of him,
have withstood the test of time.11 Even now, many people nd it difcult to
believe the enormous psychic consequences from what they would consider a
minor sexual infraction or a minimal event of sexual touch. As early as 1893,
Freud wrote: For we very often nd that the content and determinants of
hysterical phenomena [read emotional reaction] are events which are in
themselves quite trivial, but which have acquired high signicance from the
fact that they occurred at specially important moments when the patients
predisposition was pathologically increased.12
Legacy of Anxiety
Overwhelming anxiety is the inheritance left to the victim of clergy abuse.
A host of addictive behaviors involving alcohol, drugs, sex or other acting
out, and out-of-control behaviors are endemic among many men and women
who have suffered abuse. These behaviors are among the means victims use
to mollify their confusion, the pain of trauma, and their unconscious.
If childhood sexual abuse is not promptly and effectively treated, longterm symptoms can continue into adulthood. A whole range of emotional
and behavioral problems can be traced to early abuse, the most common
being anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the sexual anxieties and disorders mentioned previously, low self-esteem, poor body image,
depression, and thoughts of suicide.
These anxieties can lead specically to phobias, generalized anxiety, panic
episodes, obsessions, compulsions, and irrational anger perpetuated by the
inability of their young personalities to absorb and master what has happened to them.
Seminarians traditionally learn about scrupulosity when they are studying
to hear confessions. People with scruples are tortured by unwanted thoughts
(or impulse-driven repetitive actions). These people often turn to a priest to
counsel or absolve them of the thoughts, images, or desires that they nd
troublesome or abhorrent. Frequently, the ideation has to do with forbidden
and intolerable sexual images or ideas.
Today, this condition would be diagnosed psychiatrically as obsessivecompulsive disorder,13 and its etiology is often tied up with early sexual
abuse because abuse impairs a childs sense of self-control and opens a person
to addictive patterns of tension reduction.
Sexual abuse by an adult, no matter how kindly cloaked, is an assault.14 Inevitably, most victims will experience sex with an adult as a genuine trauma
because the occurrence does not t into the psychic or social reality of the
minor. The discordance of the relationship and exchange cannot be absorbed.
Some victims of clergy abuse have distressing reactions at the sight of a
Roman collar, a church, rosary, or anything that may trigger a memory of
abusive events. Diagnostically, PTSD is a well-dened psychiatric condition
that plagues countless victims of childhood abuse; in fact, studies indicate
that between one-third and one-half of childhood victims of abuse develop
symptoms of PTSD.
We have all learned a great deal about PTSD from treating war veterans
who, after coming through battle conditions, life threats, death or injury to
companions (often seemingly unscathed), have recurrent, distressing recollections, dreams, and emotional reactions. Unpredictable sights, sounds, or
thoughts can reignite the trauma.
A Lifetime of Depression
Depression is a common afiction in the modern world. Some studies say
that there is a 50 percent chance of one lifetime incidence of major depression
among the U.S. population. But propelling the abused toward depression are
distinct and added burdens that tend to be recurrent and sustained. In the
abused, the loss of innocence, the loss of condence, the loss of faith, the loss
of self-esteem, and the loss of their youth lay down deep roots to inevitable
periods or long-term states of depression.15
Trust Betrayed
Betrayal so deep and so fundamental is the experience of a minor violated
by the trusted that the incident(s) becomes a life-altering condition long after
the real threat of abuse has passed. Certainly, this severe result prevails when
the abuser is a parent who represents the whole world of security for a child;
when the abuser is a parental gure who also represents God, the spiritual
world, and the eternal, the betrayal leaves the victim nowhere to turn. All supposedly secure and trustworthy persons and institutions become suspect.16
A minor who is a victim experiences fundamental abandonment and aloneness. How can persons revive trust when they have been wounded so vitally
at a stage in their life when they were intrinsically able to give themselves
without reservation to trust an elder only to be unspeakably violated? Many
cannot ever recover condence and trust in a world that betrayed their existence. They needed trustas we all dofor a sense of survival. When the
abusing elder is a parent or, even more spectacularly, a representative of God,
the loss of trust is nearly irretrievable.17
Beyond loss of trust in the outside world, abuse betrayal attacks self-trust
in a fundamental way: the loss of trust in ones memory and mind. A disruption of cognition and memory can occur during and after childhood abuse.
Cognitive and neurological mechanisms that may underlie the forgetting of
abuse have been scientically identied.18
Relationships in Tatters
The person who has been abused in childhood is unable to weave his or
her relationships out of whole cloth. The bers of their personalities have
been torn. The ability of the abused to establish solid relationships remains
in tatters. Most times, victims do not understand why they cannot connect
with other people in meaningful ways. They beat themselves up by repeatedly
involving themselves in destructive liaisons. They become abusive in some
way to the friend with whom they wish to be close. Or they cling to a burdensome dependence, constructed but unresolved in their childhood. No one
can meet their needs because their needs are the decits of a childhood lost.
They are the phantom, wounded children in the skin of adequate-appearing
adults. They constantly disappoint and mystify themselves and everyone else
who could have meaning to them. Divorce, separations, alienation, antipathies, and hollowness mark the world they inhabit with family, friends, and
coworkers.
None So Isolated
The survivors of abuse have a lonely core that isolates them from themselves and everyone else. That core is unassailable because it is entrapped
in an unspoken and unimaginable secrecy. They cannot share it because the
secret is often hidden even from them. Even if they have memory traces,
they cannot put them together in any coherent way that will make sense to
anyone. And even if the memories are clear, indelibly burned into their mind
and heart, many men and women have no way to scale the wall of guilt and
shame that surrounds their childhood secrets.
Victims, in their isolation, think that they must be the only victim. Sealed
in their secrets, they are isolated from anyone they could hope might understand what they have been through. They do not understand themselves.
How can they believe what happened to them in secret when their experience
of their whole worldfamily, school, friends, churchappears so unaware
and oblivious of their darkness and trauma?
Survivors guard their secret even if it makes them ill. Unto death some
victims hug their secret because they promised to keep it. Some children
defend their abuser because the abuse is bound up with the promise of security and the feeling of being loved and special in spite of evidence to the
contrary.19
It takes victims of childhood sexual abuse years to straighten out their
trauma experience. The mixed feelings of premature excitement, guilt transferred from the aggressor, and the challenges of separating fantasies from
reality are tasks far beyond the ego capacity of most minors. It takes the
average victims of abuse 25 to 30 years to come to the realization that it was
not their fault. The guilt they feel is not rightfully theirs but the property
of the abuser. The anger they experience is justied. It takes time to learn
that they have rights and power even in the face of opposition from men and
institutions they once considered invincible and infallible.
10
Personalities Derailed
Perverted may seem to be a strong word to describe the effect on the personality development of young persons who have been sexually abused. But
the word is precise. Abuse twists the normal progression of personality
growth and development.
Over and above the distortions of perceptions and reactions that anxiety
and depression impose on the developing child, the behavior of a priest who
acts in ways that are socially abhorrent and morally wrong challenges the
childs conscience and judgment beyond reconcilable bounds. The clergyman
presents himself and is accepted as a public moral arbiter. Yet this civic and
religious leader draws the youngster into acts that are socially and morally
unacceptable and must remain hidden. The bond of secrecy forms a noose
that chokes maturing expression.
The association is essentially conicted and confusing. The child is seduced into a seemingly loving, secure relationship that actually separates him
or her from peers and family. The seducer grooms the child into a position
of specialness that makes age-appropriate friends and normal activities less
attractive and inaccessible.
What is real? What is pretense? Attention that seemed to be love and care
turns out to be selshness and exploitation.20 One who appeared to be giving and generous was actually self-seeking and hateful. The abusive bond of
childhood can become the model for adult interactions predisposing one to a
schizoidlike personality pattern of interaction.
One of the most complex personality distortions is what is now termed
the borderline personality. These people have a pervasive pattern of unstable
interpersonal relationships. They uctuate between idealizing and denigrating
others, often to the extreme. They are saddled with an unstable self-image.
They can mutilate themselves and threaten harm or suicide. They nd themselves in the middle of outrageous angry outbursts. They feel hollow; at
the same time, and perhaps because of their emptiness, they create havoc all
around them.
These people have been psychically injured during the earliest years of
their development. Their early basic insecurity makes them particularly vulnerable to multiple kinds of psychic and physical injuries as they grow up.
A childs conscience is formed not simply by education but by adult example,
experience, and relationships with others that have been meaningful to him
or her.
Self-Destruction
Suicide is the ultimate act of self-destruction, and there are untold numbers of men and women, violated as minors, who resort to this ultimate act
of desperation. But there are other behaviors of self-torture and slow death
11
that are the result of being sexually attacked and abused by a priest. Here are
some examples of the disastrous effects inicted on the abused:
Some persons cannot continue their studies because the injury to selfesteem is so fundamental that they simply are unable to muster the energy
or condence necessary to master tasks that are easily within their natural potential. Interference with education also limits earning potential.
Persons can plunge into the world of crime because the abuse makes
them feel that that is where they belong.
Unconscious guilt over their sexual involvement (abuse by a priest or
bishop) makes some victims feel that they are the ones who deserve punishment, so they unwittingly devise ways to defeat and humiliate themselves. They think they do not deserve success.
Some persons get caught in addictive self-medication to the degree that
they run afoul of family, work, and the law, and they impair their health
and life.
Some persons overdose, end up in fatal car accidents, contract incurable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, get themselves murdered without a
suicide note; their fate was sealed by their betrayal. They are completing what the abusive priest or bishop began: the death of their sense of
self-preservation.
PERSONALITY OF THE PRIEST PREDATOR

A man with any type of personality, certainly including psychotic, can sexually abuse a minor. Many abusers, even if they are clergymen, can be sociopaths and are decient in their quality of conscience. We used to call these
people sociopaths. It is still a good descriptive word, and it goes to the heart
of the priest with such a personality. (Now if a diagnostic term is used, that
person is identied an antisocial personality.)
People are usually loath to judge their minister antisocial because clergy
do so many good and helpful things in the ordinary services they provide.
Despite that seemingly mitigating circumstance, I prefer to understand
many priests and bishops by the word sociopath, a term that could be applied appropriately to a number of ctional clergymen; Elmer Gantry is an
example. It denes a person who fails to conform to lawful behaviors; he
is a man who is often impulsive, lacks remorse, lacks empathy because he
is adept at conning others for his own pleasure or prot; he feels entitled,
above the law; and he can have a reckless disregard for the safety and welfare
of others.21
Priest sexual abusers are con artists. They are pretenders. They often
offend in nancial ways also. The priesthood provides them with a mask of
moral rectitude and sanity. This personality type represents itself in every
12
rank of the priesthood and propagates itself in many ways, including through
violating young boys and girls who learn their lessons too well. The progeny
of these sociopath priests can express themselves in going on to abuse another generation of children or lie, steal, or cheat their way into prison or assume their own respectable masks to hide their real self, like their mentors.
Clergy pedophiles and abusers of minors prey on the vulnerable. Vulnerable families (the poor and dysfunctional), vulnerable circumstances (death
or illness), or the overly pious and dependent can provide opportunities for
clergy entr into the homes and lives of the trusting needy, making them
targets for abuse.
No one has yet proposed that there exists one set type of person or priest
who turns out to be an abuser of minors, and there is no test for predicting
who will become a sexual abuser of a minor. We have now, however, enough
experience with clergy abusers that clinicians are able to outline a sketch of
the priest who has abused.
He tends to be narcissistic; that is, he tends to have a sense of self-importance
and entitlement. He sees himself as special and tends to exploit others for his
own gratication. Because his needs and pleasure come rst, he lacks empathy for the feelings of others.
The priest predator is an angry man, often with the face of a calm and
gentle pastor.
Outward grace, supercial interaction, and social charm frequently cover
the isolation and friendlessness that an abuser feels. Of necessity (except
when predators ban together to share their sexual predilection), a child sexual abuser has to hide his activity and his real self.
Sometimes the abusing priest may have been abused himself, and not
rarely by a priest. The hidden life of the priest abuser requires that he split
his life into two parts: The acceptable and even exemplary public life has to
be separated from (and reconciled with) the socially reprehensible and morally defective secret life he pursues.
A priest frequently is a man torn. He struggles to make himself feel comfortable. Priests who profess celibacy publicly and are sexually active privately
know what they are doing. No matter how constrained or compelled, they
make a choice. They are doubling.22 Their priesthood, their way of life, and all
of the benets and security of their profession hang on their promise to be
celibate. If they publicly renounce celibacy, they lose everything. These men
try to adapt a celibate requirement with their irreconcilable sexual urges.
They pose good motives while participating in evil behavior.
Clerical rationalizations for being sexually active, even with minors, are
legion. Here are some justications I have heard, recited by men with a
straight face and a conviction that they really were celibate: I work hard
and I deserve it. Sex is natural. It doesnt hurt anybody. Im showing
Gods love. This child needs love. I loved him/her. I am giving good
13
instructions in sex. Priests are only human. Im only giving them what
they were asking for. She/he seduced me.
Because the darkness of the doubling cannot withstand the light of examination, the split priest often has to struggle with paranoid fears that he
will be found out. He has to isolate himself ever more carefully from adult
scrutiny and discovery.
Many bishops and priests, abusers or not, tend to minimize the effects of
sexual involvement with a clergyman. Whats the big deal? It was only
a touch. It happened just once. They had sex with others. They knew
what they were doing. Why cant they get over it? They should just forget
it. It was at least partially their fault. Christ stands for forgiveness. Why
cant they forgive? I have heard every one of these justications and more.
Sexual betrayal by a priest is rightfully called soul murder. Many bishops
and priests still miss the full signicance of this reality. They have cooperated in the process of abuse and selected and trained the perpetrators and
protected them precisely because they minimized the effects. By neglect and
inaction, church authorities justify priests betraying the trust of their people.
The church does not take celibacy or its violation seriously in action, only
in documents and words. In 1051, when Saint Peter Damian addressed Pope
Leo IX about the sexual violations by priests, he held superiors responsible
for the behavior and the harm done. He spoke a truth that prevails today.
There is no doubt that for decades bishops and religious superiors have
known about the sexual lives of bishops and priests and have covered up for
them and intimidated victims when they could. Volumes of court documents
indicate that cardinals and bishops lied and conspired to keep immoral and
criminal activity secret from the public to avoid scandal at all costs.
The irony of the scandal of sexual abuse by priests and bishops is that
secrecy was meant to save the church from scandal. Now people know the
scandal, and they can say it: Sexual abuse of minors by bishops and priests
men bound by a vocational requirement of perfect and perpetual chastity
and presented to the public as sexually safeis a major social and religious
problem. It is criminal.
WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING SEX,

CELIBACY, AND PRIESTS
The chapters in this book attempt to study celibacy, priests, and sexuality
through literature; we provide a few autobiographies, but we mostly search
for the help of ction: novels. Of course, this is not the ordinary way to study
these realities, but I claim that it provides a rich eld for understanding. The current crisis provides additional avenues for validation of creative observations.
We have already indicated that the crisis has forced us to turn to medical and psychological literature to deal with the conundrums about sex and
14
celibacy that face us. Journalistic accounts that record the voices of victims
and the churchs responses to celibate violations form a modern historical
reserve that undoubtedly will be tapped for literary expression for years
to come. Grand jury reports and the reports commissioned by the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops have already changed the general perception of sex and celibacy in the Catholic priesthood. A new history is being
written.
Three notable dramas that record this new perception have been produced
since 2002. Michael Murphy produced a play about the Boston crisisSin
(A Cardinal Deposed)that drew upon the testimony of Cardinal Law. Playwright, actor, director Dakin Matthews produced The Prince of LA; although
it is billed as ction, it echoes elements of the crisis from the California
church, and in the process it sketches an accurate and masterful portrayal of
the real working of the sexual power structure of the church. Doubt, a New
York production written by John Patrick Shanley, struggles with the perception of a nun that a boy is being abused and the denial of a priest that anything is awry. The play has been a commercial success, and it was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award in 2005.
When I began to study celibacy, I asked questions: What is it? How is it
practiced? How does a man develop a sexual identity without experience,
and how does he form a celibate identity with sexual experience? What is the
process of celibacy? And nally, what does achieved celibacy look like? With
the encouragement of Margaret Meade, I embarked on a voyage of ethnographic research.23 I have found that the quest provided a sturdy vessel, and it
resulted in a productive journey. Ethnography was compatible with the therapeutic model and the psychoanalytic theory I was familiar with at the time.
Sociological surveys that identify aspects of priests lives and celibate
practice have been conducted, and they do teach us something about the
clerical structure of celibacy.24 Sex remains a notoriously difcult area of
human behavior to research. Celibacy that is a life adjustment and by denition excludes any sexual activity poses daunting, if not insurmountable,
obstacles to standard means of investigation. For instance, random-sample
scientic surveys about priests happiness have been conducted, and they
produced the conclusion that priests are the happiest men in the country.
Of course, this says noting about how they are practicing celibacy. Without
the family obligations associated with marriage and with sexual activity of
choice available to a priest, the social and economic security and rewards
concomitant with being a priest can produce contentment, if not happiness,
for such men.25
Cinema has been a powerful element that prepared the U.S. public to think
the (Catholic) unthinkable: that priests can be sexually active. Mixed with
the stories of strong priestswho ght sin and evil, stand up to oppressors,
protect the poor, and sacrice themselves for their ock, celibate allwere
15
vignettes of less ideal clergy. Movies touched, however deftly, on problems of

clerical immaturity, masturbation, homosexuality, sexual abuse of women, or
conicted loving relationships, abuse of minors, and abortion.
The moviesthat particular U.S. medium that creates and reects image
at rst featured priests idealistically under the strict eye of Catholic censors.
More recent portrayals, however, have intimated at a spectrum beyond the
heroic.
Moviegoers witnessed the evolution of the Catholic priests public image
from immigrant protector and leader of small ethnic communities, predominantly Irish or Italian, to superstars and idols for millions to less honorable
and more pedestrian souls.
Midcentury 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
OBrien as Father Jerry in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Karl Malden as
Father Barry in On the Waterfront (1954), Anthony Quinn as the saintly Popeto-be Kiril Lakota in Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Robert De Niro as Father
Des Spellacy in True Confessions (1981).
Bing Crosby as Father OMalley 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 Churchs 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
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 a few years later (Monsignor, 1982).
The issue of sexual abuse and clergy was hinted at in two movies 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 English made-for-TV movie that made it to big-screen
theaters in the United States, sympathetically portrayed two priests, one heterosexual and one homosexual, both sexually active.
An 1875 novel, El Crimen del Padre Amaro, which portrays a young priest
who impregnates a young girl and arranges an abortion that leads to her
death, is retold in a 2003 Mexican movie of the same name. Two other
priests and the local bishop are interesting examples for the place of sex and
celibacy in their lives.
Pedro Almodvar released the Spanish movie Bad Education (La Mala
Educacin) in 2004. It was an outstanding portrayal of priest-teacher-abuser
16
who broke up the relationship of two young boys in order to have one of
them as his own sexual partner. Only a long review could begin to capture
the artistry and impact of this lm, which stands as an example of the future
possibilities of the narratives to be told about celibacy and its crisis.
Documentary lms recording the crisis have proliferated. Many of them
sported the title Sins of the Fathers. Amy Bergs movie Deliver Us From Evil,
the account of how a future cardinal (Roger Mahony) protected an abusive
priest (Oliver OGrady), was nominated for a Academy Award in 2007. The
degree of knowledge and awareness of priest and bishop abuse of minors
is so prominent that late-night comedians frequently allude to it, situation
comedies are built around it, and editorial cartoons are commonplace and
often scathing.
DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

NEED A REFORMATION?
Beyond the numbers, the atrocities of clergy sexual abuse against minors
are the tip of an iceberg. Sexual abuse denes 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.
A fair question is why the impetus for an as yet ill-dened reformation has
surfaced now and primarily in the United States. After all, sex is universal.
The sexual offenses 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 at which the numbers of
responsible priests ministering can no longer balance the number of offending priests. The John Jay study of the crisis in the U.S. (2004) records that
between 9 and 11 percent of priests abused minors in the years 1960 to 1985.
Of the priests serving in 1983 who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior, 11.5 percent of them were serving in the archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The best estimates state that each abusive priest has between ten and fty
victims. In addition, during the twentieth century, Catholic priests became
familiar and prominent on the U.S. horizon. They no longer operated under
the radar of public scrutiny. In fact, the church sought an ever-higher public
prole to match its growing inuence. These factors conditioned the U.S.
public to consider priests through bifurcated lenses. First, priests were accorded greater respect and even reverence, more so than ever before even in
so-called Protestant America. But also, priests were judged in an ever more
realistic light against U.S. democratic principles.
U.S. legislation defending the rights of children proliferated from the
1960s onward. This element prepared the U.S. public to face the problem of
sexual abuse of minors more directly than it had in the past. Reporting laws
17
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. Since the crisis exploded, more states include priests
and ministers as mandated reporters.
In 1994, when he was asked why Rome had not helped the U.S. bishops in
the sex abuse crisis, a long-time staff member of one of the congregations of
the Vatican stated: The Vatican cannot understand why the American Bishops cant control the courts and the media better. The U.S. hierarchy, indeed,
has desperately tried to control the courts and the media, and it still does to
a degree. Coordinated efforts from the central ofces of bishops in Washington, DC, aimed a counterattack in the 1990s on any news story about priests
who were abusing minors. They dismissed all reports as 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 will ultimately fail because documentation and an
informed public have tipped the balance. Many 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 ght furiously to exonerate abusing
priests and to justify the involvement of bishops and dioceses in the crisis.
Statutes of limitation have saved thousands of priestsbut not allfrom
serving jail time. Civil suits have proliferated beyond count.
The United States has a highly rened tort system that has made civil litigation more possible than in European countries. High-prole, high-stakes
jury awards and cash settlements in favor of victims sobered church ofcials: $32.5 million payout ($119.6 million jury award) for 11 victims in Dallas, Texas (1997); $7.5 million payout ($32 million jury award) for 2 victims
in Stockton, California (1998); $5 million plus payment to 1 victim in Los
Angeles/Orange County, California (2001). All of these settlements were
awarded before January 2002. Since then, several dioceses have made group
settlements: Orange County, California, $100 million; Boston, $85 million;
Louisville, Kentucky, $25.7 million; $660 million in Los Angeles (2007). Five
dioceses led for bankruptcy protection by 2007.
Awareness of the depth of the crisis has evolved slowly. But even the
highest church authorities now relinquish some measure of denial because
cardinals and bishops are no longer immune from depositions and court appearances. Previously unheard of in U.S. history until this time, cardinals and
bishops have now suffered the indignity of becoming targets of grand jury
investigations.
18
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
churchs sexual assumptions. Reformation is inevitable.
Beyond the symptom of sexual abuse by clergy is the threat to the problematic equation on which all of the churchs 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.
THE EXPOSURE OF A PROBLEMATIC EQUATION

Two questions must be addressed: What factors laid the foundations for
the climate of reformation? And what does religious celibacy, which affects
only clerics, have to do with the disruption of the faith and condence of
millions of faithful who practice their religion for the most part within marriage? Central to my understanding of the present crisis is the disintegration
of the myth that priest and celibacy are an identical and inseparable reality.
Three superstar U.S. priests of the twentieth century sold the priest-celibate
image to millions of Americans at the same time that they conditioned the
Catholic faithful for reformation.
Father Charles E. Coughlin, his celibacy unquestioned in the public mind,
championed the links between religion, social justice, and democracy. Despite
his obnoxious anti-Semitism, which was 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 such as 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 gures. No U.S. priest
has been more inuential 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 has attacked the problem of sexual abuse by priests, and
he has chided the bishops for dragging their feet as well as for their cover-up
of the problem.
Greeley is himself a champion of clerical celibacy, but at the same time he
introduced a generation of Catholics to ctional churchmen, including cardinals and Vatican ofcials, who were believable and sexually active. Although
19
other writers have dealt with the same subjects, Greeleys stature as a priest
and sociologist added a dimension of authenticity.
The practice of clerical celibacy remains largely ill dened and unexamined in practical terms. It has long been the sacred cow of the Catholic
Church. Supposedly irrefutable, it remains unquestionable and unexamined
by church standards. Only idealistic reections or arcane reafrming and
defensive treatises are tolerated and considered authentic.
Despite the monolithic defense of the law of clerical celibacy by the Catholic Church, the very word has lacked sufcient denition and distinction to
make meaningful dialogue possible. Is celibacy a religious ideal, or is it an
image? Is it a vow or a promise? Is it a regulation necessary for ordination to
the clerical ofce? Is it a state of nonmarriage or singleness whether 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 person 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 deciency 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 benets 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 last question is a no-brainer when applied to the legal profession.
But the reality of the social signicance is mostly ignored when one considers the Roman Catholic priesthood. Clerical celibacy does constitute a culture, a fraternity, with social standing, an ethos, and ethical expectations and
a mode of operation inherently wedded to secrecy. It is a culture with practical worldwide repercussions.
More critically, celibacy is a system. This system, with its sexual/celibate 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 sexual/celibate agenda of the Roman Catholic Church includes the
questions of masturbation, premarital sexual activity, sexual activity after
the death of a spouse or after divorce, contraception, homosexuality, abortion, the requirement of nonmarriage, perfect and perpetual chastity for
20
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 condence
in the authority of the church and expose it to ever-greater disdain for its
hypocrisy.
All of the elements of the celibacy crisis have been presented in literature for centuries, even if in less dramatic doses than the current climate
sustains. It is precisely the public glimpse into the hypocrisy of the secret,
sexually active, celibate system revealed in the priest sexual-abuse crisis that
has inspired an unprecedented degree of rage against the hierarchy of the
church and mobilized historic demands for accountability, transparency, and
reform.
CHAPTER
G ANDHI AND F RIENDS :

T HE S EXUAL /C ELIBATE
T WAIN M EET
I hold that a life of perfect continence in thought, speech, and action is necessary for reaching spiritual perfection. And a nation
that does not possess such men is poorer for the want. Purity of
life is the highest and truest art.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Sexual self-revelation is rare. Three popular twentieth-century male religious guresMohandas K. Gandhi,1 Fulton J. Sheen,2 and Andrew M.
Greeley3have written autobiographical accounts of their celibacy.
These three witnesses to their celibate calling share a signicant commonality: They were all highly visible public gures. Gandhis testimony,
however, is unique among the rare confessions of celibacy in literature, and
Gandhi reveals the process of his celibate discovery and development more
clearly than any other religious writer, including Saint Augustine.
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, Greeleys is the most likelyand the most calculatedto engage contemporary U.S. readers through its likable eccentricity. He employs
a matter-of-factness, and he atters his intended reader. He enjoys certain
22
advantages in the freeness with which he can fashion his rhetoric because he
is not an ofcial spokesperson for an institutional status quo.
Fulton Sheen, Greeleys fellow Catholic, was constrained by his social position to employ the prophetic voice to express a predictable coda.
Gandhi has the disadvantageor the mystiqueof being from another
culture and time. He was born a quarter-century before Sheen (and Coughlin), and he had a uniquely popular reception horizon. He remains intriguing
for his unapologetically unconventional thinking. Gandhi can, in turn, be
infuriating, unpredictable, andmost powerfullyunromantically honest.
Each of these three gures teaches us something idiosyncratic, and yet all
expose some common underpinnings of celibate life.
Not surprisingly, Gandhis Experiments with Truth, as he termed the course
of his life, expresses the most clearly of the 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.
Gandhis 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 anticolonial movement.
The awareness of conicting inuences 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 inuence of Raychandbhai4 as the predominant factor in his decision
to observe brahmacharya (celibacy). Raychandbhai was a prominent poet
who, although married, was evidently practicing celibacy.
It is noteworthy that Gandhis initial inspiration to become celibate was accompanied by a discussion of the relative value of a wifes devotion versus that
of a servant. Gandhi felt that 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 wifes devotion to her husband. Therefore, he
considered a wifes devotion as perfectly natural and expected, whereas equal
devotion between master and servant required a special effort to cultivate.
Gandhi and Friends
23
There is more to Gandhis discourse than at rst meets the eye. Arguably, both forms of devotion are the result of a social cultivation stemming
from class and gender oppression.5 There was, however, a two-pronged psychological signicance 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 enthusiasma thousand times more praiseworthy
reects an attitude required to offset the sense of loss and grief, reminiscent
of Saint Augustines, 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 to
which Gandhisand to some extent Sheens and Greeleyscelibate decision gives rise: Does male celibate intention require the demotion or denigration of women to support its own resolve?
The second prong of Gandhis argument is also signicant. 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 Gandhis
Hindu culture that anthropologist Louis Dumont calls, Homo hierarchicus.6
Still, it must be kept in mind that Gandhi was also the product of England
and its culture, one in which the importance of the master-servant relationship was a prominent sentimental motif of British literature. This masterservant motif is linked to a world of male-male bonding in literature in which
antisex and antifemale biases persist.7 Consider, for instance, the sexless, misogynist, and avuncular world of the Hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkiens Lord of the
Rings trilogy.8 Tolkiens Middle Earth is dominated by the sentimental masterservant relationship of Frodo and Sam.
In his essay The Knight Sets Forth,9 Erich Auerbach observed the signicance of the connection between male-male bonding, master-servant delity, and avuncular kinship in adventure genre, on the one hand, and, on the
other, male celibacy in the Grail quest genre of romantic literature and real
spiritual vocation.
Again, without bias, the reader must carefully consider the relationship of
celibacy to male-male bonding. It would be supercial to dismiss the question simply as a homosexual concern. Understanding the connections in
these literary expressions has implications for understanding the celibate
ideal, resistance to democratization, and womens rights in both Western
culture and the Catholic 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 and knowledge of the process, practice, and commitment. Both before and after his formulation of intention, Gandhis awareness of his capacity for celibacythat
24
is, his capacity to live a life of service capable of balancing the deprivations of
personal celibacyexpressed itself in a longing for some humanitarian work
of a permanent nature.
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 ve years after he began
practicing it; the vow was crucial in establishing his commitment to the celibate life.
Gandhis greatest signicance 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, such as George Orwell10 and some of Gandhis Hindu
contemporaries interviewed by Erik Erikson,11 had reservations about the
level of Gandhis achievement and integration of celibacy, even though
Gandhis service of humanity speaks eloquently to his internal achievement.
These critics believed that there was a bit of showmanship and dissimulation
in his physical closeness in his old age to young virgins to prove his selfcontrol. Orwell, like Dorothy Day, held that the label saint, so often applied
to Gandhi, was a facile dismissal of a persons message and a thing human
beings must avoid.
A series of signicant characteristicsalong with service and the acceptance of all humanitymarks 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
denitely 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.
Gandhis 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 inexibility 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 dictate the proper sexual life
of both the celibate and the noncelibate, 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 psychobiological constitution, locked Gandhi
into a sexual rigidity from which he seems never to have been able to free
himself.
Gandhi and Friends
25
Even before his vocation, Gandhi was committed to an archaic model of

human sexuality, one similar to that threatening to undermine the credibility
of the sexual teachings of the contemporary Catholic Church. Gandhi, who
had engaged prostitutes from the time he was 13, felt that a married couple
should never have sex out of lust12 but rather only to conceive progeny. He
had contempt for the idea that sex was a necessary act like sleeping or eating,
and he felt that lust should be controlled at any cost.
To be sure, an archaic view of sexuality is at least as culturally and historically inuenced as it is psychologically generated. Nevertheless, Gandhi
was aware of alternatives. He had read about contraceptives and, considering the Reverend Mr. Hills 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 rectied 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 Saint Paul or John Cassian,13 who 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.
Signicantly, the passion of Gandhis asceticism was matched by his intolerance, even contempt, for the noncelibate, 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 noncelibate, which is frankly absurd. Gandhi taught
that there was a profound dividing line between the celibate and the noncelibate that was clearly apparent and that any resemblance between the
two was an illusion. Although both had eyes and ears, the celibate used his
to see and hear the glory and praises of God, whereas the noncelibate used
his for frivolity and ribaldry. The celibate stayed up late to pray, whereas
the noncelibate frittered his time in useless amusement. Naturally, Gandhi
extended his diatribe to a comparison with eating: The celibate did so to
maintain the temple of the spirit, the other to gorge himself and to make the
sacred vessel a stinking gutter. Gandhi maintained that the situation only
worsens with time.
26
In his Elmer Gantry-like diatribe, Gandhi swept aside precisely the ground
upon which celibate and noncelibate can come to understand and support
each other: 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
that excluded and denigrated Orwells 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
caused pain. He judged that nonattachment was an escape, and he refused to
argue the relative value of spiritual versus humanistic ideals. He concluded
that they were incompatible. The choice between God and man was settled.
Orwell chose man.14
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
developingor even maturesingle person. In their dilemma, many young
people reject all religion. Beyond that, they fail to see any connection between rejecting sex and serving humanity, an ideal that is still vibrant for
many young people.
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
worldthose who follow their ethical and humanitarian vocation according
to noncelibate or secular modelswith the Gandhisthose who dene 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.15
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.
CHAPTER
I RISH A MERICAN P RIESTS :

T HE R OAD FROM H ERO TO H UMAN
Man defending the honor or welfare of his ethnic group is a man

defending himself.
Milton M. Gordon
American Catholicism has been largely fashioned in the image and likeness of
Irish Catholic culture. In 1970, 52 percent of all active priests in the United
States were Irish Americans, 73 percent of all bishops, and ve of six archbishops were Irish American at a time when only 17 percent of the Catholic
population was of Irish descent.
Even though the twenty-rst century Irish and U.S. Catholic Churches
have experienced an unprecedented rupture of their indigenous clergy population and an inux of priests from a mixture of foreign countriesIndia,
Africa, China, Vietnam, South America, and Poland among themthe structure of the Catholic Church in the United States remains branded with the
stamp of Ireland. It is remarkable, but not surprising, how Catholicism in
both countries has been similarly devastated by the clergy sex abuse crisis
between 1995 and 2007.
The image of the priest and the presumption of celibacy, or the doubt of it,
are intimately interwoven in public consciousness. In the twentieth-century
United States, we note here ve of those Irish American priests who 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 a chaplain during World War I. His consistent self-sacrice and
indifference to risking his life ministering to the men of his Irish American
28
unit, the Fighting 69th, gained him their unswerving devotion and, in time,
nationwide fame. A statue of him stands in Duffy Square, just north of Times
Square in New York City. 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 puritysexual abstinenceusing 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 1917, Father Edward Flanagan won worldwide fame, admiration across all religious divides, and immense nancial 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 aint heavy, Father. Hes my brother, worked its
way into U.S. 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 OBrien brought Father Duffy to similar fame in the successful 1939 movie The Fighting 69th. Father Duffys statue still stands, and Father Flanagans Boys Town continues its work into the twenty-rst century.
Three other U.S. priests have achieved the status of media stardom on
their own. In the 1930s, the Reverend Charles Coughlin used his melliuous voice, a voice made for promises, to attract an audience of 40 million
enthralled listeners to his radio broadcasts. He was a priest who would be
heard.
In the 1950s, Reverend-Monsignor-Bishop Fulton J. 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 been rivaled only
by the likes of Paul Newman. He was a priest who would be seen.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Father Andrew M. 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.
Although 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
U.S. society at large.
Irish American Priests
29
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 a discussion of sexuality and celibacy as
well as 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 of
these priests gave their followers permission to rene 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 and men like
any other soldier. 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 antiheroes, too.
Father Flanagan gave the priest a human heart, even though it was supersize. 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. Each of these Irish American priests has
had a remarkable inuence on the development of the twentieth-century U.S.
image of priests, celibacy, and the Roman Catholic Church.
A reection on the life work of three U.S. priestsCharles E. Coughlin,
Fulton J. Sheen, and Andrew M. Greeleyand making a critical analysis of
the autobiographical accounts of Sheen and Greeley have helped exploration
of the reality of religious celibacy and the understanding of the system of
which it is a part.
Although the tradition of religious celibacy is long, the list of autobiographical accounts is short indeed. Many revere Jesus Christ as a lifelong
celibate, yet there is no scriptural evidence to disclose whether this was so.
The astounding popularity of Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code feeds on a deep
and unarticulated doubt about Jesuss celibacy. That doubt is ancient but consistently discounted by dominant Catholic power and tradition. Perhaps there
is divine wisdom in Scriptures silence on Christs sexual/celibate integration.
Saint Augustine, for all of 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 autobiographical apostles of celibacyGandhi,
Sheen, and Greeleyis admirable for offering his testimony, necessarily
30
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 conict along the road to the perfect and perpetual continence demanded by canon law for inclusion into the priestly caste.
Sheen avoids a radically honest self-analysis, and he 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 cover
a deciency, an intolerance verging on scapegoating. Even Gandhi, whose
honesty and service to humanity outshone both Sheens and Greeleys, nonetheless fostered 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
humanityis the result of the public nature of both their witness and their
vocation, the demands of their positions of power. Perhaps celibacy can be
achieved fully only beyond the sphere of mass culture; perhaps it can nd
its testimony only 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 noncelibate 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 deep
religious signicance.
The reality of celibacy, with all of 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. Our goal is to contribute to a deeper understanding of celibacy
and to foster the development of a more adequate vocabulary for discourse.
Dialogue is essential because 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 nonsex. The time bomb that has
been ticking for centuries is religions unresolved issues of human sexuality
and religious celibacy.
Years of exploration have convinced me that celibacy is not just an incidental facet of Catholicism. Celibacys imageits faceis not just another
face in the crowd. Like the face of Helen that launched a thousand ships,
celibacy has inspired men to heroic deeds in the name of love, and it has
been capable of violent repression and destruction of human lives. It still
has the capacity to inspire saints to seless service. Celibate failure and
hypocrisy, as in the past, still have the potential to ignite revolutions and
reformations.
Irish American Priests
31
The reformation that is currently upon the Catholic Church owes its
energy and driving force to the failure of the sexual/celibate system of the
Roman Catholic Churchepitomized by priests and bishops who sexually
abuse minorsand its inability to convince lay people that it has anything
meaningful to say about their sexual lives. Celibacys faithful portrait is
painted in literature and its history written boldly in the lives of priests. Let
us explore.
CHAPTER
T HE R ADIO P RIEST :
C HARLES E. C OUGHLIN
The representation of delement dwells in the half-light of a quasiphysical infection that points toward a quasi-moral unworthiness.
Paul Ricoeur
In 1930, Father Charles Edward Coughlin was the voice of the Catholic
Church for many U.S. families. Father Andrew Greeley records a warm
memory from his childhood home: Sunday dinners, with his family 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 U.S. dinner
tables.
In truth, Coughlin was not a personal champion of celibacyhis practice
has been severely compromised by historybut that made no difference
in his public portrayal and reception. He was a priest. In the mind of his public, he had to be celibate.
Father Coughlins fame was real in the 1930s; his tarnished reputation
endures. His message of social justice and his legacy of organizing labor
have been mixed with delement. His celibate practice was imperfect. Unlike
Sheen and Greeley, who both have written about celibacy in their autobiographies, traces of Coughlins sexual/celibate adjustment have been pieced
together from his school history, court records, and, most prominently, from
the les of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with observations
from his friend and parishioner, psychoanalyst Leo H. Bartemeier.
The Radio Priest
33
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,
which 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-rst 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 nations greatest menace, and free enterprise, if left alone, would
provide jobs for everyone. . . . And nally, of course, business should run
the country.2
The loudest voices in the 1920s belonged to advertising, public relations,

and boosterism. Successful writers such as Ernest Elmo Calkins proclaimed
that business was the worlds greatest benefactor, and columnist Walter
Lippmann agreed:
[T]he 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 in which 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
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 felt keenly.6
After the stock market crashed on October 23, 1929, the attitude and atmosphere in the United States changed dramatically. The ordinary people
who had bought shares of stock on margin were sold out, and so were those
34
who had banked their money. The Bank of the United States, for example,
which catered to poor immigrants, engaged in speculation; when the market
collapsed, the bank ofcers passed their losses on to the depositors. The bank
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 $3 billion. Retail sales fell, merchants went bankrupt, and sales and production
workers were laid off in increasing numbers. One insurance company reported that 23.8 percent of its policyholders in 46 large cities were unemployed in December 1930. Even though 76.2 percent of workers remained
employed, the spectacle of 1 million people riding the rods and living in
so-called Hoovervilles caused deep anxiety in a people who had expected
prosperity to be a permanent part of their lives. Even in 1938, more than
10 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 Coughlin was born on October 25, 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada, the son of a third-generation Irish American family that had originally settled in Indiana. When Charles was a child, his father, Thomas, worked
as a sexton at Saint Marys 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, he never looked back.
Amelia rst dressed her son in girls clothes and allowed his hair to grow
in long curls; she even sent him to his rst day of school in a kilt. Whatever
the mothers motivation in cross-gender dressing (Ernest Hemingway was
subjected to similar treatment), it did little to curb the young Coughlins natural aggression. There are accounts of him roughhousing with his friends,
yelling loudly, and ripping his clothes in minor scufes in the streets. Distinct
from Sheen or Greeley, Coughlin was a natural athlete; his aggression found
an outlet in rugged sports: rugby, football, and baseball.8
After grammar school at Saint Marys, Coughlin attended Saint Michaels
College in Toronto. Saint Michaels was a minor seminarya boarding high
schoolthat prepared students for the priesthood. Like Greeley and Sheen,
Coughlin proved himself to be 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.
The Radio Priest
35
After graduation, Coughlin enrolled in Saint Basils Seminary. Priests of

the order of Saint Basil the Great (known for scholarship) conducted Saint
Michaels and Saint Basils. Coughlin joined this religious group and was
ordained a priest on June 29, 1916. After ordination until 1923, he taught
English, history, Greek, and he 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 Basilians had been interrupted by
a brief and unexplained exile for a year to one of the orders high schools in
Waco, Texas, where he taught philosophy and coached baseball. Another piece
of the mystery in Coughlins career was that his relationship with the Basilians
was completely severed in 1923 when he joined the Archdiocese of Detroit.
As a diocesan priest, Coughlin served as assistant to pastors, rst 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. Few parishioners and limited nancial support coexisted with an additional obstacle to the development of a new Catholic parish: The resurgent Ku Klux Klan, with its nativist and anti-Catholic
agenda, had an active chapter in the neighborhood.
Nevertheless, one of Coughlins rst acts on his arrival was to build a new
church. This new structure, the Shrine of the Little Flower, with a seating
capacity of 600, was much too large for the 32 Catholic families in the parish. But Coughlin led his parish to growth and prosperity even in the direst
days of the Great Depression. He not only lled the pews and paid for his
rst church, he also built a larger, architecturally notable round church with
the altar situated in the center. Coughlin remained in Royal Oak for 53 years
until his death on October 27, 1979.
All of this would constitute an unremarkable biography of a suburban
parish priest were it not for the extraordinary power, inuence, and, ultimately, 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 nance his new
parish, and he reaped almost immediate results. Even in the rst weeks after
his broadcasts began, people started to ock to his parish masses; mail was
sent to him in the rst 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 nationwide over the CBS network. His reputation
spread, the mail sacks multiplied, and the contributions kept coming in.
36
Part of the key to Coughlins 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.
Frank Sheed who listened regularly to Coughlin described a voice of such
mellow richness, such manly, heart-warming, condential intimacy, such
emotional and integrating charm, that anyone tuning past it on the radio
dial almost automatically turned back 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 transmogried 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 teachingthe proponents of birth control and abortionCoughlins
voice was pastoral, nonpolitical, and noncontroversial.
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.
What were the reasons for the shift? By this time, Coughlin had achieved
acceptance, even wide popularity, and a degree of nancial success. His mailbox 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 businessfor example, his superior Bishop Gallagher and Henry
Fordbegan 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, an understanding of social encyclicals and Catholic teaching on the
rights of the working class, the disposition of an activist, and now he had the
power base.
In 1930, Coughlin knew that a large segment of the U.S. 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 40 million Americans would
listen.12
Although Coughlins political message was vague at rst, and his focus
was 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 condence but
The Radio Priest
37
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 redene the structure and goals of American society at home.13
In his early political broadcasts, he lamented the economic condition of the
countrymillions of homes in the United States without adequate water,
plumbing, electricity, and heatbut he did not propose an alternative.
Even in his exploratory attempts to help his audience nd some understanding of their dilemmas and to dene solutions for them, Coughlin generated emotion against an ever-widening circle of enemies. Communistsof
the Bolshevik, intellectual, Jewish varietywere a frequent early target. The
Left spoke for the most hopeless in the United States, 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 also
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

Coughlins attacks on Bolshevism were political and economic, in contrast
to Sheens 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 terried of Communism, which they associated with the violent overthrow of the government
to be followed by the conscation of private property, so-called race mixing,
atheism, free love, and the destruction of the family.
Birth control was a consistent object of Coughlins attacks, but because
there were few effective methods in the 1930s, that subject was tolerated as
appropriately Catholic, and it did not raise great controversy.
Negative reactions and controversy erupted immediately when Coughlin
began to attack the power system: bankers, businessmen, international nanciers, and U.S. capitalism generally. He blamed the economic power brokers
for the social plight of the poor. Wall Street was the villain.
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
38
traumatic experience saw millions of Americans under arms for the rst
time in fty yearsmore than 100,000 of them died and 200,000 wounded,
gassed, or shell-shocked. Moreover, the war stimulated enormous changes
in society, including the overproduction of goods, the change in the status of
women, and the place of racial minorities in the workforce. Coughlins choice
of World War I as a starting point for the economic troubles of the 1930s
thus made good rhetorical sense.
With moral indignation, Coughlin broadened the scope of his inquiry into
the causes of the Depression to include the underlying conditions of class
division and distribution of wealth. Coughlin was able to steal some of the
Communists thunder by rst citingand then denyingthe reality of government overproduction to supply goods for Europes war as a cause of U.S.
unemployment. His references to Wall Street bankers and foreign interests
are clear harbingers of the scapegoating that would soon poison his 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 benets. Coughlins words thus
offered something to everyone at a minimal cost.
Although Coughlins political economy was decient, his demagoguery was
masterful. Without a doubt, Coughlin was having a political impact. He was
an important factor in the rst presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt
(FDR) and in rallying support for the New Deal. He was a principal in the
formation of the United Auto Workers and inuential in recruiting their
membership. He taught and propagated the signicant 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 and social activist, and he was a star.
By 1934, Coughlin was a power broker. He had been a house guest at
Campobello, Roosevelts family home, before the presidential election; received a personal invitation to FDRs inauguration; could attract as many as
twenty thousand people to a rally at New Yorks Hippodrome; and inspired
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 75 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.
Coughlins attacks on his so-called enemies became more frequent, direct, and shrill. His violence always tended to be directed against certain
well-dened groups: Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, African Americans,
The Radio Priest
39
bankers and nanciers, the British government, the Roosevelt administration, andespeciallythe Jews.
Coughlins choice of these groups appears puzzling at rst glance: He
attacked both the Klan and African Americans, both nanciers and Communists. And Jews included, in the 1930s, both Lord Rothschild and Leon
Trotsky. Coughlins 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 denitive break with
FDR and the New Deal, it was also 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.
Coughlins 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. Coughlins voice still had power,
but it was becoming more disaffecting and less winning.16
Coughlins tone turned bitter as his persona transformed from presidential advisor and New Deal promoter to demagogue. Coughlins support and
followers decreased in proportion to his exaggerated attacks and criticisms
of the president. The caliber and quality of Coughlins supporters also shifted
dramatically from his rst distressed but hopeful radio audience. They now
became a rabble.
In mid-1938, Social Justice announced the formation of the Christian Front,
which 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 Coughlins Brownshirts.18 There is no doubt that
Coughlin provided the ideological and inspirational foundation for the Christian Front, even though an FBI investigation into a 1940 armed conspiracy
attempt by a New York chapter could not prove his direct involvement.
40
Protected by his priesthood, Coughlin could play it both ways. He could

orchestrate mass demonstrations without appearing to have actual responsibility for any hateful outcome. A vignette from a Farrell novel serves as a
more accurate description of his modus operandi than does any journalistic
account. The scene is a rally; the priest speaks:
They didnt 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 yells, accompanying his words with ourishing gestures. The audience roars in agreement. As the applause dies down, a stout
woman with a pudgy face cries out, Name them!
My fellow Christians, I dont have to name them, the speaker replies,
smiling unctuously. A lean woman, whose face is beginning to crack with
wrinkles, jumps to her feet. Ill name them! She shrieks in a shrill, highpitched voice. Ill name them! The dirty Jews! 19
The ction of James T. Farrell also offers an enlightening contrast between

Coughlins early followers and his later ones. Thinly disguised as Father
Moylan, Coughlin is the subject of a street-corner discussion by the sons of
Chicagos middle class in 1930. They conclude, Theres a man for you. Boy,
what Father Moylan doesnt say about bankers, and the Reds, too.20
In a later work, Tommy Gallaghers Crusade, Father Moylans xenophobic
and anti-Semitic diatribes no longer interest ordinary well-adjusted youth.
Only guys like Tommy, the maladjusted loner, chronically unemployed, a heavy
drinker, and harboring hate for Jews and an admiration for Hitler, respond to
Moylans message. Farrells ction showswith a power and precision that escape historical descriptionhow Coughlins changing persona rst attracted,
then alienated, the disaffected U.S. middle class and how at last Coughlin
claimed only the weakest and most desperate.21 The ctional portrait of the
priest turns out to be more revealing and accurate than the priest in real life.
Fanatics had now replaced many of Coughlins 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 spring 1942, the postmaster
general refused to allow Social Justice to be mailed; even Coughlins 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 30 years, from 1942 until 1972, Coughlins voice was conned to
the pulpit of his parish church. In Coughlins 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.
The Radio Priest
41
FASCINATING MYSTERY
Father Andrew Greeley claims that priests are among the most fascinating men in the world and that it is their celibacy that 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--vis a veritable
leviathan.
The priest is an organization man even more fully than any corporate
executive or military ofcer. Theologically, he is another Christ; his commission is eternal. He holds the authority to forgive sins. There is a party line
he is expected to support. All of this and more are 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 in which 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, even though many bishops, arguably most, were not
antibusiness, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or Fascist, never successfully curtailed
Coughlins mission and message. Of course, those elements were not the sum
and substance of Coughlins teaching. He did promote social justice and workers rights. There was enough ambiguity and support of Catholic teaching in
his message and sufcient support of his thinking in high places to save him
from ofcial censure.
Coughlin did receive criticism for his political involvement. After his rst
mutterings in 1930, William Cardinal OConnell of Boston openly objected,
but his opposition was to a priest speaking about politics at all rather than a
rejection of specic 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, soon after he arrived made repeated
efforts to silence Coughlin. That autumn, when Coughlin attacked the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for supposed Communism and antiChristianity, Mooney rebuked him. Coughlin knew that Mooney wished to
censor his broadcasts; Coughlins response was to cancel his radio program
and appeal to the popes 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 nally reached the Pope,
42
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 action garnered him support from some
unexpected quarters, including some church liberals. Father John A. Ryan,
who was professor of theology at Catholic University and one of the most
prominent and inuential 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 U.S. church and in Rome during the
1930s to tolerate, and even support, Coughlins preaching. In 1938, an Irish
priest, Denis Fahey, published a book entitled 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.
Coughlins anti-Semitism was at its most vocal when he discovered Faheys
theology of history. Coughlin was inspired by yet another theologian to
justify and reinfuse twentieth-century scientic anti-Semitism with longstanding medieval religious prejudice.
Was Coughlin a Fascist? Coughlins economic programprivate ownership, but the means of production rigidly controlled by governmentwas
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. Coughlins antiSemitism dovetailed with the Nazi program.
Certainly, Coughlin never described himself as Fascist, and he never used
the term in connection with the National Union for Social Justice, although
he did endorse so-called 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 vilication of certain groups, including the Jews, to build a
U.S. radical political movement that he would control. If Coughlin was not
an actual Fascist, he was so close that 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
outright endorsement in the Vatican. Fascism had been seen as a bulwark
against Communism and other enemies of religion and a protector of the
churchs 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 churchto maintain
The Radio Priest
43
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 signicant and substantial means of independent
nancial 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.
COUGHLINS SECRET WORLD

Coughlin, like every Roman Catholic priest, was required to make a lifelong promise of celibacy before 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, and he left a considerable paper trail in his FBI le.
Coughlin biographer Sheldon Marcus cites several well-known accusations against the priest. 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
Bnai Brith.
Coughlins mysterious conicts within the Basiliansthe interruption of
his theological studies and his unexplained departure from the ordercould
have been the result of this incident or others like it. 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
Gariepys wife.29
In more than seven hundred pages of FBI les that we obtained under
the Freedom of Information Act, there are several references to Coughlins
sexual indiscretions. One tantalizing le 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. The note claimed
that they listened to German propaganda every day at the Waldorf-Astoria
in New York. 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 partieswine,
women, and. . . . 30
44
When the FBI anonymous informant wrote wine, women, and . . . , it is

clear that his ellipses referred not to song but to homosexual encounters.31
The reports put Coughlin in the social company of the homosexual elite:
Cole Porter, W. Somerset Maugham, and Nol Coward.32
Moreover, Coughlin did in fact sometimes travel under assumed names;
in 1937, he journeyed incognito to England and Europe. A letter from the
assistant executive ofcer of military intelligence to FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover reports that Coughlin visited Jackson, Mississippi, under the name
Eddie Burke.33
After 1942, all of the FBI entries about Coughlin concentrate on his sexual life. A memorandum dated April 15, 1942, from J. Edgar Hoover to Clyde
Tolson, his assistant and close friend, cites a condential source: Father
Coughlin at the present time was being treated by a reputable Detroit psychiatrist for certain sexual difculties. 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 ew in all directions. One operative reported to Hoover: [A] condential source [name
deleted] told me that Father Coughlin was known to be a man of very unsavory repute; Reverend [name deleted] . . . had investigated Coughlin; . . . has
proof that Father Coughlin has a mistress. . . . It is [sources] understanding
that Reverend [name deleted] presented his evidence to some of the leaders
of the church but that no action was taken.35
The FBI went to a great deal of trouble to probe these allegations. They
conducted interviews in Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, DC; and
Boston. Obviously, the FBI and the Ofce of the Attorney General considered the source of the information credible enough to give him at least three
extended interviews.
Can one guarantee the trustworthiness of anonymous and secret letters
and FBI les? Hoover was out to curtail Coughlins activity. It is clear that
Hoover and some of his top aides took pains to investigate Coughlin, and
they wrote reports clearly reecting some knowledge of the goings-on in the
Waldorf-Astoria and of Coughlins 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
Coughlins Oak Park parish. Even in the days before 1930, Bess Bartemeier
often 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 Coughlins death, Bartemeier revealed the key to Coughlins thirtyyear silence. It was not the threat of lawsuits by the U.S. attorney general,
which were real but not daunting to Coughlin; he bragged he had better
lawyers. Nor was it sudden obedience to his bishop, whom he had successfully
The Radio Priest
45
deed for several years. That cover story was circulated in May 1942 by
church authorities to explain Coughlins retreat from public view.
Coughlin felt the effects of a voice more powerful than his own magnicent one. It was a voice that silenced Coughlins in any public forum, on any
subject, and shackled him to his parish pulpit as long as that voice survived.
It was that of J. Edgar Hoover, who delivered a personal threat to Coughlin
by phone on a February 1942 Sunday morning after Mass, at the same time
trucks from the Ofce of the Attorney General were being loaded with les
of Social Justice and all of Coughlins other operations for transport to Washington, DC.
Coughlin rushed in a panic to the Bartemeier home to confer with his
longtime friend at a juncture he felt was the greatest crisis of his life. Hoover
had proof of Coughlins homosexual activity. That proof, communicated in
the verbal exchange between Hoover and Coughlin, was sufcient to silence
Coughlins public voice until May 24, 1972, when he gave his rst unrestricted interview to Heritage magazine. J. Edgar Hoover had died just three
weeks earlier, on May 2, 1972.36
COUGHLINS TRAGEDY
In another dimension, could one imagine Coughlin being cured of his violence and anti-Semitism by the sainted Sheens reason? Or could one imagine
that Greeley, the popular paperback writer, could transform Coughlins life
into a comedy of grace? Or is the irony of the melliuous voice being silenced
by the whisper of government blackmail too overpowering to be transformed
into anything but tragedy?
This perspective is troublesome, but instructive. Tragedy is a Greek dramatic form. The place of the gods varies from portrayal to portrayal, but necessity and fate operate at the same time as man remains responsible for his
acts of hubris. There is apattern: korusa feeling of self-satisfactionleads
to hubrisan arrogant actfollowed by Ate (the Greek personiction of infatuation). Destruction results from the heros embrace of Ate; he abandons
reason for the rash foolishness of blind impulse.
The priest-as-Prometheus imagery does have a certain delicious irony. Catholic tradition on the one handwith its emphasis on grace and redemption
contrasts with the Faustian career of the Reverend Charles Edward Coughlin
on the other. To understand, we must move temporarily from the language
of religion, which emphasizes sin and salvation, to the language of behavioral
science, which emphasizes causes and conditions.
The story of Coughlin resembles a Greek tragedy. Coughlin, the young,
heroic voice, is blinded by his ambition and challenging forces greater than
himself, only to end up out of control, pursued as a criminal, is isolated, and
is nally silenced.37 Beyond mere ambition, however, Coughlins rise and fall
46
depended on his historical circumstances, on his personal abilities and education, on his clerical status, and on his psychological makeup.
The importance of Coughlins historical setting is clear. Had he been born
forty years earlier, before the radio, before the Great 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
denes itself as postmodern, he might have become a clerical Ross Perot, attracting millions of disaffected Americans. In neither case would his ministry
have electried, so to speak, such a substantial part of the U.S. public at a
time of national emergency.
Coughlins personal abilities and education also played a part in his tragedy. The 1930s produced a ood of angry orators. Many remained ineffective; others were ridiculous. Coughlins 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. Coughlins status as a priest was important. He created the image
of a strong authority gure, 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 to his readers to question church
teaching about sex.
The psychoanalytic questlike the riddle of Oedipus, with which it is so
closely boundsomewhat resembles a detective story. Something is dramatically wrong, whether in the individuals life or in the public life of Thebes.
The task of the detectivewhether analyst, king, or literary criticis to
discover the underlying cause of the blight. Coughlin is like a tragic gure
in that he rose brilliantly but fell just as quickly in his hubris and his blindness, which raises the question: What was Coughlin blind to? The answer is:
himself.
THE PERSONALITY OF THE STAR

Coughlins 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 acknowledgment. He demonstrated
a magical view of money and status; most important, he exhibited a pattern of wooing authority gures and then rejecting them. These impulses
inspired Coughlin to strike out for new territory on the airwaves and in politics. Coughlins situation thus virtually conspired to bring about both his rise
and his fall.
The Radio Priest
47
Turmoil
A review of Coughlins public life demonstrates his 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. Coughlins relations with his ecclesiastical superiors, however, were far from smooth. At times, he openly deed them; at other
times, he simply paid lip service to them and went his own way. Coughlins
obedience to his bishop depended on convenience.
Coughlin admired leaders he perceived to be strong, but there was an excessive and personal quality to his attachment to authority gures. In the case of
FDR, Coughlins overzealous adoption of Roosevelt was followed by an overzealous 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.
Coughlins attitude toward dictators also betrays his love-hate relationship with authority. One biographer speaks of Coughlins admiration for
strong, dictatorial rule.39 Hitler was the big man whom 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 Carrs ctional
Smiley notes that he eschews prospects who burn with hatred for Communism because 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 gure.
Coughlins love-hate relationship with authority is key to understanding
his attraction to violencemanifested in his tendency to scapegoat particular
groups and mark them as targets for violenceand his grandiose thinking.
All of these tendencies combined in his psychological underdevelopment and
narcissistic attitude toward the world.
Enemies
The conjunction of Coughlins anti-Semitism with his sadomasochism is
very apparent in the way his anti-Semitism developed. At rst, Coughlin
48
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 by his followers
against Jews. 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 Coughlins groups of enemies
are, rst, their distance from or opposition to Coughlin himself and, second,
their relative power. Greeley is clearly free and puried from Coughlins racial
and religious biases, but psychologically they share many common characteristics, especially in their treatment of enemies.
Grandiosity
As early as August 1936, according to FBI les, Coughlin was talking
about sending an army to overthrow the anticlerical Mexican government.
He bragged to a government agent that he could handle any opposition
from Roosevelt.40 Coughlin fantasized about vast wealth and armed might.
Again from the FBI le, a letter dated September 10, 1940, notes a speech
by Father Coughlin in Dubuque, Iowa, in June of that year, 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. Bruenings 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, Hitler, had
supported Social Justice with substantial contributions. In fact, Germany evidently did contribute money to Social Justice but not to the tune of hundreds
The Radio Priest
49
of thousands of dollars, as Coughlin boasted. Records show that the government could prove payments of only $36 over four years by a German
agentlittle more than pocket changein order to remain on Coughlins
mailing list and keep their clipping service current. Coughlins grandiose
boasting and his denial of actual responsibility for real crimes are thus
opposite faces of the same coin.
Fantasy and Imagination

If Coughlins 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 difculty of navigating among the real, the
imaginary, and the symbolic, a difculty arising early in the phallic stage of
development.
Coughlin was absorbed with rhetoric on the practical levels of fundraising and demagogy, and he 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 Coughlins stardom rested on a kind of bootstrapping.
As a high school Greek teacher, he represented himself as an expert, though
he was himself in the process of learning basic elements. His responsibilities
undoubtedly 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 ll the church but to replace it with an even bigger one.
And as a radio preacher, self-condence 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
Millers Willy Loman, riding on a shoeshine and a smile.
But on a level deeper than the sales pitch, Coughlins imagination was
rooted in violence and power, and his fascination was expressed in fantasies
of military triumph. Such fantasies originate from early sadomasochistic 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 Coughlins discourse, particularly in his adulation of powerful
politicians. This imagery contrasts with the status and person of Coughlins
biological father. Coughlins repeated approaches to authority gures
and his repeated disillusionmentsillustrate the incompatibility of childish
fantasy with adult reality.
50
Some words resonate on such a deep level that they actually become violent; the courts have long recognized the reality of so-called ghting words.
This continuum of words and actions may have made it difcult for Coughlin
actually to distinguish between the fantasies that made him feel good, the
words with 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 control completely
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 liveif I renounced religion and was illogical
enough to disbelieve in a life beyondin 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, andbelieve me, I would become the
worlds champion crook. If I didnt 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 catalogs. Sheldon Marcus records his abuse of his churchs tax-exempt status
to cover prot-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 proted politically from a cynical scapegoating of the Jews, and
then he hid from responsibility behind imsy equivocations. Apparently, he
took advantage of his wealth and clerical status to conduct a series of sexual
adventures. The surface of Coughlins quotation tempts the reader to conclude that Coughlin simply did not believe in God.
But, as always, truth extends far below the surface of things. From a
theological perspective, Coughlins statement presents a startling outline.
Dostoyevskys Roskolnikov began from approximately the same theoretical
position as Coughlinwith the proposition that if there is no God, then all
is permittedonly to nd 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 nds ethical conduct incumbent because it does not recognize a
spiritual judge outside the individual.
On a level of common sense, Coughlins syllogism does not hold up. From
a Christian perspective, it is even stranger. Saint Anselm dened God as the
The Radio Priest
51
greatest thought that the human mind can hold. If that denition is applied
to Coughlins quotation, the greatest thought, and hence God, is equated
with the satisfaction of selsh 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. Coughlins narcissism permeates his deepest religious convictions.
Coughlin came to assume, on some level, the ultimate deception of all
discourse. The conict 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 Coughlins life and work t together? Which are
of personality? Which are of priesthood and which of celibacy and celibate
culture? If priest equals celibacy were not the accepted mantle of his work,
would he have been allowed the same voice?
CHAPTER
T HE T ELEVISION P RIEST :
F ULTON J. S HEEN
Every theologian ought to be a saint.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
Andrew Greeley had a worthy predecessor on the center stage of U.S. popular culture. In the 1950s, the predecessor presented what was described as, a
vision of clerical glamour.1 His name, though no longer a household word,
was Fulton J. Sheen. Like Charles E. Coughlin and Greeley, Sheen was an
Irish American priest who soared to ecclesial, nancial, and popular success
from humble family roots. Sheen sold millions of copies of the 60 books he
wroteonly one-third the number of Greeleys titles. His radio broadcast,
The Catholic Hour, spanned more on-air years than Coughlins entire career
as a radio star. But Sheens preeminent claim to popularity and fame was by
way of prime-time television.
From 1951 until 1957, Sheens program, Life Is Worth Living, was one of
the most popular television programs in the United States. What made it
remarkable was that Sheen held the attention of 30 million major network
viewers in prime time against some of the most popular entertainers of the
day: Milton Berle, Gene Autry, Groucho Marx, and Lucille Ball.2 In 1952,
Newsweek and Time magazine both commented on the phenomenon, estimating that 14 percent of all of the television sets in the United States were
tuned in to Sheens broadcast.3 That amounted to 2 million sets. By 1955,
5.5 million sets were xed on Sheens Thursday night ABC presentation.
Sheens books and videos of his television programs are still available, but
they now appeal mostly to a pietistic segment of the Catholic audience rather
than the broad spectrum of viewers in the 1950s.
The Television Priest
53
Sheen, like Coughlin before him, reached a wide 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 did not stop him from dressing himself in traditional ecclesiastical garb. Sheens focus on this world of
people and their problems rather than on the next world of eternity moved
the discourse of U.S. Catholicism in a direction that anticipated the changes
featured in the Second Vatican Council (196265).
Sheens television ministry certainly changed the attitudes of millions
of Americans 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.4 Perhaps he manifested a touch of characteristic vanity in his name selection. Baptized Peter,
he later selected his mothers maiden name, Fulton, as his rst name. John
was his conrmation name, and he incorporated that initial into his adult
identity.
He was educated in local parochial schools, where proved himself a superior student: Saint Marys grade school, Spalding Institute in Peoria, and
Saint Viator College, where he was a champion debater. He spent his rst
three years of theological studies at Saint Paul Seminary in Minnesota. Although admittedly a brilliant student of theology, some faculty and students
judged him too serious.5
Amazingly, one of the major factors that contributed to that impression
was the amount of time he spent in the seminary chapel. During those rst
years, he took a private vow to spend one hour each day before the Blessed
Sacrament.6 It was a promise he kept until his death. But while in seminary,
he did develop a stomach ulcer, left Saint Paul, and, after a period of recuperation, completed his 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 PhD in 1923. Two years later, he
was awarded the highest scholastic distinction the university could confer.
After serving one year as an assistant pastor in Saint Patricks Church
in Peoria, Father Sheen began to teach philosophy at the Catholic University
of America in Washington, DC. He remained a popular professor there for
the next 25 years, most of the time lecturing to standing-room-only classes.
So, unlike Coughlin, who remained attached to one parish church all of his
life, Sheens congregation began in academia, but it was not grounded in buildings or conned to a pulpit. All three priests, Coughlin, Sheen, and Greeley,
54
reached out to millions of people via radio, television, or novels, and they found
their congregations in the mailbox.
By 1956, Sheen was to average between eight thousand and ten thousand
letters per day, occasionally receiving as many as thirty thousand.7 Some
people dubbed his parish the mailbox. This volume, of course, did not equal
Coughlins 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, he 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 Sheens autobiography, Treasure in Clay, were among his most popular books. Like Greeley
after him, Sheen 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.8 Fulton Sheens voice
was good, but it did not match the exceptional, magnetic quality of Father
Coughlins; but then how many voices could? What Sheen had was eyes and
presence, wonderfully suited for the new medium of television, which was to
be the venue of his popularity and fame.
As the prospect of Sheens television career took shape, he moved to New
York City. 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 a reputation as an excellent speaker, drawing large audiences
when he preached at Saint Patricks 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-prole persons he ushered
into the Catholic Church: the likes of Clare Boothe Luce, Louis Budencz, and
Heywood Hale Broun.9
All of Sheens work was conducted under a commission from superiors or
sponsored by ofcial church organizations. The institution he served honored
and promoted him. In 1934, he was created a monsignor and later a papal
chamberlain, and on June 11, 1951, 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 Sheens loyalty to his church or his commitment to traditional priestly celibacy. Greeley credits celibacy and hard work
for his productivity, factors that could well have been the keys to Sheens
productivity also. He was a driven man, working 17-hour days. Daily Mass,
55
his Divine Ofce, 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, such as historian Monsignor John
Tracey Ellis, found Sheen vain and ambitious.10 Father Daniel Noonan,
housemate and biographer, described Sheen as a consummate egocentric,
who was frustrated by ecclesiastical ambitions and the tedium of administration.11
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 he gave literally millions of his own money to
the charities for which he collected from the public. Greeley also exhibited a
municent spirit, but utilized incorporation and grants to his family as major
ways to express his generosity.
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.12 His humanity inspired admiration and devotion among secular
viewers; his ecclesiastical status and stardom compelled pride and respect
among the faithful.
Sheens nal 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 Second Vatican Council, but all
of his earlier media and diplomatic experience were of 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 on December 9, 1979, at the age of 84.
In 2000, John Cardinal OConnor, then archbishop of New York, gave permission to begin a study of the life and writings of Fulton J. Sheen, which
could lead to his canonization, the long process whereby the Catholic Church
declares a person to be a saint.
THE MEDIUM
Bishop 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,
and his intensity and personal good looks combined to make him a welcome
56
presence in the burgeoning medium eager for new personalities to help it

sell itself.
Sheens on-camera strategy suited television. He was a salesman, creating
a need in the minds of his viewers. Like the car salesmen of 1950s folklore,
Sheen told his audience, You cant afford to pass up this deal! Although he
never denied the cost of Christianityand indeed spelled out the pain and separation of celibacy in his autobiographyhis emphasis, like that of Greeleys
novels, was on the good news of Gods grace. Sheen sold peace of mind, hope,
and freedom to reason about life and Catholicism to Catholics and anyone else
who would listen. But to make the sale, he rst 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 transxing the viewer.13
The same writer elaborates:
Sheens 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.14
Exceptional eyes were not unknown or unique among big-time U.S. 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 mans soul ever shone more vividly through glance as did Charles
Finneys.15 He successfully sold salvation through re and brimstone. But
that was in the 1820s; no television yet existed to make audience contact
available beyond the aps of the revival tent.
Sheen attered his viewers, oiling his discourse with laudatory references
to popular themes and people: soldiers, mothers, the Irish, and the current
hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He set his viewers at ease with humor and
even corny jokes, puns, jingles, alliteration, much in the recorded manner
of Saint Augustine.16
Like the good pitchman that he was, Sheen situated himself in a common space and time with his audience, a space dened 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 U.S.
Catholics with him, anticipating the tone and agenda of the Second Vatican
Council.
By 1958, when Sheen left his rst 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 U.S. mind about Catholicism.
57
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 gure 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. Invariably diplomatic, Sheen nevertheless had his designated enemies: not persons, but rather the enemies of reason and nature.
These foes were not just enemies of religion, but of everyone. Sheen believed
that the three greatest dangers of his time were Freudian psychoanalysis,
atheistic Communism, and articial birth control. All of Sheens presentations were tinted to one degree or another by this bias.
The smallest category of Sheens early telecasts addressed specically
religious or inspirational topics, which is not to say that religion played a
minor role in his discourse. Quite the opposite. But he tended to downplay
the religious, and specically sectarian, aspect of his thought, emphasizing
instead a kind of neo-Thomistic system of anthropology, economics, ethics,
and politics: an Everymans philosophy in which practical problems could be
explored in terms of the man and the woman.
By 1955, later in his television career, Sheen became condent enough of
his reception by the general public to speak more frequently about specically 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.17 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,
such as that of the woman at the well featured in Johns Gospel (4:130) and
evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He even gave one presentation
on the doctrine of the Trinity.
MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
The largest number of Sheens television programs dealt with popular
psychological issues involving marriage, the family, and child rearing. His
program titles included The Laws of Marriage, The Training of Children, How Mothers Are Made, and To Spank or Not to Spank. He also
focused on common stresses such as Pain and Suffering, Fatigue, and
Human Passions.
58
He devoted time to ethical questions, preaching on The Meaning of

Love, Conscience, Character Building, Something Higher, and The
Cure for Selshness, and the theme that permeated his philosophy, Freedom. He featured specic problems such as What Is Alcoholism and Cure
for Alcoholism, and even psychology such as Psychology of the Irish, all
with an astringent antipsychiatric tone.
Anxiety, for Sheen, as distinguished from fear, is a purely psychological
phenomenon, resulting 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, present a double challenge to humans: on the
one hand, pain forces one to look inward, which could lead to self-centeredness;
on the other hand, this introspection could be a stimulus to faith.18 Sheen
chose as examples the two thieves crucied with Jesus. The thief on Jesuss
left cursed his lot, whereas the one on the right begged forgiveness.19 Pain
and suffering are not then intrinsically evil; they become evil only when they
serve as a stimulus to selshness.
Modern humans, in Sheens judgment, often invoke sickness as an excuse
for selshness, egotism, and impatience. Selshness is 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.20 Similarly, fatigue results not from exhaustion but from stagnation. People grow fatigued when
they are bored, and they become bored when they see no purpose to their
activity.21
Sheen used his theme of boredom to join and attack his two enemies of
moral freedom: Freud and Marx. He said that boredom frequently leads people to 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.22
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 because drunkards enjoy the taste and the experience of alcoholic beverages,
whereas alcoholics are driven to drink from mental stress and moral anxiety.23 Eventually, however, the alcoholic is conditioned by his addiction and,
to some extent, loses his free will.
To Sheen, alcoholism was not exclusively a physical disease but a complex spiritual and medical phenomenon.24 The alcoholic can, however, cure
himself by following the example of the prodigal son: He must recognize his
59
powerlessness and turn to God, confessing his moral guilt without making
excuses; he must make reparations for the damage he has caused, but foremost he must become reconciled to God.25
In Sheens judgment, all of these psychic problemsfear and anxiety, pain
and suffering, fatigue, and even alcoholismultimately stem merely from
the failure of the individual to recognize that freedom must ultimately be
directed to the service of God.26 These observations seem dated and particularly unscientic compared with the sophisticated approach Greeley was to
take when he commented on problems of the human condition and religion.
But Sheen was specic 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.27
THE RED MENACE

Bishop Sheen devoted a great deal of air time to exposing and attacking
the evils of Communism. In fact, more than a 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 those of Coughlin. 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-ts-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 dening Communist dangers, Sheen exhorted his
audience to attack it by confronting the breakdown in our own order: by
restoring the sanctity of U.S. homes and marriages, by raising children with
discipline.
An example of this masters clever rhetoric is clear from one of his
presentations on 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.28
Sheen was generally careful to note that he was exhorting his viewers
to attack evil in general and in themselves; he was not advocating a military attack on the Soviet Union specically, but his choice of imagesPearl
60
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 worries and
drawing cards to many of Sheens viewers in the 1950s, much as sex is a draw
and a timely concern for the readers of Greeleys novels. Sex, marriage, and
psychological issues were Sheens other popular subjects, and they have retained a freshness in Greeleys sociology and ction, but Communism has had
its day as a subject to hold popular attention. Many of Sheens 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 socalled worried well who made up Sheens congregation, an audience of whitecollar and secure blue-collar Americans. The Communist Party USA, which
had also been the object of Father Coughlins 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, despite Senator Joe McCarthy and James Bond. In this sense,
Sheens Cold War broadcasts were essentially psychological, translating perceived danger into moral motivation.
Coughlin had emphasized the threat of Communism for his own political ends, calling for the destruction of the entire system of capitalism. His
National Union for Social Justice would do away with exaggerated class
divisionsfodder for revolutions like those in France and Russiaat the
same time that it saved the United States from Communist domination.
There is no question that Sheen, the priest-philosopher, hated atheistic
Communism; however, he reassured his public that atheism was not a denial
of the reality of God but actually an afrmation 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.29 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 because it was uttered in 1955.
For Sheen, Communism was an intellectual rather than a political affair.
He put words in the mouths of Communists and 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, by the devout Roman
Catholic Ignazio Silone, was an oxymoron in Sheens discourse. Communism
existed as an abstract and fallacious position in the debate about what was
most central to Sheens philosophical and religious concern: freedom and
determinism.
61
FREEDOM AND REASON

Central to Sheens 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
Gods grace and salvation.
In his broadcasts, Sheen argued that freedom was part of the nature of
man and a necessary good, involving freedom from determinism and constraint. It demanded freedom for choice. Sheens hatred of Freudian psychoanalysis was based on his belief that psychological determinism destroyed
mans ability to choose. Freedom for, in Sheens 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. At the time, many religious leaders judged
it to be 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 was the freedom to reject articial means of birth control, which, in Sheens mind, were
against nature, reason, and love.
Sheen, like Coughlin, felt strongly about the evils of articial birth control. He devoted much effort to making strong arguments for the soundness
of his judgment. 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 in an uncertain time of beginning that reached its
apogee during the life of Saint Thomas Aquinas (122574). It was an ideal
time of integration, and it was followed by the Age of Reason. The current
Age of Sensation, in turn, followed this.30
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 such as Marx and Freud,
became the current demoralized age. This Age of Sensation is degenerate and
poses grave perils; nonetheless, good and faith will ultimately triumph.
According to Sheens myth, the United States was portrayed as good and
even divinely inspired. The United States under assault by external forces
(atheism) and internal corrupting inuences of materialism and sexual license
(Freudianism) mirrored the individual consciousness under assault by the
sensations of covetousness, resentment, anger, and, of course, sexual desire.
62
Sheen said that Satanequated with Marx and Freudwould indeed triumph in the twentieth century if Americans were to the lose 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 Sheens viewers the gift of independent thought. To be sure, that thought was guided toward a predetermined end. Viewers knew that Sheen would end each broadcast by afrming
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 Sheens salesmanship; nevertheless, his broadcasts had
the shape of independent reection.
Sheen always began a program by positing some contemporary problem.
He then dened 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
ction. 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 because Malraux was, at the time, best known for Mans
Fate and Mans Hope,31 novels extremely sympathetic to Communism and
anarchism; Baudelaires Flowers of Evil 32 and Lawrences Lady Chatterleys
Lover 33 were even in an ambiguous legal position in the 1950s, and they 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
Fyodor Dostoyevsky and John Cardinal Henry Newman.
Independent thought, however, is like a genie that can neither be controlled nor put back into the bottle. When U.S. Catholics applied freedom of
judgment 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 Greeleys star would come into its ascendancy.
SEX AND MARRIAGE

Problems of love and marriage concerned many of Sheens programs. He
argued that true love between a man and woman implied body and soul.
63
He objected both to what he termed the Victorian Error of denying sexuality

and the Freudian Error of focusing exclusively on sexuality.34 If love between
the sexes did not seek God, it was destined to seek death.35 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 Andr
Malrauxs comment on D. H. Lawrences 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.36
For Sheen, marriage was the only natural goal of sexual love. Homosexual
love was not a concept that he could even consider. Homosexuality was not a
topic to be mentioned on television 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, nally,
maturing into a stage of fulllment.37 In the rst 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 leads to a
second stage, one of disillusionment as the repetition of pleasures hardened into irritability. In Sheens mind, this development was logical because
the biological phase involved such a close and sustained encounter between
two egos that the deciencies in each individual would inevitably come to
prominence.
Here Sheens analysis unwittingly evoked Jean-Paul Sartres No Exit, with
its gloomy conclusion that hell is other people. Philosopher Sheen, however, was no existentialist because, at the instant the two partners discovered
God, they transcended the gulf that separated them and thereby reached the
third stage of marriage, that of fulllment.38 Greeleys novels portray a far
more complex and realistic process of sexual relationships, and his sociological study of intimacy, love, and delity in U.S. marriage, Faithful Attraction,
supplies a detailed scientic bent to questions that Sheen could not approach
through his medium.
When children arriveas in Sheens formulation of marriage they must
they are to be spanked soundly.39 He argued that modern and Western ideas
of child rearing led to license and juvenile delinquency.40 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. He preached that an error of the Western world
was love without discipline, which produced softness. The Communist error
was discipline without love, which fostered hardness. Sheens 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.
64
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 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.41 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 Sheens vocabulary, referred to evil, not to persons.42
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.43 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.44 Most important, 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 Greeleys novels, but he embraces more latitude in portraying it, unconstrained by the philosophers grid. Also, he sees the hunger expressed and
fullled between men and women in esh-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 Sheens view, humans were like animals inasmuch as they had sensations and passions. Knowledge and love were specically human. Knowing
belonged to mans intellect or reason; loving belonged to his will. The object of the intellect was truth; the object of the will was goodness or love.45
Of these two faculties, will, therefore love, was innitely preferred because,
in the process of knowing, the subject of our knowledge was necessarily
reduced to mans level. In the process of loving, the subjectideally God or
another personwas accepted without any attempt to dominate or reduce
the subject.
65
This discussion of knowing and loving was basic to understanding the

sharp distinction Sheen interposed between male and female and their modes
of loving. Sheens 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 Greeleys
generations thoughts about the sexes.
Sheens attitudes toward the sexes can now be seen as stereotypes. Men
were concerned primarily with things; women were concerned with persons.
Men talked business; women talked about how another woman was dressed.
A mans interests were more remote; a womans interests were more immediate. Men favored the abstract; women favored the concrete and intimate. Men
were concerned with ends, goals, and purposes; women were concerned with
something proximate, close, and 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.46
Another difference Sheen listed between men and women was that a mans
love was always tied to his intellect. A man needed to have reasons for loving,
and he needed to justify his love. But for women, love was its own reason; she
did not have to give anyone a reason for her love. This distinction presumed
that personal defects interfered with a mans love for a woman, whereas defects in a man never hurt a womans love for him.
Greeleys women are important players in many of his novels. Many of
them demonstrate the characteristics Sheen attributes to women generally:
they love unconditionally, and their nature is like Gods, to save men.
Sheens philosophical construct made all of sexuality problematic. His explanation of the process of knowing (the masculine principle) made an inevitable hierarchical conict 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 . . . 47
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.48
Beyond the evident stereotyping of men and women in Sheens examples,

it is patently clear that in his philosophy the act of knowing, proper to a man,
66
degrades (Sheens word) its object, placing her below the subject in dignity.
At the same time, the act of loving, proper to a woman, ennobles its subject,
raising her almost (but not quite) to the level of her beloved.
Greeleys sociological work seems free of gender distortion. The sum
total of Greeleys novels, however, echoes a hint of Sheens Thomistic psychology and reveals 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 did 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 afliation or political agenda and who could be respected
for their openness and reasonableness.
THE NEW ERAS CRUCIAL DIVIDE

Sheen rmly 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 U.S. Catholics to reject the sexual teaching of their church.
By 1968, the Sheen era was over. Sheens philosophy could reconcile itself to
the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae, but Greeleys 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 who studied changes in his church. Like Sheen, he approached the stage scientically
from academia. He examined issues affecting the church, including the inuence 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 cataloged anecdotally and by common sense.
One crucial issue to which Greeley paid close attention was the attitude of
Catholic parishioners, priests, and bishops to the ofcial 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 rst oral contraceptive for women.49 Enovid was inexpensive, convenient, and, for most women, safe and relatively free of side effects. When
taken correctly, it was nearly 100 percent effective. Because the Pill consisted
of hormones normally present in a womans 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 U.S. women, including Catholics.
In 1964, Pope Paul VI appointed a commission to review the churchs
position on birth control generally and the Pill in particular. This group
67
included experts in theology, medicine, sociology, and canon law as well as

a U.S. married couple who founded the Christian Family Movement. The
majority of the group issued a condential report that concluded that the
ban on articial methods of birth controlall methods except rhythm and
abstinencecould and should be changed. Pope Paul rejected the recommendation of his commission and reafrmed the prohibition against birth
control in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae.
The document was greeted with a restorm of protest and anguish. Archbishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin told Greeley, Often I cant sleep
at night because of what that goddamn encyclical is doing in my diocese.50
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 were voiced on high levels. Most
people became indifferent to church pronouncements; some intellectuals and
scientists, like Dr. Rock who had served on the popes commission, were deeply
disillusioned by the popes 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 afliate 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.51
During the nal quarter of the twentieth century, U.S. 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.
CHAPTER
A M IXED M ESSAGE :
F ULTON J. S HEEN
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 Gods 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 George 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 Sheens account of his celibacy. The struggle for, and achievement of,
celibacy appears to be a static balance of forces from the moment of intention
and when 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 Sheens conception. Although such a at and abstract
narrative could be construed as an expression of permanent achievement, the
recurrence of certain disturbing patterns in Sheens description of sexuality
suggests instead a failure to integrate celibate understanding fully as a lived
rather than merely professed practice.
A Mixed Message
69
Sheens claim at the outset that celibacy is not higher, marriage is not
lower1 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 the 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 Sheens witness reveals itself in his descriptions of his relationships with his inmost self, his God, and others, celibate and noncelibate
alike. Sheen is caught in a religious culture in which 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 autobiography2 as if he were
writing a promotional pamphlet, disarming his reader with conciliatory arguments while defending himself behind an abstract and metaphoric style
of reections rather than a narrative of witness, so unlike that of Saint
Augustine.
The reader can choose either to be lulled by pleasant phrases into accepting Sheens institutional coda, or he or she can 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 Sheens 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 authors title, Treasure in Clay, offers, the reader can sift the
silt off of Sheens rhetoric to discover what of real value remains in the pan.
Sheens 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.3 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 his rhetoric of violence: violence toward women,
toward self, and even toward Christ.
Violence toward women in Sheens account of his celibacy takes two
forms. The rst is the catalog of misogynist clichs. Perhaps they can be
understood as a cultural hangover from his Victorian past. Nonetheless, they
promoted the antiwomen tradition, often identied with a celibate hierarchy.
70
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 dened as not sexually fullling, the shrew.
Ironically, he contrasts her to a lovely, beautiful wife, not a loving one.4 This
subtle linking of the bad wife and the temptress, in which both are given the
blame for mans indelity, runs throughout Sheens imagery. He credits the
husband who loves his wife intensely as having little problem with delity;
the man subjected to constant quarreling is often in search of greener pastures. The guilt is quietly shifted to the woman as shrew and fallow eld.
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 Sheens personal conception of the relations between men and
women compared with a violation of celibacy:
Any infraction of celibacy is always interpreted by every good priest as
hurting Christ. 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.5
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, although not legitimated, is disturbingly normalized by the metaphoric
sadomasochism of his love of Christ.
Sheens favorite scriptural analogy for the priests struggle is that of Jacob
wrestling with the angel, the heavenly wrestler who nally touched the nerve
in Jacobs thigh and paralyzed it, an image itself rife with sexual innuendo.6
Similarly, the celibate struggles not with temptation but with Christ himself.
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 de Sade 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 esh and the esh lusts against the Spirit.
It is not so much the wrong that we have done; it is rather how we have
smeared the image.7
The crowning achievement of Sheens struggle appears to be a love of

Christ based on self-hatred: It is because of His love that I loathe myself. It
A Mixed Message
71
is His mercy that makes me remorseful.8 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.
Gandhis 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.9 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 reections on the dark night. He gives no clue to
the developmental history of his own practice, but his use of the rst person
plural voice does not completely take away the impression that the voice of
personal experience speaks through his analogy of a struggle.
Sheens allegory of the cross in which Heaven and Hell meet also holds
some personal hints. Hell is the realization of the part our indelity played
in the crucixion. Heaven is our remaining faithful, or our return to ask
pardon.10
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.11 Sheens 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 attempts to fool his presumably committed, though noncelibate, Catholic readers. Initially, he atters their choice
of worldly love. Sheens essay on celibacy begins 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.
Yet, despite his professed stance, every one of Sheens metaphors reestablishes a relationship of condescending superiority. Marriage belongs to the
secular world, uses alternating current, travels by roadway, labors with hand
tools and reason, and so forth. 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 rmly aligned along a vertical axis, not horizontally.12
72
By contrast, Gandhis blunt and insulting distinction between celibate and

noncelibate seems refreshingly honest and a better, even if awed, 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 higherthat is, literally closer to heaven.
Sheen rst implicitly, then explicitly, contradicts his claim that celibate
and married loves share the same plane. He even constructs a new set of
metaphoric 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 it may be spent or harbored. He appeals to Carl Jung, who held
that spiritual transformation involved holding back some of the libido that
would otherwise be squandered in sexuality.
Sheens positive understanding of this process of holding back the sum
of libido is naive at best, manipulative at worst. Pop psychology, whether
elded 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 economy13 thesis and its opposite, the optimistic thesis,
which postulates genital gratication as the route to liberation or health,
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 noncelibate: the ambivalence of sublimation as a universal human
experience.
In his concluding paragraphs, Sheens mixed message becomes clear. The
argument with which he rst woos 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.14
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
tilts 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 rst encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, on
January 25, 2006. It is a meaningful 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
A Mixed Message
73
in any forum or even hint at glorifying celibacy above married love. The
playing eld of Christian love is leveled a good deal by his statement.
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 rst encyclical letter 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 Sheens 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?
CHAPTER
T HE P APERBACK P RIEST :
A NDREW M. G REELEY
An autobiography can distort: facts can be realigned. But ction

never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
V. S. Naipaul
Andrew M. Greeley is a priest, sociologist, and storyteller. To those who
expressed 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 antiSemitic; in fact, he has been frankly ecumenical. Greeleys expressed political
positions resist categorization. In a broad sense, though, he tends to be liberal on social issues such as 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 respectnot for philosophy but for social science. How then does Greeley t in with a Fascist radio priest of the
1930s and a conservative television priest of the 1950s?
First, Greeley, like Coughlin and Sheen before him, has enjoyed tremendous popularity. Greeley is a literary gure; his readership, particularly of
his novels, is estimated at more than 20 million. At one time, Coughlins
radio audience was estimated at 40 million, but his listeners could tune in
The Paperback Priest
75
for free, and his radio career was limited essentially to one decade. Sheens
television audience, at its height, was estimated at 30 million. The programs
sponsors, too, treated his viewers to his broadcasts. But for the most part,
Greeleys audience has had to pay for his words, and his novels consistently
make best-seller 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 and 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, and between Greeley and Harold
Robbins is 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 targeted political economy and the
Great Depression as they related to the Catholic Churchs 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 important, all three of these stars are Catholic priests.
This special status has privileged their words for millions of listeners, viewers,
and readers. Coughlin gave his listeners permission to act: to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, to join unions, to write to their congressmen in support of
the New Deal, and later, regrettably, to attack Jewish-owned businesses and
to engage in street battles. Sheen also gave his viewers permission to think
logically, to dene their terms, to consider root causes and to conduct thought
experiments, and to integrate their conclusions into a coherent worldview.
Greeley, through his novels, gave his readers permission to think about
sexualityeven priests sexualityand about the authoritarian structure of
his church outside the boundaries of the ofcial moral teachings. He encouraged his readers to think analogically; specically, to think about what, up to
that point, could not be stated coherently in the language of the church.
Before proceeding, however, a digression is in order. The prospect of analogical thinking needs consideration because it is the key to understanding
both Greeleys 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
76
Ages and the Renaissance, as mathematics grew ever more sophisticated, logic
grew in importance and prestige. Moreover, when Newton was able to quantify physical theoriesfor example, of gravity and of celestial dynamicsthe
triumph of logic seemed complete. All that remained was for investigators to
ll in the gaps linking physical phenomena to psychology, ethics, and politics.
Such, at least, was the project of La Mettrie, whose book Man a Machine1
proposed the famous slogan The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes
bile. Condorcet2 sought to apply mathematical formulas to political events.
These systems, however, tended to break down almost as soon as they were
proposed. Diderots3 Jacques le fataliste et son matre and Le Neveu de Rameau
are direct expressions of his failure to construct a so-called scientic system
of ethics and 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.4
At various times in its history, the logical view of reality appeared to conict with Catholic religious teaching that gloried blind faith and obedience.
The most basic problems of religionproblems 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 rst millennium of the churchs existence. In the twelfth century, Averross commentaries on Aristotle, which postulated a difference
between scientic truth and religious truth, provoked a storm of controversy
in the universities, a storm that could only be quelled by the intellect of Saint
Thomas Aquinas.
With the incredible advances in astronomy, geography, physics, and biology after the Renaissance, Saint Thomass 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 Saint
Augustines era, the crisis of faith versus logic has been a constant in the
history of the church.
77
One of the most reprehensiblebut also, it seems, one of the most

persistentapproaches to the conict 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 horric examples of the churchs 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 versus 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 them to solve the distress of
the Great Depression by attacking Jews. And Greeleys mythical cleric, the
ctional 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 Lvi-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 scientic language with myth, the Egyptologists H. Frankfort and H. A. Frankfort write:
Our modern desire to capture a single picture is photographic and static,
where the Egyptians picture was cinematic and uid. 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 godor 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.5
The function of mythic discourse is profound. Myth eschews objective language for a coherent narrative that involves the speaker directly in a personal
78
relationship with the universe. Its purpose is not mere entertainment. The
ancient mythmakers 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 reected 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.6
Mythic assumptions underlie all scientic approaches. 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, and so forth. 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.7
Greeley discovered mythanalogical 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 Greeleys 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 rst born of four children; a sister who followed died, essentially at birth, of spina bida. 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 rst 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 sisters afiction.
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
79
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. Her afiction with
Alzheimers dementia (AD)a fate similar to that of his parentsand her
death were major struggles in his life.
Greeleys parents, married in 1927, were a hardworking couple who initially enjoyed enough prosperity to live in a substantial middle-class home
in a good Chicago neighborhood. They were able to take a summer home on
Grand Beach, Michigan, and travel, quite elegantly for the time, by train to
Mississippi.
The Great Depression hit Greeleys 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 99 on a school project, his father would ask him
why he had not got 100.
Greeleys Catholicism is expressed in his priesthood that subordinates, or
rather interweaves, all of 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, Greeleys father
was in general skeptical about the cloth, having known his share of unhappy,
alcoholic priests, and he wanted his son to attend a high school that offered
ROTC. But 13-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 Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary, in Mundelein,
Illinois, 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 so-called
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
pervade 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
80
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 the priest 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 Greeleys experience with his pastor, whom he found petty,
tyrannical, and jealous.
A review of the full range of Greeleys works indicates that the great signicance for Greeley in this curate-pastor conict must have been 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 10 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 Greeleys creativity or intellectual ambition, nor did it deprive him of
a rm 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.
GODS SOCIOLOGIST
Just as his advanced degree in philosophy offered Sheen an avenue into
academia and beyond, so Greeleys 1961 doctorate 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,
and did not rise as high in their careers. Greeley found, however, that the
conventional wisdom was false. In fact, graduates of Catholic schools performed signicantly better than did graduates of public schools.
The results, published in 1966, as The Education of Catholic Americans,
brought Greeley to national attention. In January 1969, Time magazine referred to Greeley, already three years on the full-time staff of the National
81
Opinion Research Center (NORC), as one of the shrewdest observers of

U.S. Catholic life. 8
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 as a 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 dependence.9
Greeley defended the rule of celibacy for priests, but he recognized that
some men join the priesthood to avoid the stresses of dealing with women.
Along with others like Father Eugene Kennedy, Greeley began to write about
sexuality as a reality of the priests existence. This line of critical thinking
plus Greeleys denition of contemplation as a dreaming and imagining
conditioned by poetry, ction, drama, music, and art already set his direction
from sociology to storytelling, although it would be another decade before
he published his rst novel.10
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 articial 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 nancial 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; and the hierarchy would suffer a crisis of authority. By the end
of the century, all of these predictions had materialized.
Sociology gave Greeley a rm 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.
Greeleys early model of sexuality was somewhat conventional and almost
Victorian. He viewed a boys 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 supercial 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.
82
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 Claudels play The Satin Slipper.
This model remains constant in his early work. Some nervous caution on
Greeleys part appears when he states, Even if we pass over all the sins and
the selshness that pose under the name of love, we cant ignore the terrible
narrowness that sexual attraction often introduces into the life of a young
person. Greeleys novels and his extended experience of celibacy would
later modify and rene his sexual model.11
Fidelity has been a consistent theme in Greeleys reections 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 the United
States, 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, in 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 U.S. bishops, energized by the Second Vatican Council, set up a number of subcommittees 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; Father Eugene Kennedy with
Victor Heckler directed the psychological study; and the NORC and Greeley
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, which had been commissioned
with the admonition, not to fear to speak the truth. Because the bishops did
not have ears to hear the language of the social sciences when it conicted 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 ction.
THE MYTHMAKER
Greeleys 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.
83
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 eld that favored external codiable
procedures. Greeleys study gave him an appreciation for the near universality of fundamental structures of religious experience and expression.12 He
learned a healthy critique of the limitations of the scientic method and that
the quest for truth was an exercise in model tting.13
Greeley proceeded with his sociological training on three fronts: popular
sociology written as literature, advanced consideration of models, and the
writing of imaginative ction. He used his sociological insights to describe
the operation of mythic structures in religionThe Jesus Myth, The Mary
Myth, The Catholic Myth, and God in Popular Culturenally extending his
observations by way of novels into the mythopoeic 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.14
Although Greeley had written ction since the 1950s, mostly inspirational
stories for young people, by 1979 and 1980 he was ready to incorporate his
experiences into novels. His rst two works were not immediate commercial
successes, but they were paradigms of all that were to follow. From the very
beginning, Greeley crammed all of his theology, sociology, pastoral experience, and life into his stories. Of his rst book, one critic commented:
The Magic Cup, the Holy Grail, thus emerges as the central and most signicant symbol in Greeleys 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.15
Thus, Greeley passed from sociologist to mythmaker.

Greeleys 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 rst love. The mystery genre, which has included all
of the elements of this novel, would later develop and come to full bloom in
the character and escapades of Blackie Ryan, a ctional 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
84
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 womanin his own way.16
Father Kevin Brennan is the narrator and speaks at times for the author.
He remains celibately devoted to the church over the 33-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 on
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 irtation and mild sexual experimentation. Kevin, for instance, goes skinny-dipping with Ellen Foley, a 15-year-old friend. Patricks
dalliance with Maureen Cunningham goes much further but ends short of
intercourse.
These passages form a paradigm for the novel and Greeleys treatment of
celibacy. A lake and skinny-dipping are recurrent images in Greeleys myths,
representing a quasi-sexual but still sanctifying experience. Patricks 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 virginityhe loses all interest in
her and is lled with revulsion.17 This passage echoes the behavior and feelings of J. T. Farrells protagonist 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.
Greeleys Kevin and Pat move from summer vacation and the ill-dened
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.18 Pat develops a problematic emotional attachment to another seminarian; Kevin rescues Pats career by getting the
other seminarian kicked out of school. Pat then turns his sexual attention to
a girlfriend whom he frequently sneaks out to meet. When seminary ofcials
suspect Pats absences, Kevin again saves Pats career by climbing into Pats
empty bed during bed check.
Pat is selected to study in Rome where he continues the predatory sexual behavior 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.19 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.
85
Toward the end of the novel, Greeley shifts genre, leaving the format of
the introspective bildungsromannovel of development, such as A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man or Of Human Bondageto become a novel of
adventure, piling episode on episode with little space for reection. All four
characters are involved with Vatican and Maa 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 nancial scandal and an inept pope,
and to rescue Pat from blackmailers.
Greeley creates in Kevin a priest adept at using violencea gun, explosives, karate, harboring murderous impulsesto further his ends of saving
Pat and the church. It is the task of the woman, in another of Greeleys leitmotifs, to save the hero from his own murderous impulses.20
When Greeley says, The principal theme of The Cardinal Sinsobviously
and self-evidently, I would have thoughtis that Gods 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 Kevins love. Kevins celibacy takes
the direction of vicarious sex: sexually abstinent himself, he is repeatedly
involved with Pats sexual transgressions, saving Pat from the consequences
of his sexual activity.21 Likewise, barred from actually having sex with Ellen,
Kevin nonetheless manages to give her sexual satisfaction through an improved relationship with her husband.
All of Greeleys novels are peopled with a variety of priests, but the 1982
and 1983 novels have a priest as protagonist and the same theme as 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 conicts
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But Greeley, having forcefully presented the nexus of sexual and Oedipal anxiety and celibacy in The Cardinal
Sins, actually backs away from it step by step in his subsequent novels.
In Thy Brothers 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 conict.
Lord of the Dance (1984) externalizes evil (and sexuality). In place of the
two priests of The Cardinal SinsPat, 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 Greeleys characteristic mode of relating to fact and perceptiondenying the contrary of
86
a proposition and thereby suggesting the proposition without ever actually stating it positivelybecome increasingly important in all of Greeleys
myths.
After this set of novels, Greeleys 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. Greeleys later novels become increasingly formulaic and avoid the essence of the
sexual/celibate 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 ock, to
their church, and to their God.
But Greeley imagines his priests with an inordinate inuence 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.22 He goes on to argue for the priest as the Love Person in
the Christian community23 and as the center of hope and vision in the parish.24
One concomitant of Greeleys parish-centered Catholicism is a type of
insularity. Greeley goes out of his way to mock missionaries, for example,
in explicit denunciation of the Maryknoll missionaries and liberation theologians who have dirty ngernails, 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. Although 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 Greeleys works, but even then primarily as
they relate to Chicago, the parish, and its parishioners.
Certainly, Greeleys stories inspire reection on the meaning of Christian
spirituality and sexuality, and they advance the discourse about the credibility
87
of church authority in these matters, just as Jesus did. Marsden notes the association between Greeleys myths and the parables of Jesus:
There is little doubt that Father Andrew M. Greeley is writing modern
religious parables in his best-selling ction which certainly seem to have
found a large audience among both the Catholic and non-Catholic populations of the United States.25
Has Greeleys prolic production exacted a price in the quality and richness
of his mythmaking?
Lvi-Strausss view of the genre of the roman feuilletonthe serialized
popular novelmay have relevance in reviewing the body of Greeleys myths.
Lvi-Strauss claims that ultimately the roman feuilleton distorts the pristine
freshness and originality of the myth. Greeley consciously eschewed irony
in his mythmaking. His so-called 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 ction of Andrew Greeley. His investment in a few of his characters who appear repeatedly
in his novels threatens to make his world claustrophobic instead of kaleidoscopic. Despite the recurring cast of characters, Greeleys paperbacks are not
similar to the nineteenth-century French roman euve novels by Balzac or
Zola, whose empathy and identication with even the most improbable characters lent a broad spectrum of colors and textures to their ctional worlds.
Homosexual orientation becomes a signicant question in considering religious celibacy because 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 Greeleys 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 salvic for both: God attracting us
to Himself/Herself through our sexual attractions to others.26 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
88
backgrounds, such as 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

In his novels, Greeleys concerns 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 lived experience of the people in the pews. His novels struggle with
the religious problems of ordinary people: problems of sexuality and family,
of job and community, of faith and practice, on their own terms and in their
own language, as when a priest says, Dont fuck with God!
Greeleys characters are people with whom the reader can identify. Greeleys Chicago novels feature people like their readers, or, more precisely,
people better off than most readers, but in positions the readers could realistically attain. Greeleys characters are all power gures; they work as
psychiatrists, art dealers, judges, journalists, lawyers, investors, commodities
brokers, and, of course, priests. Greeleys characters enjoy wealth and social
status: They vacation in summerhouses, eat at elegant restaurants, and y 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 by 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
Greeleys Chicago novels concern two large extended families: the Farrells
and the Ryans. Together, these two families appear, at least as minor characters, in more than half of Greeleys 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 descendants. Although Greeley himself describes
his novels as comedies of grace, it may be enlightening to think of them as
romances.
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 myththe hero trying to nd his way home to his true
loveinforms the plot of many of Greeleys novels. Those novels, like James
Joyces classic, attempt to show a hero at the height of his powers seeking, in
some sense, to come back to a mature heroine.
89
Greeleys 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 Greeleys storiesseen as the logical and reasonable
outcome of the death of a marriagein contrast to strict Catholic teaching.
Before and between marriages, Greeleys characters enjoy sexual relationships. Although they have sex with various partners, for the most part
Greeleys characters are serially monogamous, sticking to one partner at a
time. Moreover, most of the sexual relationships in Greeleys novels culminate in marriage and a nuclear family.
The specic sexual acts in which Greeleys heroes and heroines indulge
are strictly, even aggressively, normal and idealized. Homosexuality occurs
in the novels, but, as with Greeleys priest characters, it is always a mark of
moral evil. Lesbianism marks a mother superiors evil. Similarly, a murderess
is a lesbian. Only villains choose same-sex partners in Greeleys novels, and
the virtuous are decidedly healthy.
Masturbation is demonstrably the most universal sexual outlet for human
beings, yet none of Greeleys men or women masturbates. 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 that many
young people suffer in a struggle with masturbation. Joyces Stephen Dedalus is described in real pain: the pain of his erce 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 to deal with masturbation in any of his writings. Greeley and his young characters maintain
sexual fantasy at a certain pitch of intensity, a strategy that protects them
from the pain of sexual conict felt by Joyces 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
antisexist. The epitome of Greeleys women is reected in his assessment of
a rectorys beautiful cook: with her clothes off, God forbid, Brigid would be
more devastating than any centerfold. Greeleys mythical women are indeed
often idealized, but they are frequently subjected to pain, sacrice, 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 Greeleys work; descriptions of womens
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?27
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Greeley, seemingly unaware of the sadomasochistic undercurrent 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 Gods 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 salvic, if suffering, gures.
In Greeleys ideal world, questions regarding birth control and abortions
do not arise. Yet both issues are relevant to the status of women. Greeleys
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 U.S. Catholics.
Here, Greeley the sociologist and Greeley the mythmaker combine without
direct rejection of ofcial church teaching.
The question of abortion arises because, over the course of his novels,
Greeley subjects a number of his women, including teenaged virgins who
are presumably not taking birth control, to rape. Rape ties into the underlying tone of violence in many of Greeleys 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 although rape is not a particularly efcacious method of inducing pregnancy, in the real world, pregnancies nevertheless do result from
rape. Fortunately, the question never arises for Greeleys women. As a result,
Father Blackie and the other priests of Greeleys world are spared the very
difcult matter of advising women faced with unwanted pregnancies.
Greeleys men and women turn to their priests for spiritual advice. It is
noteworthy that Greeleys world, unlike Sheens, 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
Greeleys priests address.
GREELEY AND THE CELIBATE MIND

John Blackwood Ryanfather, monsignor, bishop, Blackieis a ctional
priest-detective created by Greeley and featured in more than a dozen of his
novels:
Blackie Ryan serves as a contrast to the shallow, selsh, insensitive, mediocre priests who abound in these stories. Blackie represents the priesthood
at its best, the ideals in the priesthood that originally attracted me.28
The person of the author reveals himself or herself most clearly in the
telling of the story and in the mythopoeic values that prevail. In other words,
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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 ctional 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 ctional creation sometimes speaks for the author.
Chestertons 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, and his entry into a case is motivated
chiey by a desire to move the criminal to repentance and reconciliation.
Father Blackie also holds a pastoral role in Greeleys 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 Chestertons priest because the culprit could look like
anybody; 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.29
In Father Blackies world, true crimes are committed only by the truly
evil, those damned by their very nature. Greeleys villains can usually be
identied by their appearance; oftentimes they are repulsive old men. In
some sense, these characters are exaggerated caricatures of enemies and of
the pastor who tortured young Greeley in the rst 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
he needs to gure 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
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Brown, unlike Greeleys 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 sinners conscience and Gods
mercy. An ofcer 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. 30
Greeleys Father Blackie often acts as a kind of auxiliary to the regular
police. He relishes political power and is privy to the Central Intelligence
Agency 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 institutiona hopeless case.
With regard to violence, Brown (the product of a married laymans mind)
and Blackie (the product of a celibate priests mind) are strikingly at loggerheads. The discourse of confession, a dialectical process aimed at discovering
a sinners true position before God, is at the heart of Father Browns 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 salvically with the
criminal.
Greeleys Blackie is a soul hallowed by destiny. Blackie has more the
quality of the dramatic hero who, by Lukcss denition, is passive and lacks
interiority. Lukcs holds that interiority is the product of the antagonistic
duality of the soul and the world.31 Greeleys explicit desire is to show the
church and the priesthood as instruments of Gods love. But Blackies struggles exist outside of him. He passively judges and brings others to justice. He
is involved with tales of Gods love and salvation mediated through human
love, but vengeance, torture, and retribution also have a prominent place. In
Blackies universe, the demons are in other priests and are satanic, drunken,
sandal wearing, misguided, unfaithful, or otherwise irredeemableunlike
himor the villains are reprehensible, dirty old men.
The laymans priest, Father Brown, is the incarnation of Chestertons 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.
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Author Greeleys 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 Gods love.32 He embraces sacrament in the broadest terms as whatever
discloses graceespecially water, re, food, drink, and sex. Blackie is not the
central character of all of 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 life33 and because sex is
edifying and religious and important.34
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.35
An understanding of Blackie Ryan is crucial to puzzle out Greeleys celibate mind. Greeley says that Blackie was a character who lurked in his imagination for a long time and who sometimes speaks in the authors voice.36
What, if anything, can the mind of Blackie Ryan and his creator, Andrew
Greeley, reveal about the development and personalities of celibate priests?
GREELEY AND CELIBATE DEVELOPMENT

One basic question, and an area of justiable 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 23, sexual abstinence was
expected. Greeley denies any sexual love with a woman in his young life.37
Celibate development and adjustment are not and, by their 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: Youve always been a teenager, Father Greeley. You just never grew up.38 One important key to understanding religious celibacy is evident by looking at adolescence itself. It
would be naive 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
justiably 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,
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security, independence, work, peer relationships, and consolidation of identity and valuesall 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,
sexual themes, professional afliation, 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 benecial for religious ministry
and are clearly manifest in Greeleys 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
naive, 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 they 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, although these priests
must be of a particular stampnot too stodgy, not too stupid, not gay, and
certainly not Marxistin other words, priests who agree with Greeley.
Authority
Questions about authorityones own powers and the powers over one
are endemic to adolescence. The experience of ones independence, and the
desire for it, motivates 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.39
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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 mans life.
A major task of adolescence is to balance ones 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.
Greeleys conict with authority gures 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, whom 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 against it and subduing it on the other is alive in Greeleys
writings.
Consolidation of Sexual Identity

Although adolescence is widely touted as the period of clarifying ones
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 midlife. Even
the wisdom of years is not immune from sexual discovery and ne-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, inuence all of
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 nd 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, claiming that celibacy
itself plus training, practice of the ministry, and the grace of the priestly ofce
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 sacrice will merit for the faithful
united in the holy bond of matrimony the grace of a true union.40
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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 celibrant is deprived of one
of the most important sacramental avenues in Greeleys schema of knowing
the love of God: sex.
In his books, the priests can pace Greeleys imaginative process and difculties in integrating sexuality with his celibate vocation. The Cardinal Sins
depicts one idealized priest (underdeveloped in terms of Father Eugene
Kennedy and Victor Hecklers psychological study of the priesthood) pitted
against an aggressively sexually active priest (maldeveloped) whose sexual
identity is undifferentiated but whose ecclesiastical career is successful.
Thy Brothers Wife tells the story of a priest who experiences one sexual
lapse with a woman raised as his sistermythically an act very close to incest.
He abandons the woman to become a better priest. Ascent into Hell follows a
similar pattern: A priest ees from grace and the active priesthood, returns,
and resumes his celibate life. The priests struggle between marriage and
celibacy is explicit: Had he been wrong all along? Had he sacriced marriage for a historical mistake?41
With the appearance of Blackie Ryan in Virgin and Martyr, however, the
priest loses any real sexual/celibate conict. He becomes a severed head, observing, judging, suggesting, fanaticizing, but never engaged in any sexual
activity or any signicant internal struggle with himself.
Greeley is on very solid historical and theological ground 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 animahis feminine sideand 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 provides a strong indication of the level of consolidation within
his own sexual/celibate differentiation in an incident he describes: He was
sitting in a television studio in Tucson, Arizona, for an interview following
the airing of The Thorn Birds. A cardinal in Philadelphia and a married priest
and the priests 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 didnt think I would be happy married to either of them.42
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: Sexual anxiety
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can reasonably be called castration because of its repetitious accretion of masculine prowess. The Oedipal drama is played out in the conicts of the priests
with their authority gures. In the celibate mind, the primal scene is acted
out in the sexual adventures of others.
Many of Greeleys women characters are subjected to sadomasochism.
Although Blackie can demonstrate his strength with sadistic force, sexual
sacrice is also a demand of the God who, by Greeleys denition, 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.43
The overall view of women in Greeleys novels is that of a virgin/whore
dichotomy, a common adolescent, imaginative solution to the threat of female
power. The tendency to narcissism in the novels is underlined by Greeleys
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 of the characters.
George Orwell observed that Graham Greene clothed theological speculation in esh and blood. Greeley can be said to wrap esh 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. Greeleys imagination harbors a fund of knowledge
about celibacy; his myths tell the reader what he knows.
Professional Afliation
The choice of work or professional afliation in which one plans to settle
is regarded as an adolescent task. What are you taking in school? What do
you hope to be when you grow up? are clich 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 afliation, can be attractive as well as daunting. The thought that
sexual conicts and choices are settled once and for all, at least in principle,
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
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all depend for success on the natural drive to conquer oneself, which is heightened during this time. Lack of impulse control and addictive traits undermine
a persons 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 deciency 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. Greenes whiskey priest, Cathers archbishop, Powers Father
Urban, Joyces Father Flynn, Bernanoss cur, Voynichs Canon Montanelli,
Ignazio Silones Don Paolo, and the various priests of Farrells and Greeleys
Chicago all offer the reader a panoply of personality types from which he or
she 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 Greeleys personality traits affected his construction of myths and
inuenced his storytelling? It would be fruitless and foolhardy to attempt a
reading of an authors life or personality from one of his novels. For instance,
Bernanoss Nazi sympathies could not be discerned from reading his Diary 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
whom Abraham Maslow describes as generally a single, lonely person rather
than a group, struggling alone with his inner conicts, fears, defenses against
arrogance and pride, even against paranoia.44
Every man who pursues celibacy has some personality type, a preferential
psychic mode of coping with reality, reducing stress, establishing relationships,
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dening values, and channeling basic instinctive drives. Greeleys work is

marked by his personality just as much as Coughlins and Sheens productions
were.
Greeley has clearly been energetic, ambitious, hardworking, and competent. No one could question that he is intelligent and an intellectual. He says
in his rst autobiography that he had never experienced a depression or a
dark night of the soula 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 conict with bishops and pastors, and he does not mince
words in pointing out their inadequacies. He is self-sufcient and has been
resourceful in maintaining his autonomy within a highly structured organization. But he has experienced his own problems in exercising authority.
Specically, 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 Greeleys grandiosity and projection of blame can be seen in the
founding and breakup 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.45
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.46 One favorite image, of himself as an inkblot for the entire Catholic Church, conveys with elegant economy Greeleys
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
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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.47 He was incensed when he felt slighted, for instance, by being left
off the list of contemporary best-selling authors.48
Grudges and Enemies

Greeley holds grudges, and that is with a capital G. He devotes pages and
chapters in both of his autobiographies to attacking his perceived opponents,
and he relentlessly justies 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 collections of incompetent nitwits to whom it has ever
been my displeasure to speak. A respected Catholic journal (commonweal )
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 his research,
writings, wealth, and his sister Mary Jule, among others.
Narcissism
Greeley links Blackie with Anne Maria OBrien Reilly, a character from
his novel Angels of September, whom he identies 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 Andys vision of God.
Greeley agreed and elaborated: The passionately loving and implacably seductive Maria (fully sexually active) and the ingenious, determined, mysterysolving Blackie (celibate), Only God is better, more lovely than Maria, more
comic and resourceful than Blackie.49 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 dene 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.50
The conglomerate of Greeleys 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
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kind of aloneness, but given the range of observable celibates and the variety
of novelistic interpretations of priests, a reader must conclude that Greeleys
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 a 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 afterimage 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. His
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 Greeleys stories. The reader
must ask how much of Greeleys world is representational, depicting the
real, observable, and quantiable world, and how much is presentational,
arguing for a world that might be. The line between these two modes of
writing is uid. There is an obvious representational dedication in the work
of James T. Farrell, in contrast to the presentational effort of G. K. Chesterton. Farrells work has a kind of photographic quality about it, extending
from the everyday speech of his characters to their thoughts and dreams.
Chestertons work is allegorical. Each of these writers displays the reverse
side of the coin, evident in Farrells irony and in the morals illustrated by
Chestertons allegories, but Farrells method remains representational and
Chestertons presentational.
Greeleys 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. U.S. Catholics really do
practice birth control, live in families, work for a living, and attend church.
In other areas, Greeley is presentational: Most Americans are not part of
the jet set. In general, however, even the presentational aspects of Greeleys
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),
and a church centered on family, parish, and priest.
102
Greeley seems to accept 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 believers (or in the parishs) eye rather than on the mote in the worlds
eye. In all of these areas, Greeley is very close to the observed and quantiable social reality of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
He is, moreover, just one tick off strict and accepted church doctrine. In
a monolithic and hierarchical organization like the Roman Catholic Church,
however, even this one tick can cause serious trouble for a priest. To Greeley,
who has been subjected to the discipline of the church, receiving criticism
and rejection from those he most wanted love 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 Greeleys novels.
The novels themselves are almost literally adolescent: They are lled with
energy and idealism, but they lack consistency and artistic distance.
More important than any literary decits, Greeley gives his readers permission to imagine religion mythically and to consider openly their sexuality
as a dimension of Gods love. Whatever his motivation, he leads readers to
question the celibacy and the sexuality of priests. Regardless of his own conicts with authority, he reinforces and blesses his readers doubts about the
credibility of the teachings of the Catholic Church on human sexuality.
CHAPTER
D OUBLE E XPOSURE :
A NDREW M. G REELEY
The degree and kind of a mans 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: rst, in the rhetorical style with which he deals with sex and defends
celibacy and, second, in the intriguing ways in which he reveals himself.
Writing ction 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.1
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 selfcentered gratication of keeping his sexual relations reserved for women of
his own creation.2 Although this myth is precisely the one Andrew Greeley
appears to embrace so enthusiastically for himself, some readers nd 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.
104
There is a strong temptation when reading Greeleyespecially within

the often stultifying connes of traditional Catholic treatises on celibacyto
feel that he is refreshingly honest, contemporary, and direct. The writings
of Gandhi and Fulton Sheen reveal a celibate tradition burdened by antisexual and misogynist prejudices. The components of Greeleys 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.
Greeleys sexual/celibate world, like his rhetoric, is complex and difcult
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. He distinguishes between his own heterosexuality and the orientation of Joseph
Cardinal Bernardin, about which, although he does not question, uninformed others have their doubts.3 Even the eroticized parts of womens
bodies become distinct, quasi-religious icons in Greeleys hymns to Lady
Wisdom. Adolescents might more frankly and irreverently call Greeleys
icons T & Atits and ass.
Greeley shows one sign of a troublesome quality similarly exhibited by
Gandhi and Sheen: an implicit superiority compared with noncelibates. Like
Sheen, Greeley is reluctant to share any personal weaknesses. Even though
he does include some exonerating narrative of his celibate developmentno
adolescent loves and no adult love affairshe, however, preserves and delights in his imagination on women, the objects of his seventh- and eighthgrade 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 in that his use of these
qualities is almost exclusively for self-acceptance. Gandhis celibate discipline served one of the greatest ethical causes of our century. Even Sheens
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, attery, and scare tactics.4
Greeleys ability to combine contradictionscelibacy with irtation, scientism with paganism, support of womens causes with antifeminism, requests for fairness with calls for purgesis a powerful and familiar rhetorical
Double Exposure
105
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 after the airing of The Thorn Birds becomes
transcontinental. He becomes the notorious sociologist from Tucson
who joins the panel. Father Ted Hesberg, president of Notre Dame, becomes
a man answering questions from a confused, conservative alumnus. John
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 dismissedboth partiesas 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.5
The core of Greeleys appeal is that, unlike Sheen and Gandhi, he claims
to prefer a dialogic 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. Although Greeleys argument is appealing, he
seems reluctant to provide 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 Sheens rhetoric of self-reproach with
one of archness and titillation for the reader?
Revelations of Greeleys 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.6
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 rst 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, wouldnt it?7
106
The call for openness, never fullled, is typical of Greeleys clever rhetorical
strategy, one that allows him to appear so much more direct than 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; Greeleys service is more self-limited under the guise of serving sexuality (Lady Wisdom)
and woman, both cast in the mold of their maker.
Thus, Greeleys message, like Sheens, 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 of the individual women
in his ock.
Hermann Hesse wrote very insightfully about celibacy and fantasizing in
Siddhartha.8 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
innite potential love affairs with acquaintances and chance encounters are
played out.9
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 oneessential elements in the
model of achieved celibacy. Greeleys psychic investment, transferred from
the literary women characters that 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 noncelibate.
From the start, Greeley uses a highly overstated comparison to distinguish
himself and celibates in general from all other men. Here is his denition:
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.10
What a striking distortion. The measure of the celibates relationship to

women is measured against a behavior that, 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 noncelibate 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 stand in strange and inexplicable
contrast to the image of the noncelibate man as an insensitive and unsteady
companion for women.
Double Exposure
107
For Greeley, the noncelibate is not equal to the celibate priest as a condant and intimate companion of women, a point he argues from a bewildering range of positions. First, from the personal point of view, he repeatedly
reassures readers that he is just as sensitive and probably more sympathetic
to women that to most married men. He has so frequently stated that a conding relationship between a woman and a sensitive parish priest actually
benets the couples sexual relationship, that it has developed the quality of
a mantra of reassurance.11
It is hard to accept that Greeley is not being disingenuous when he makes
such a recommendation, particularly in light of research that nds considerable potential for these condant relationships to become sexual. His exaltation in his celibate freedom runs the risk of mocking the connes 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 is not obligated to practice what he preaches;
the exact opposite in fact: He is forbidden to.12
The only measure readers have of the sexually charged nature of Greeleys one-on-one relationships with women is his deployment of rhetoric in
the intimacy of the reader-writer dialogue. The archness and irtation in
some passages are surprising by any standard. His God is a woman with an
Irish brogue:
Lady Wisdom:
Me:
Lady Wisdom:
Me:
Well, Im not bad looking at all, if I do say so Myself.

A lot better looking than that cabin attendant woman,
though Im rather proud of her too. I thought the arrangement of her curves was most ingenious. And the
smile too, if you take my meaningI get upset when
people are too busy to admire my handiwork.
You put someone like that on every plane I board and I
guarantee Ill admire her.
You dirty thing! But youre after missing the point. And
that woman in the dining room? Wasnt I after outdoing
Myself when I thought up her breasts?
Youre the dirty thing, enjoying them that way.13
If this is a model for a real-life condant relationship, it is a pretty strong

come-on.
How does Greeleys game of irtation t with Sheens tilt of moral superiority? Rather than make an unapologetic defense of his practice as a priest
who indulges in enjoyable sexual fantasy instead of cultivating sublimation,
108
Greeley deects 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 supercial appropriation of feminism. He
deects attacks against his own ambiguous use of priestly fascination
privilege is more like itby 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 (i.e., 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. 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 ight.14
This uctuation 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 sexuality/celibacy 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!15
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-specic language for the liturgy.16
Although 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
Freuds universal signier? These binaries may be structured as a dialogue,
but the predetermination of appropriate gender behavior is still religiously
zealouslyadhered 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
Double Exposure
109
give ourselves over completely to Him. They teach us about Her gentle,
life-giving, healing grace.17
His description sounds like the same patriarchal ordering upon which power
has been based for millennia.
When Greeley turns to sexual relations in his ction, he uses oblique
phrases such as full-bodied sex person, and a nubile member of the opposite gender, coupled with mens magazine clichs: the mature, devastating,
and delicious cabin attendant; the mature and tasty cabin attendant.18
These mixed messages seem part and parcel of a familiar rhetorical power
game. Greeleys calls for enlightenment in the churchs 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 womens sexuality, Greeley seems to prefer mystical
meditation to listening to (or reading) what real women have to say. He interrupts a reection 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.19
Greeleys nal erce attack on homosexuality does not cast him in a particularly attering light, because it is confused. He identies a scapegoat
that can serve simultaneously as marginalized victim: the gay priest (and
gay lifestyle). He confuses the evil victimizer (the pedophile) 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, which forms a narrative with strikingly similar parallels to the concluding chapters of Sinclair Lewiss Elmer Gantry.20
Greeley courts women to join him in his campaign through a seemingly
plausible, but actually tenuous argument:
[O]ne 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 nd them either attractive or tempting but repellent.21
Greeley defends himself and his mode of living celibacy by accusing the
church of a double standard:
I nd it ironic that my novels are thought to be highly inappropriate because of the shock they cause to those who havent read them but who are
110
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 doesnt seem to create any problems at all.22
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.23
Thus, the reader is led without explicit comment from the failure of the
churchs 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.
Although 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 sexuality/celibacy. Greeley
also reveals his own exaggerated investment of being a man of fascination.
pa rt ii
F ICTION , C ELIBACY , AND

THE S EARCH FOR T RUTH
CHAPTER
A B RIDGE FROM A UTOBIOGRAPHY

TO THE N OVEL : J AMES T. F ARRELL
Man defending the honor or welfare of his ethnic group is a man

defending himself.
Milton M. Gordon
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, like me, experience a rst 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
writers 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 U.S. culture and of the U.S. family.
The novel form of literature can be a lens that focuses the problems of an
ageor ageless problemsin a singularly powerful way. If a visual image
painting or photographcan stun or haunt ones imagination into an awareness, the characters in a novel challenge one to action or transformation
because 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 Dreisers Sister Carrie,
114
Wrights Bigger, and Bellows Herzog, who has become part of the U.S. literary landscape and family history. Studs is an urban Huck Finn who struggles
through home, school, and church; the streets and poolrooms of Chicago echo
the adolescent sexual development of Youth, Everywhere USA.
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, in which his persona transcends
his author or his authors life.
And Studs Lonigan is timely reading,1 despite its dated slang. There is no
U.S. novelStuds was the rst published in 1932that speaks so clearly to
the mood and the dilemmas of the nal decade of the twentieth century. As
one analyst pointed out, Behind the irreverence, the aming youth, and the
articial 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 Studss relevance to the rst
decade of the twenty-rst century should reect on Alan Friedmans evaluation, delivered decades ago: Judgment Day shows us a prostrate economy
that has not only terried 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 saved scores of Scandinavian soldiers from
Nazi execution, said that the climate of the United States in 1992 was eerily
like the atmosphere of the pre-Hitler Germany she experienced.4 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 inuenced both author and character. Farrell attended grade school at Corpus Christi and Saint Anselms and high school at
Saint Cyrils. Unlike Studs, who dropped out of high school, Farrell attended
the University of Chicago for a couple of years. There he was deeply inuenced by sociology, and much of his writing reects his profound concern for
the social conditions of Chicago and the nation as well as their spiritual (and
material) poverty.
Farrells Studs was branded as lthy because of its frank descriptions
of adolescent sexual development. Some scenes of masturbation were excised in early editions just as the scene of Bigger Thomas polishing his
night stick in the movie house was cut from Richard Wrights 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.
A Bridge from Autobiography to the Novel
115
Andrew M. Greeley is a Chicago writer who can be compared with Farrell

in the sense that he was deeply inuenced by his Irish parents. His Catholic education extended through seminary and ordination to the Catholic priesthood,
an alternative that Farrell considered briey while he was in grade school.
Greeley is exquisitely sensitive to social conditions, and he 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 lthy 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 rst 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 juncturein the rst few pages of his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priestwhen he is trying to introduce himself and his own
life and to orient his readers, Greeley refers to Studs Lonigans life at least
six times. Greeley compares his own father with Studss. His critical loves,
he teases, could have been like Studss Lucy. He confesses that the story of
Studs and Lucy inspired tears, but he assures his bishop that there is no Lucy
in his life. Greeleys revelation needs to be examined in detail to understand
the celibates comparison of himself with Studs.
Greeley familiarizes his readers with himself by taking his ethnic and economic bearings from Farrells epic. Andrew Greeley was born in Chicago
in 1928, a bare generation after Studs. Like Studs, he is a full-blooded Irish
American: both sets of 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 rst two decades of this century the Chicago Irish were still, on
the whole, poor, not perhaps quite as poor as theyd been in the world of
Mr. Dooleys Bridgeport recorded by Finley Peter Dunne at the end of
the nineteenth century but not yet quite as afuent and respectable as the
painting contractor who was the father of James Farrells Studs Lonigan.5
Moreover, he connects his father to Studss father metonymically 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 rst chapter of his autobiography):
I dont cry much, but I did when I read James Farrells story of the summer
romance of Studs Lonigan and Lucy Scanlan, one of the most touching
116
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.6
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 identication here. First, Greeley identies personally and psychologically with the love observed (he cried). Second, Greeley
the writer identies professionally with Studs: he judges the work as a portrait
of grace . . . refused. Comedies of grace is a phrase Greeley uses frequently to
describe his own novels. The third identication is frankly autobiographical
and factual. He tells a bishop that there has never been a Lucy Scanlan (Farrells character) or an Ellen Foley (his own character) in his own life. Fourth
and most profoundly, Greeley teases the readers 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 Farrells Studs Lonigan and in Greeleys autobiography and
his novels.
CHICAGO
The Chicago of Studs Lonigan follows the axis of Fifty-eighth Street
above Saint Patricks 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 Lewiss Main Street
is an axis for states of mind and conicts of values.
The poolroom is on Fifty-eighth Street, a street that is the spiritual center
for the gang. Lucys house is at Fifty-eighth and Indiana; Fifty-eighth and
Michigan is where blacks are out of place.8 The plight of black people is part
of the Chicago streets, the site of the 1919 riots. Studss 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 ghts.
The transition of Chicago is portrayed dramatically in one of the nal sequences of the trilogy. Studs lies dying in his bed. His father Paddy (Patrick)
117
goes to Saint Patricks 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 with one another 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 Greeleys novels are set in Chicago, or they are 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 Greeleys 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 Greeleys summer home. In St. Valentines Night, Saint
Praxides 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, Greeleys rst parish assignment after his ordination. There are
others.
But Greeleys characters do not explore Chicagos 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 that extend via OHare
Airport to Washington, DC, and the Vatican. Greeleys 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 Studss Chicago, there is an Irish Catholic parish
church at the center of life in each of Greeleys novels.
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
beingthe tragedy of the Irish.10 This essay is one of Greeleys most selfrevealing 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 Studss friends are Irish
American: Weary Reilly, Red Kelly, Arnold Sheehan, Tommy Doyle, Paulie
Haggerty, Three-Star Hennessey, Vinc Curley, Slug Mason, TB McCarthy,
Elizabeth Burns, Lucy Scanlan, and Helen Shires (who is Protestant Irish).
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The priests at Saint Patricks, Father Gilhooley and Father Doneggan,

are also Irish. In school and on the football eld, Studs occasionally interacts
with Polish Americans, and in the dance hall he meets a Swedish girl with an
accent. Two of Studss crowd are Jewish: Davey Cohen and Phil Rolfe; Phil
eventually converts to Catholicism and marries Studss sister. For the most
part, however, the people in Studss world are Irish.
To be Irish American in Studss Chicago meant to be part of an identiable minority. It meant, in effect, to be assigned to certain neighborhoods,
certain Democratic clubs, certain occupations, and even certain Catholic
parishes: Saint Patricks 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
Germansabove 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. Moreover, all of Greeleys
novels concern Irish or Irish Americans. The heroes and the villains are
Irish. Irishness is as essential to Greeleys 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 countrys 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 wouldnt trade that for anythingnot 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 Greeleys essay on the South Side Irish:
He is uncertain of his own emotions and the irrational powers, which he
dimly perceives, that reside in the depths of his personality. But if his anger
is ever given full vent, he is afraid that he will kill and destroyespecially
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
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the matter bluntly, the Irishman will not and cannot be himself because his
mother wont 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, Greeleys biographer, begins his work with a description of Greeleys recurring
dream and speaks of Greeley the dreamer. The same biographer was cited in
The Wall Street Journal, in which he speculated about Greeleys 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 identies 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 Irisha
marvelously gifted and creative peoplehave 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 his identication 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 Farrells
novel, not merely in Studss life but also in the Irish culture and family. Greeleys own grandfathers were both alcoholics.
Both Studss father and brother are drunk at the moment of Studss death.
His father ends his tour of the neighborhood of his childhood in a speakeasy,
and in his drunken stupor he speaks of Gods will and the dark angel and
says, I had to get drunk. Im not a drinking man. I had to. When everything
a man has falls from under him, hes got to do something.15
Drink is a link between being Irish and being Catholic, certainly for Studs
and clearly in Greeleys 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
lled 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
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goes to the St. Patricks 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.
CATHOLIC
There is no question that Studs Lonigan is a religious novel in a way that is
similar to the way Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms is a religious novel
and Catholic. Hemingways protagonist seeks salvation through his symbolic
baptism (crossing the river to ee the demons of war) and his identication
with Christs passion and crucixion (the bloody wounds he endures to save
his loved one). Even if his nal solution is nihilistic (God plays with humans
only to torture them), the novel is a profound struggle demanding reection
on the place of religion in human destiny and on the irony of existence and
its temporality.
Georg Lukcs is correct when he insists that such reection is the melancholy of every genuine novel.17 I hold to the theory that every born-Catholic
novelist is compelled to exorcise 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 Saint Patricks Church hold a central but circumscribed
place in Studs Lonigans fate, from the opening chapters of the rst volume,18 which record his graduation from Saint Patricks 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 Gods love . . . stories . . . of
the breaking in of God to the ordinary events of human life.20 Later I will
address each authors capacity for self-reection. Here I want to compare the
portraits of priests that each author paints.
Farrells Priests
Father Gilhooley is the pastor of Saint Patricks. Our rst glimpse of him
is as he pursed his fat lips, rubbed his fat paws together and suavely caressed
his bay front. A y 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 bonre).22
But what really endures about his being is his obsession with raising funds to
build his new Saint Patricks Church: Father Gilhooley was probably happy,
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thinking of what a collection he would get, and of how many parishioners

had received Holy Communion, Studs opines at Christmas Mass.23
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 he is 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 because
he sees Christ as a stern judge.24 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 Studss mental theater, reects 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 ght 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.25
Father Shannon, a plump bald-headed priest, along with Father Kandinsky, his sidekick, visits Saint Patricks 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, briey.26
Studs interacts with all of these priests, but his conversions are shallow.
He ends up in the gutter, drunk, on New Years Day 1929. Mental impressions of priests are lasting: Father Shannon accusingly appears in Studss
nal delirium with Lucy Scanlan on his arm.
Then there is Father Moylan. On Sundays, Studss father listens to Father Moylan on the radio, just as Greeleys father listened to Father Charles
Coughlin on his radio. Greeley hastens to assure us, however, that Dad did
not buy Coughlins anti-Semitism, by the way, not one bit.27 We do not know
what else of the radio priests message was bought; inasmuch as Coughlin/
Moylan was the most famous and powerful person outside government in
the 1930s, claiming 40 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
Studss gang:
Well, Hoover is nothing but the tool of the international bankers, and hes
the guy who put the country on the fritz, Red said.
Thats just what Father Moylan has been saying on the radio, Mugsy
said.
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Theres a man for you. Boy, what Father Moylan doesnt say about the
bankers, and the Reds too Kelly said.28
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 personied. He is not of
this world and not able to save or transform, unlike the social circumstances,
such as the black population growth, that did transform both Saint Patricks
Church and Studss neighborhood.
For Studs, the Catholic Church is not a religion or matter of spirituality
as much as it is an identity, dening his family, his friends, his school, and his
community. Studs was born into a Catholic family, and he is therefore Catholic, no matter what his beliefs, attitudes, or conduct may be.
Religion does intrude from time to time on Studss consciousness, whereas
spirituality and meaning do not. Studs does not apply the lessons of Jesus or
the teachings of the church to his daily lifea 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 conicting feelings about sex and,
not coincidentally, death and hellre.
Greeleys Priests
In contrast to the priests in Studs Lonigan, who occupy a central but demarcated place, the priests in Andrew Greeleys works are diffused throughout the texts. Every one of Greeleys novels concerns a hero who either is a
priest himself (as in The Cardinal Sins, Thy Brothers 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 priest in
The Final Planet, or a former seminarian in Lord of the Dance, Patience of a Saint,
St. Valentines Night, Love Story, The Search for Maggie Ward, and Rite of Spring.
Other minor priest characters in each of Greeleys novels complete his
tapestry. Priest/sex/church/social structureall separate elements in Farrells workare woven into one seamless garment in Greeleys.
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, whom Greeley most
unfairly compares with the peace activists the Fathers Philip and Daniel
Berrigan, marries and then divorces Cathy. He turns out to be homosexual.
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Father Ed, a liberation theology priest in Costaguana loves Cathy, but he

sells her to the local authorities to be tortured and raped. Finally Father Tierney, a drunken lecherous old priest, attempts to rape her. Only Father Blackie
Ryan, Greeleys alter ego, intervenes, an action that sends Tierney to an asylum.
What emerges from the tapestry of Farrells 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.
Farrells refusal to judge priests or even Studs amounts, paradoxically, to
a Christian attitude from a former Catholic/atheist/Marxist. Studs Lonigan
demands reection. 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.
Greeleys portraits of priests are intimate. He produces a view of the world
from the inside of the priest/church. Greeleys stories are tales of revelation,
vengeance, judgment, warning, and power. Dont fuck with God, says Father Blackie. Greeley assures us that Blackie is a character that sometimes
speaks with the authors 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 reection. In fact, it is this very
diffusion of character and voice that limits Greeleys power as a novelist.
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 heroesprayer, reection, meditation, dialogue, and liturgytend to be eclipsed by their superhuman deeds.
Greeleys priests engage in such exciting activitieselecting popes (The Cardinal Sins), making and unmaking saints (Virgin and Martyr and Occasion of
Sin), colonizing new worlds (The Final Planet), solving murders (St. Valentines
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 Brothers
Wife)that it is easy to miss their religious activities. The rift between religious activities and spiritual meaning so gaping in Studss life is not entirely
healed in Greeleys novels, but both do seek to heal the chasm with sex.
SEXUAL IDENTIFICATION
Farrell
Studs is the epitome of adolescent struggle for sexual identication. His
struggles are more explicit than those of Mark Twains Huck Finn, but his
124
goal of a rm sexual identity is no less clear. He masturbates, to be sure, but

he does so with richer fantasy, more social awareness, and less compulsivity
than Philip Roths Portnoy.
As a 14-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 Anybodys
of Studss neighborhood. According to Studss friend Helen Shires, Lucy is
jealous (or perhaps merely shocked) when she learns of Studss 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 didnt. 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 x 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 didnt like
her. . . . He told Helen that Lucy was all right, but he didnt think he was
interested in girls any more.29
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 he 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 hadnt seen her
in about four years.30
Studss 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. Studss parents are ecstatic; Lucy is precisely the kind of girl
they want for him. She is pretty, respectable, rich, and Irish Catholic. But 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 didnt 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.31
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After the dance and before the cab ride to her house, Lucy says both insightfully and indulgently, Youre just the same Studs . . . just like a little boy.32
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.
Im 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 wont hurt you. Come on, he said huskily. He didnt even think of his
dose, all he had in mind was Lucy.
I cant . . . no . . . not here. If my mother isnt home, maybe . . .
Why not? he said.
I cant . . . itll be awful . . . Ill 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 didnt look back.
He walked slowly out and away.
That goddamn teaser!
He felt that hed been a goddamn chump, but realized what a bastard
hed been, trying to make her. He couldnt get her out of his mind.33
And in his mind is where Lucy stays, for her actual association with Studs
comes to an end with this episode.
She appears in Studss nal 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. 34
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 nal 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 whom his pleas are directed because
126
all of the powers that be in Studss world are accusing and pursuing him. The
next person to speak is his mother, who announces, Hes dying.
Studss 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 nal appearance of Lucy on the arm of a priest sums up poignantly
Studss experience that religion does not help one become a man despite its
doctrinal demands. Studs remains an undifferentiated adolescent whose infantile sadomasochistic 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 Studss 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.35 The teachers advances leave Studs with conicted 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 nds himself strangely interested in a group of black gays
who invite his companionship.
Studss psychosexual struggles are intensied by the teachings of his
church and the values of his gang. Both encourage his sexual conicts to take
the shape of a general violencea madonna-whore view of womenand
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 reective force that confronts the observer of
Studss journey.
Greeley
Does this journey have anything to do with Andrew Greeley, priest, sociologist, and, novelist? Yes, because he is a champion of the imaginative
aspect of religion, of the reective force of story and symbol. They form the
bedrock of his sociological theory of religion. We are reective creatures; we
must reect on our imaginative religion.36
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
127
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 identies 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
reect the rich fantasy enlivened and circumscribed by lack of experience.
Descriptions of sexual activities, feelings, and attributes occupy a very large
place in Greeleys books. Greeley does not shy away from sacerdotal sex, a
subject Farrell did not deal with and one Studs would nd 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 Greeleys books, occurring only in The Cardinal Sins and once
in Thy Brothers Wife and in Virgin and Martyr. These are Greeleys 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 Greeleys writing, in contrast to both Farrell and Richard
Wright, the latters censored accounts from Native Son being published for
the rst time only in the 1991 Library of America edition.
Many of Greeleys 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 Greeleys sex. In
its most demonic form, the woman is cruelly rapedoften by the Maaas
a sanction against her male relatives.
There is a special category of adolescent sexual play so frequent in Greeleys novels that it merits its own category: mixed skinny-dipping along with
references to Playboy centerfolds. These events merit further analysis inasmuch as they are part of a system of recurring symbols in Greeleys writing
along with water, re, and the empty tomb.
Finally, all of the women in Greeleys novels, be they schoolgirls, nuns, or
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 Greeleys novels. There is, for instance, a graphic
rape scene that concludes Farrells second volume. Weary Reilly rapes Irene37
128
at a New Years Eve party. One can be moved to tears for the victim. A rape
scene in Greeleys Virgin and Martyr, much less explicit than Farrells, 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 ght
back.
In the police station, Don Felipe was the rst 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 esh, 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 rst night.38
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, Greeleys voice is quite frequently confused with that of his characters,
both male and female.
For all of 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 Greeleys rst novel. This cover, Greeley
tells us, was his personal choice and decision. Images of beautiful languorous
women in dishabille continue across 20 covers of Greeleys ction. The packaging provokes some of Greeleys 20 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 Dance 39 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 fteen pounds (without telling us what her original weight was from which
the fteen pounds were subtracted) only she didnt 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 bluecarpeted room. Youre totally
129
beautiful. . . . I want you to be the prettiest mother in the parish. Greeleys

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 Greeleys writings, his nonction
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 reects 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 didnt think I would be happy married to either of them.40 Cynicism is
perhaps the least signicant 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:
Its a sin to be seen in your pelt, Mrs. OFlaherty 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, lled it, lit the pipe, stood in the doorway
pufng, 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 shame! the mother said.
What are you talking about? Margaret asked, a rasp of anger in her
voice.
I wouldnt be seen showing myself in me pelt.41
Farrell manages to withdraw from the scene almost completely, letting the
womens billingsgate carry the weight of his argument. He rarely intrudes.
In particular, Farrells description of nakedness is detached. Margaret
weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds. This is not a subjective or
130
affective characterization but a measurement. Some of Farrells other details

are less impersonal but no less detached. Margaret is a well-built young
woman, with brown hair that 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 rst, 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 Greeleys novels are 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). 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.
Greeleys 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 nger squarely on the pulse of the new U.S.
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 at. So he never knew the joy of
having for the rst time your own bathroom and separate bedrooms for the
different members of the family.42
Greeleys readers, his parishioners as he called them, live between the brats
squall and the bosss snarl and always in terror of the pink slip.
In fact, it may be that Greeleys novels, portraying the Chicago of money
and glamorous settings, the commodities exchange, the power lunch, the
yacht, and the characters with connections in the Central Intelligence Agency
and the College of Cardinals, function as a kind of opium to his readers.
131
Nevertheless, in its mythic structureits identity, politics, violence, and tortured sexualityGreeleys vision steers uncomfortably close at times to positions described by Farrells Father Moylan.
Greeley attributes the volume of his writing in part to his celibacy. Indeed,
his novels are a witness to his sexual/celibate adjustment and his sociological
expertise. Having said this, we are left with one nal puzzle: How do we distinguish author and character and account for the kinship between the two?
KINSHIP, THE VITAL LINK

Three problems remain in understanding the kinship of Greeley and
Studs. The rst is the style employed in Farrells portrayal of Studs in contrast
to the style of Greeleys novels. Second, there is a problem of spiritual poverty,
the term Farrell used to describe Studss 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 of words. His characters are drawn nely
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. . . . [W]hen 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.43 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 approacha consideration of stylecan aid us in appreciating what
each messenger has to say about the world in which we live.
Greeleys 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.44
Farrell began writing the Studs Lonigan trilogy in June 1929 and completed it in January 1935. In the 1958 paperback edition of the work, he
132
reects on his motivation, especially in defense against those who claimed

that his work was salacious:
A man does not make sacrices, 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.45
Greeleys novels cannot be dismissed as pap merely because they are hammered out in a few weeks or months. Certainly, they lack the renement of
Farrells novels, and none of his priest characters approaches the sensitively
nuanced portrayals of Georges Bernanos, Ignazio Silone, Graham Greene,
J. F. Powers, or Jon Hassler. Greeleys 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 ve years,46 a stark contrast to Farrells
trilogy, which sold a mere ve thousand copies in a similar period. For all of
his numbers, of course, Greeley has not produced an American classic.
If Greeleys style is breezy and thin, his intent and his themes are not. Greeley says repeatedly that his novels are about God, Gods love, and Gods intervention and revelation in peoples lives. The Catholic Church and church
people, especially priests, carry the weight of his argument. Bishop/Monsignor John Blackwood Ryan, PhD (Father Blackie), rector of the Cathedral of
the Holy Name, is the one priest character who has lurked in my [Greeleys]
imagination for a long, long time, while sometimes he speaks in my voice he
has an identity and integrity of his own.47 Greeley attributes to Blackie his
most memorable phrase, [N]ever, I repeat never, fuck with the Lord God.48
Despite Greeleys style and intent, he does demonstrate an acute awareness of the spiritual poverty of church, priest, and layman. Greeleys 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 Studss
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.
133
The word spirit become less strange when we recall that Farrell was
strongly inuenced by Max Weber, for whom spirit was a basic principle
of sociology. Webers best-known book is titled The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism. And Farrells study of Marx had led him naturally to
the philosophy of Hegel, whose rst inuential book was Phnomenologie des
Geist, literally, Phenomenon of Spirit; Geist is often mistranslated as Mind.
Hegel distinguishes between mind (Sinn) and spirit (Geist), and he 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 Studss mental
universe. Beyond the words that Studs hears in his mindbeyond, that is, the
clichs that ricochet through his mental labyrinth like billiard ballsStudss
mind contains images of himself and of other people.
Studs cannot tolerate representations of himself as the child of privilege,
as his mothers pampered rstborn, 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 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 ght the odds by himself.49 The Lonewolf thus stands as the emblem
of Studss 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 individuals 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 Studss 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: Studss 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 Woodrow Wilson, Father Gilhooley, Red Kelly and his father police Sergeant Kelly, Mrs. George Jackson (a woman Studs picked up in his
brother-in-laws 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 Studss sister Frances in a transparent
nightgown.
The mental riot, of course, occurs in the course of Studss illness, but the
cartoon other people are liberated only by Studss loss of control. Indeed,
134
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 face only in his delirium or in his drunken bouts. The images of Studss
imagination, from his fantasized self, Lonewolf Lonigan, to the bleeding Lucy
Scanlan, nd echoes in Greeleys pages, where Father Blackie often nds
himself in a similar position. Greeley understands Studss spiritual poverty,
and he gives it a new voice and continued reality.
Voices: Authors or Characters?

Again, Greeleys 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 writers navet and the novelists objectivity, which Lukcs
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 nonself as well as the self, and he can transcend both in his characters. In other words, all of Greeleys characters are tools or aspects of his own
striving, and therefore they 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 condent father to imitate, and paralyzed by guilt, Studs was
already bent on self-destruction when he graduated from St. Anselms in
1916.50
Of course, Studs graduated from Saint Patricks in 1916. Farrell graduated from Saint Anselms grade school. The slip is symbolic of the deeper
confusion of author and voice that pervades Greeleys own work.
Earlier in the same essay, Greeley mentions St. Anselms church, built by
Father Gilhooley to save the neighborhood. Of course Father Gilhooley
built Saint Patricks.51 Later, Greeley says ambiguously, Who will celebrate
the agony and the glories of Christ the King, the way Jim Farrell celebrated
St. Anselms?52
135
From a literary point of view, what makes Greeleys ambiguity and confusion so striking is that he misses Farrells 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 Greeleys profound identication with Studs at
the same time that he seems oblivious to the hopeful vertical transcendence
implied by his identication. In other words, if one can effectively reect on
the fate of the tragic hero, in this case Irish self-destruction, one can avoid
it oneself.
Greeley indulges a ight of fancy in which he imagines Studs not dead but
moving to Beverlya locale in several Greeley novelsto 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. Greeleys fantasy saves Studs from his fatedeath at age
29to make of him something he could never be, a loyal parishioner, a ne
father and husband, a distinguished citizen. Greeley would have Studs marry
Lucy Scanlan rather than Catherine, his pregnant ance. Yes, indeed, says
Greeley, Studs Lonigan, I know you well. What a shame we never met.53
We contend that the key to understanding Greeleys comparison of himself with Studs the character rather than with Farrell the author lies in the
precision of voice in the latter and the diffusion of voice in the former.
Farrell as an author is consistent in his voice. Danny ONeill speaks for him,
not merely as a minor character in the Lonigan series but as a major speaker in
Farrells ONeill-OFlaherty 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 Farrells senior. Because of
Farrells 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 Farrells creation. Lonigan qualies admirably against Georg
Lukcss demanding criterion:
The need for reection is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel. Through it, the writers naivet suffers extreme violence and is
changed into its opposite. (This is only another way of saying that pure
reection is profoundly inartistic.) And the hard-won equalization, the unstable balance of mutually surmounting reectionsthe second naivet,
which is the novelists objectivityis only a formal substitute for the rst:
it makes form-giving possible and it rounds off the form, but the very manner in which it does so points eloquently at the sacrice 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.54
136
Farrell portrays the ironic struggles of the making and education of an

ordinary American boy.55 His mythic garb, which makes him accessible, is
that he is a Chicago Irish Catholic adolescent. Farrell reects 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.56
John Chamberlain draws on personal youthful Irish experience to reect
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.57
Even though Greeleys novels lack the form-giving elements that Lukcs
says are necessary to complete the novel form and establish the melancholy
reection, he does identify with Studs. That intuitive kinship means that on
some level he does understand the sermon. He has reected 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 reected the meaning
of celibacy, not via autobiography or as priest-authors, but novelists who
found the truth in their ctional priest characters.
CHAPTER
10
C HILD A BUSE IN THE O LD S OD :

J AMES J OYCE
The past is not dead.

In fact the past is not even past.
William Faulkner
People who think that sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is a U.S.
problem and a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century have
not paid attention to the literature of James Joyce. Nor have they tuned into
the new Irish Catholic revolt that burst into consciousness as powerfully
as any Irish Republican Army bomb in 1994 when Prime Minister Albert
Reynolds and the government fell over their failure to extradite a pedophile
priest, Father Brendan Smyth, from Northern Ireland.1 Few Irish or Americans were surprised in March 2006 when the Irish government convened
an investigation into how church and state authorities conspired, by negligence and design, to cover up decades of child abuse within the Dublin
priesthood.2
James Joyce did not live long enough to witness the vital stirrings he cataloged so poignantly beneath the Irish paralysis he decried so bitterly. The
work of Joyce, especially Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
illustrates sharply the fact of child abuse and its effects on the lives of Irish
people and on Irish society at the beginning of the twentieth century.
First, there is the beating of children, so widespread that it scarcely occasions comment. Counterparts ends with the brutal beating of a little boy
by his father. In Ivy Day in the Committee Room, an old man remembers
nostalgically how he used to beat his son, now grown too big for beating.
138
His friend remarks that beating is the only way to bring up children. And in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen is unjustly beaten with the
pandybat.
Sometimes, this beating shades into sadomasochism. An Encounter
describes a strange man who is xated on whipping schoolboys; his fantasies excite him so much that he masturbates in front of them. The villain
of An Encounter shows many similarities with Father Flynn of The Sisters as well as with Father Keon of Ivy Day in the Committee Room; we
may reasonably infer a sexual dimension to Joyces priests relationship to
boys. (This sexual dimension is reinforced by a scene in the Circe section of
Ulysses in which Father Dolan, who beat young Stephen in A Portrait, springs
out of a cofn like a jack-in-the-box.)
In Joyces Ireland, the entire family is complicit in the oppression of children and adolescents. The Sisters, for example, is the story of the adult
worlds incomplete efforts to hide an unseemly truth about Father Flynn
from the narrator. Mrs. Mooney of The Boarding House encourages her
daughter Polly to carry on a sexual relationship with her lodger in order to
land Polly a good husband; Pollys brother enforces the mothers decision
with the implied threat of a beating. Mrs. Kearney, of A Mother, ruins her
daughters chance to perform at a concert by quarreling over a four-shilling
difference in her honorarium, and the mother of the little boy in Counterparts is in church while he is beaten.
The children, beaten, browbeaten, and seduced, learn their lessons well:
not lessons in the history of the Roman Empire or of France or Ireland, but
lessons in silence, violence, respectability, paralysis, and simony. Maria of
The Clay, for instance, has shrunk almost to invisibility. Mr. Farrington of
Counterparts beats his son as he was (and is) beaten. Eveline cannot grasp
her one chance for happiness, standing paralyzed on the docks. Mr. Kernan,
of Grace, literally bites his tongue. Corley, of Two Gallants, sees in his
girls love the chance to cadge a few shillings as Mrs. Mooney grabs at the
chance of a steadily employed son-in-law.
Over the years, Joyce has been treated primarily as a symbolist, or as a
psychological realist, so the images in his stories are said to represent states
of mind or psychic processes. But this view is contrary to Joyces own aesthetic, according to which characters, events, locations, and things are both
real and symbolic. In fact, one of Joyces purposes was to show a certain view
of Irish reality.
Vasily Aksyonov once remarked that censorship is not entirely bad for a
writer because censorship forces reader and writer alike to approach texts
with meticulous attention, concentrating not only on the explicit meaning of statements but also upon metaphor, metonymy, and process to reach
levels of meaning beyond the denotative. All of the writers of the Soviet
Child Abuse in the Old Sod
139
period, as well as such Western writers as James T. Farrell, Henry Miller,

D. H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, and Gustave Flaubert, worked under
the eye of the censor.3
James Joyce, as we know, was subject to very severe censorship and on
many levels. Much of Joyces work was banned as obscene and was subject
to criminal prosecution; publication of Ulysses, for example, was illegal in
the United States until 1934. Beyond criminal sanctions, though, Joyces
work was subjected to the far more effective censorship of the marketplace.
Joyces early success with the stories that were to form Dubliners was cut
short when H. F. Norman, editor of The Irish Homestead, which had published The Sisters, Eveline, and After the Race, declined to accept any
further stories because of the number of complaints from readers.4 Publisher Grant Richards asked Joyce to make changes in Dubliners, omitting
Two Gallants and An Encounter entirely as well as the use of the word
bloody. Joyce did make some changes, though with the greatest reluctance.5
Beyond these immediate levels of censorship, however, there remains the
constraint of discourse as a social space: Language is only communication
if it can be understood on some level, and some of the topics Joyce wished
to discuss were literally unspeakable in the language of his day. One of the
topics was sexualityremember the furor that greeted Freuds rst discussions of the topic at the turn of the centuryand another was the suffocating power of organized religion. We can only imagine what would have
been the public reaction to any mention of the problem of priestly pedophilia, though the data we have been able to glean from oblique references
as well as available comparisons suggest that there must have been such a
problem.6 The historical and current reaction of the church to questions of
such abusedenial combined with a condemnation of the accusersgives
us a hint as to the reaction Joyce might have faced had he articulated a statement such as I once knew a priest who was sexually attracted to young
boys. We believe that Joyce dealt with the difculty by a process of meiosis,
splitting out the explicit pedophilia from The Sisters (and leaving a mysterious hole in its place) and resetting it in its own story, An Encounter. In
this way, the original unity of the statement I once knew a priest who was
sexually attracted to young boys is split into its two halves: I once knew
a priest who was . . . and X was sexually attracted to young boys, and
both enunciations acquire the motive discontinuity proper to myth. In the
process, each story is given an importance and a suggestiveness that reaches
beyond the unity of the original statement. The Sisters becomes, literally,
a Euclidean gnomon, suggestive of mystery itself, whereas An Encounter
(which retains its integrity, like the parallelogram separated from its larger
original shape to leave the gnomon) illustrates the loneliness characteristic
of perversion (in the Lacanian sense).
140
Our reading is marked by three assumptions:

1. Although The Sisters eschews direct statement, it nevertheless allows
meaning to shine through a web of silence, ellipsis, and contradiction
via various indirect mechanisms.
2. The narrator of The Sisters and An Encounter, though unnamed, is
a child, with a childs limited perspective; knowing that the narrator is
a child, the reader is expected to ll in the spaces in his narrative.
3. The stories are not to be read in isolation but rather in a reciprocal relation to one another as well as to the other stories in Dubliners as well as
to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
THE PUPPET SHOW

The Sisters unfolds in a series of incomplete scenes before the boy narrators gaze, each ending when the shutter is slammed down by the adult
stage crew. As the story opens, the narrator studies the sickroom window
of his friend Father Flynn for a clue as to the old mans hour of death. He is
fascinated and horried by the priests paralysis and also by the word paralysis, which he conates with the equally incomprehensible words gnomon and
simony. When the boy arrives home, he stumbles into a conversation already
begun, a conversation involving Father Flynn but with an obscure text. On
retiring, the boy passes the last conscious moments of the day trying to decipher the meaning of Old Cotters mysterious speech, and he passes from this
perplexity into a mysterious dreamworld and hence to a state of amnesia.
The next day, persuaded at last of Father Flynns death by a printed death
notice, the narrator proceeds to a new level of mystery as he struggles to
reconcile his sense of freedom with the sadness he should be feeling. Casting
his thoughts on Father Flynn, he remembers chiey that the priest had made
the familiar strange, posing difcult questions on purpose, emphasizing the
secrecy of the confessional, and only smiling when the boy could make no
answer or only a very foolish and halting one. After viewing the body, the
boy accompanies his mother as she talks with Father Flynns sisters, Eliza
and Nannie; here, so to speak, the narrator leaves us, in our own perplexity.
But the mystery in The Sisters appears deliberate, enforced like a conspiracy or a state secret, by the adult world against the boy narrator. The
checks to understanding in The Sisters operate like doors quickly slammed,
like window shades dropped over disturbing scenes momentarily glimpsed.
Old Cotter drops a hint about Father Flynns character: No, I wouldnt say
he was exactly . . . but there was something queer . . . there was something uncanny about him. Ill tell you my opinion.7
Old Cotter never gives his opinion; instead, he rephrases slightly his
empty insinuation: I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was
one of those . . . peculiar cases. . . . But its hard to say. 8
141
Next comes the news of Father Flynns death, news delivered obliquely
but (this time) with unmistakable meaning:
Well, so your old friend is gone, youll be sorry to hear.
Who? Said I.
Father Flynn.
Is he dead?
Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house . . . 9
This interchange between the narrator and Old Cotter marks the rst time
information is actually conveyed. Note the baroque shape of the statement:
when the boy asks, directly, Is he dead? Cotter refrains from denying the
death, in effect afrming it. This nonnegation is one important way information is actually transmitted in the story.
The information regarding Father Flynns death is followed by a somewhat scandalous, though again abstract, implication: I wouldnt like children of mine, he said, to have too much to say to a man like that. 10
One interesting feature of this remark is that Old Cotter is enjoining to
silence: He does not say I wouldnt like children of mine to be seen with a
man like that, but I wouldnt like children of mine to have too much to say
to a man like that. Old Cotters utterance is so vague (as well as so disturbing) that the narrators aunt asks him to explain it; Old Cotter begins to cite
some problem involving the disparity of age between the priest and the boy
but ends by throwing the question to the narrators uncle who changes the
subject. The narrator confesses himself bafed by these hints: I puzzled my
head to extract meaning from his unnished sentences.11
This puzzlement is succeeded by a dream in which the boy sees the heavy
grey face of the paralytic following him and trying to confess something
in a murmuring voice through a smile and lips . . . moist with spittle. The
dream, itself mysterious, dissolves in amnesia: I could not remember the end
of the dream.12 It seems that the narrators psyche is in league with the
keepers of the secret.
The following morning, the narrator sees a printed death notice containing a vague hint of something wrong, as Father Flynn is identied as
a former pastor of Saint Catherines. The qualication can only mean that
Father Flynn was removed from ofce.
Another check to understanding comes in the use of clich by Eliza, one
of the eponymous sisters of the story; the clichs contain further clouds in
Elizas malapropisms. Following the string of clichs are two cryptic halfadmissions:
Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly.
Whenever Id bring in his soup to him there Id nd him with his breviary
fallen to the oor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open.
142
She laid a nger against her nose and frowned, then continued.
He was too scrupulous always, she said. The duties of the priesthood
was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed.13
Of Elizas laying her nger alongside her nose, in the rst quotation, Jackson and McGinleys note reads, Body language: say no more in front of
the boy.14
The narrators aunt presses Eliza: And that was it? Said my aunt. I heard
something . . . Eliza nodded.15
This nod is the closest Eliza will come to a positive statement; in effect,
she appears to afrm what the narrators aunt heard. The nod is, however,
equivocal, because Eliza may be afrming that that [the breaking of the
chalice] was it rather than conceding what the narrators aunt had heard.
Eliza next proceeds to an equivocal digression on some fault in Father
Flynn, in which each statement but one is immediately contradicted: It was
the chalice he broke. . . . That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it
was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still . . . They say it was
the boys fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him.16
This mass of contradictionscontaining another cryptic and disturbing
hint in they say it was the boys faultis followed by the tale of a search
ending only in incomprehension:
So then they got the keys and opened the chapel and the clerk and Father
ORourke and another priest that was there brought in a light for to look
for him. . . . And what do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself
in the dark in his confession box, wide-awake and laughinglike softly to
himself.17
This tale, so like Heart of Darkness in miniature,18 is interrupted by aposiopesis: She stopped suddenly as if to listen.19 But Elizas silence is answered
only by the silence of the house and of the dead man, a silence succeeded
by Elizas meaningless repetition: Wide awake and laughinglike to
himself. . . . So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that
there was something gone wrong with him.20
The Sisters, indeed, operated almost as a catalog of checks to clear statement in the blank window shades, the incomprehensibility of foreign words,
abstract and fragmented speech, relinquishing the oor, changing the subject, dream speech, amnesia, half-truth, clich, malapropism, encoding, equivocation, aposiopesis, and circular statement. Only four so-called facts emerge
regarding Father Flynns character:
1. Old Cotter would prevent children from speaking to him on the basis of
some peculiarity or incommensurability or because he might somehow
lead them astray (through overeducation, at least).
143
2. Father Flynn was removed from ofce.

3. The narrators aunt heard a rumor of some behavior more serious than
the breaking of a chalice.
4. They say it (whatever it was) was the boys fault.21
Four facts only, but what facts!
A CONSTELLATION OF TEXTS
Taken by itself, The Sisters operates indeed as a hermetic system of
silences and checks to understanding, disclosing only that there was something odd about Father Flynn, that he was removed from ofce, that they
say it was the boys fault, but The Sisters need not be considered in isolation. The Sisters is followed immediately by An Encounter, a story that
presents both metaphoric similarities and metonymic links to The Sisters.
The dynamic of An Encounter is very much like the dynamic of The Sisters. In The Sisters, the boy, confronted by the mystery of death, seeks
words that will explain, heal, and make whole the paralytic, the simoniac, but
he nds only secrecy, silence, and distance. In An Encounter, the boy seeks
the fullness of an adventurous adult life suggested to him by penny dreadfuls,
and although he nds a real adventure, he is left as mystied as ever.
Besides the similarity in structure, there are many accidental (in the scholastic sense) links between the two stories. The action of An Encounter
centers on an excursion by two schoolboys to Irishtown; as Jackson and
McGinley note: [T]he boys go south into Irishtown, the childhood home
of Father Flynn of The Sisters. 22
The strange man who approaches the boys wears a suit of greenish black,
Jackson and McGinley note a clear echo of Father Flynns attire in The Sisters. 23 Father Flynn regaled the narrator of The Sisters with stories of
the catacombs and of Napoleon,24 whereas the stranger in An Encounter
talks of the poetry of Thomas Moore. . . . The works of Sir Walter Scott and
Lord Lytton:25 Each man entertains a boy with stories of adventure. Of the
strangers yellow teeth, Jackson and McGinley write, They are clearly
reminiscent of Father Flynns big discoloured teeth and are also like Stephens mouth of decay in [Ulysses] Proteus.26 Of the strangers discourse
on the attractions of girls, the narrator observes: He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that,
magnetized by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling
round and round in the same orbit.27 Something which he had learned by
heart could easily apply to the words of the Mass, as taught by Father Flynn:
Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the mass, which he
had made me learn by heart.28
144
Moreover, the strangers variations on his theme suggest precisely the

tropes of the Mass. Jackson and McGinley note, too: The mystery and ritual
of sex are added to those of religion from The Sisters, a process comparable
with the explanation of the mysteries of the Mass. All sorts of unexpected
things are complex and mysterious. 29
Although there is no suggestion of sadomasochism in The Sisters, there
is a clear connection elsewhere in Joyce between priests and beating. In
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance, schoolboys are beaten
with a pandybat. An Encounter also suggests the confessional: [H]is
voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.30 In its
juxtaposition within Dubliners, in its deep structure, and in its many accidental attributes, An Encounter parallels The Sisters.31
There is, besides, as Lucinda Boldrini has written, an information of
The Sisters by Dantes Inferno.32 Boldrini notes, rst, the Dantean echo of
There was no hope for him, which, moreover, introduces the story (and the
volume) in the same way that the inscription Abandon all hope introduces
Dante to hell. Boldrini sees a parallel between the boys puzzlement over
certain words and Dantes incomprehension of the same inscription: Master,
their meaning is hard for me.33 Boldrini believes that a comparison between
Father Flynn and Virgil is ironic and that the true comparison is between
Father Flynn and Brunetto Lantini, Dantes former teacher, who is being
punished for sodomy.34 Boldrini observes that both Dante and the narrator
of The Sisters retain a lial affection for the punished soul as well as in a
certain social dimension: Brunetto warns Dante to keep clear of the sins of
Florence (sodomy), as Father Flynns paralysis warns the narrator to keep
clear of the simony and paralysis of Dublin.
Beyond these accidental links and parallels, however, it is the confessional
moment in An Encounter that most profoundly ties An Encounter to The
Sisters and raises our understanding of the two stories, for, as the stranger
confesses to the boy, he makes the boy his priest and completes the circle.
In The Sisters, too, the boy becomes a priest: In his dream, the narrator is
followed by the gray face of Father Flynn: I understood that it desired to
confess something.35 On other levels, too, there is an identication among
the boy, the priest, and the stranger. Jackson and McGinley note that the
boys formula for saying goodbye is identical to the mans formula for saying
hello.36 We note, too, a certain ambivalent attraction of the boy toward the
old man: I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the
end he said: Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now, he added
pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, he is different.
He goes in for games.37
Here the boy eagerly participates in the exchange with the old man,
partly perhaps to impress Mahony but partly to ingratiate himself with the
145
stranger. The narrator notices, besides, the old mans good accent.38 The boy
suffers the old mans peculiar monologue with remarkable patience, though
he experiences some agitation, not surprising, because it is clear to the
reader that the old mans attentions are directed at him:
The man asked how many [girlfriends] had I. I answered that I had none.
He did not believe me and said he was sure I must have one . . . 39
And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he
would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said
there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that.40
When the boy stands up, he is afraid that the old man might seize him by
the ankles; might this fear not also be, on some level, a wish? The narrator
is clearly aware of, and disturbed by, the identication between himself and
the old man: I can see youre a bookworm like myself. In a similar way, the
similarities between the old man and Father Flynn help explain Old Cotters counsel: There is some apparent afnity between the narrator of The
Sisters and Father Flynn, and this identication is to be discouraged. Old
Cotter and the uncle admit as much, even as they pretend that the fault to
be avoided is overeducation (and we are struck once more by the fact that
the stranger of An Encounter uses books for bait).
We can certainly see on the psychosexual level a connection between the
old priest, the stranger, and the young boys conicted images of himself.
In connection with the rest of Dubliners and with A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, we can view The Sisters as a gnomon of the paralysis with
which Joyce identies celibacy and of a kind of simony in exchanging the life
of the artist for the outward show of the life of a priest, the empty chalice
Father Flynn breaks. One standard reading of Dubliners is that kind of autobiographical thought experiment: Ellman cites Joyce:
The order of the stories is as follows. The Sisters, An Encounter, and another story [Araby] are stories of my childhood; The Boarding House,
After the Race, and Eveline, which are stories of adolescence; The Clay,
Counterparts, and A Painful Case, which are stories of mature life; Ivy Day
in the Committee Room, A Mother, and the last story of the book [Grace],
which are stories of public life in Dublin.41
In this citation, Joyce is clear that The Sisters and An Encounter (together with Araby) are autobiographical; afterward, his wording indicates
an increasing tendency to ction proper. In 1905, the date of the letter cited,
The Dead was as yet unwritten, but from the conation of the character
Gabriel Conroy with Joyces father and with Joyce himself, we may assume
that Gabriel Conroy is what Joyce imagines he would have become had he remained in Ireland: bitter, frustrated, ineffectual, and paralyzed. Joyces most
146
obvious symbol for paralysis is, of course, Father Flynn. Ellman notes: Although he never allows himself to say so in the story, he makes the priests
actual paralysis a symptom of the general paralysis of the insane with which
Ireland was aficted.42 Father Flynn is not only paralyzed, he is paralysis
itself, and that paralysis is contagious.
Joyces identication of paralysis with the priest is clear, but to understand
the mechanism of the identication, we need to consider that other mysterious term, simony. Simony is, of course, the exchange of a sacred ofce or
property for gain; it takes its name from one Simon Magus, reported in Acts
to have attempted to buy the gift of the Holy Ghost from the apostles. When
we combine the terms gnomon, paralysis, and simony to form a rebus, we may
say that that Father Flynn (attached to the rebus at the term paralysis in the
opening paragraphs and at the term simony in the dream sequence) stands as
a gnomon of the simony of paralysis. This rebus is to be understood in terms
of Joyces theory of epiphanies, of the moments of grace that art can discern
in the mundane: Grace is to be apprehended by art alone, and the claims
of religion are empty chalices, sham, simony (the censored word sodomy),
paralysis, gnoma (in the sense of incomplete gures). This explanation is
supported by the crisis of conscience of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man: Shocked by the intensity of his feelings after a sexual
encounter, Stephen withdraws into an ascetic piety until he has sufciently
matured to integrate sexual attraction as beauty.
When I Was a Child, I Thought as a Child

Priest or artist? The dichotomy is, of course, false. Many men have combined the two callings: Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Henry Newman
may stand as two examples, Vivaldi and Rabelais as two more. Further, most
people are neither priests nor artists.
The dichotomy is not to be taken at face value. Indeed, to insist on a literal
meaning would be contrary to Joyces (implicit) theory of the sign.
Portrait Words
Signs mean not only their referents but also serve as symbols of a psychological moment: the struggle between latency and adult sexuality.
Inscape
Finally, from what we know of Joyces view of Irish society, we can say that
he viewed it not so much as a patriarchy but as a repressive system of paralysis enforced by women molded by a mother church (and Catholic priests).
CHAPTER
11
F ATHER AND F ATHERHOOD :

E THEL V OYNICH AND
G RAHAM G REENE
If the achievement of celibacy is one of the most potent symbols of spiritual

grace and self-mastery, the birth of children is certainly a sign of the power,
biological and spiritual, of the relationship between a man and woman. Both
conditions, celibacy and parenting, are associated with the greatest and most
intimate human responsibilities (as well as the greatest betrayals of trust),
and both make commensurate demands on the emotional and intellectual
resources of those who shoulder them. Yet what happens when both conditions coexist in the lifeworld of a single individual, making their demands
felt with simultaneous force? After all, one cannot be celibate and involved in
a sexual relationship at the same time, but children remain long after vows
are broken and renewed.
In two works apparently written from opposed points of view, this issue of
currently celibate clergy confronted with their emotional bond to the natural
offspring of an earlier lapse is treated with great sensitivity and surprising
similarity:1 Ethel Voynichs The Gady, labeled by supporters and detractors
alike as a classic of anticlericalism, and Graham Greenes The Power and the
Glory, a novel condemning the persecution of the church in revolutionary
Mexico. In both novels, the clergy protagonists are brought to their greatest spiritual crisis by the confrontation with their natural children at a moment of intense political conict. The power of their emotions as parents
directly diminishes their ability to wield the spiritual and temporal power
vested in their vocation. Whether the outcome of either crisis represents a
spiritual triumph or merely surrender and collapse poses a difcult challenge
for interpretation.
148
Irish-born Ethel Voynich wrote The Gady in 1897. This fast-paced historical romance draws equally on her experience of work with political radicals
in Italy, Russia, and Poland and on her powerful and romantic imagination.
Largely ignored in the West, the novel had its greatest success in Russia and
later in the Soviet Union, a fact that, together with the career of its author,
earned the novel the pejorative label political. This categorization is probably
most responsible for its being taken as anticlerical. What else could a novel
about revolution in Italy that was canonized in the atheist Soviet Union be?
But no careful study of its plot, characters, and conicts could substantiate
either label as sufciently descriptive.
First, the plot is far more psychological than political. The political conicts between the Young Italy movement and the Austrian and papal authorities are melodramatic, even comic opera, alongside the intensity of the family
drama and the love story. The most intense scenes of political struggle are
always subordinated to correspondingly more intense episodes of psychological struggle. If The Gady is a roman thse (novel of ideas), it dramatizes
the theories of Freud more than those of Marx.
The opening pages of the novel introduce us to an idyllic scene: In the
seminary of Pisa, Montanelli, a kindly and learned priest, and Arthur, his
young and devoted English assistant, retire to the seminary garden to rest
from their research and to converse. But et in Arcadia ego.2 The young man
condes to his father confessor his desire to join the cause of Young Italy,
a commitmenta vocationhe believes to be entirely in keeping with his
Catholic faith. In fact, he considers it the sincerest expression of his faith,
despite the political ambivalence of the Vatican. The priests reaction is so
profound that he is rendered inarticulate. He turns ashen and begs Arthur to
reconsider, but he offers no intellectual or ethical reasons against the political movement itself. He merely tells him, I cannot argue with you tonight. . . .
But . . . if you, die, you will break my heart.3 After Arthur leaves, Montanelli
broods on the biblical story of David: For thou didst it secretly, but I will
do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun; the child that is born unto
thee shall surely die.
Arthur is Montanellis son. His mother was Polish and the wife of an
English merchant based in Leghorn. Married to a Protestant, she had attended church alone for many years. The sensitive young priest offered her a
companionship lacking in her marriage to a wealthy foreigner.4
Events move quickly. Montanelli is promoted to bishop of a mountainous
border region. Arthur attends clandestine political meetings where he meets
and falls in love with a young English woman, Gemma, a friend of his family. Her infatuation with a young Italian revolutionary enrages him; driven
by guilt over his jealousy, he relates the story to his new father confessor,
Montanellis replacement at the seminary, who, by his concerned inquisitiveness and knowledge of politics, appears to be an ally of Young Italy. When
Father and Fatherhood
149
Arthur and his political colleagues are subsequently arrested, he realizes that
his confessor is a police spy: [W]hat did Christ know about a trouble of
this kind? . . . He had only been betrayed. . . . He had never been tricked into
betraying (56). But he is even more crushed by his familys revelation, an
outburst occasioned by the public disgrace of his imprisonment, that he is
the love child of Montanelli and his dead mother. Arthur avenges himself on
Montanelli for hiding the truth from him and on the church for betraying his
trust by declaring suicide, casting his hat into the Arno, and stowing away
on a ship bound for South America.
When the narrative resumes 13 years later, we are reintroduced to the
protagonist, now totally transformed. Felice Rivarez, known as the Gady
for his stinging satirical attacks on the church, is, like his contemporary in
the Young Italy movement, Garibaldi, returned to Italy from mysterious adventures in South America. Disgured and crippled by wounds and famous
for his bitter wit, the Gady seems the very incarnation of revolutionary
commitment and sacrice. But as he condes his history to Gemma, now a
professional revolutionary herself, he reveals his adventures in exotic lands
to have been the descent into hell of a naive and sensitive youth. His disgurement has been the result of beatings in bars and brothels, his cynical
humor the protective shell secreted during years of enslavement and humiliation on plantations, in mines, and, perhaps worst of all, in a traveling
circus.
The radicals attribute his assault on the church to deep political convictions and his special malice toward Montanelli, now a cardinal and spokesperson for the progressive wing of the church, to a revolutionary scorn for
liberal reformers. But the expression of the Gadys malice is too irrational
to be so construed. Its idiosyncratic nature becomes most evident when it is
revealed that the Gady is writing both the attacks on Montanelli and the
anonymous columns in his defense.
Although the Gady appears the very gure of commitment in a series
of gunrunning missions to guerrillas ghting against Austria, his route
through Montanellis diocese expresses his personal obsession. Disguised as
a pilgrim to the cathedral, the Gady crosses paths with Montanelli, taking
full advantage of the opportunity: [W]ould Your Eminence receive a man
who is guilty of the death of his own son? (164). The same evening he is
praised by the guerrillas for his skills as an actor: [Y]ou nearly moved His
Eminence to tears (165). When questioned by another, an admirer of the
cardinal (hes too good to have that sort of trick played on him, 165), why
he risked drawing so much attention to himself, the Gady points out that it
was the best means of establishing his cover. But this so-called professional
explanation is belied the same night when he goes back to the cathedral to
torment Montanelli further, almost bringing the encounter to the point of a
full confession.
150
The climax of the novel is reached after the Gadys imprisonment during
another mission. When Montanelli hears that the authorities plan to try him
unconstitutionally by military tribunal in order to hurry his execution, he
decides to intercede on behalf of this scourge of the church. Although there
is no doubt that he has the temporal power to effect a pardon, Montanelli
conducts several interviews with the prisoner, urging him to renounce violence as a means of political change.
As the Gady, aficted by his old wounds and mistreated in the prison,
sinks into a dangerous illness, his self-command begins to dissolve, and a
confrontation with his father becomes inevitable. On Montanellis side, the
ongoing political crisis of his vocationbetween his pacism and his hatred
of the regimecomes to a head in the case of the Gady. How can he, in good
conscience, urge the pardon of a man who openly upholds the use of violence,
a man, whom the authorities claim will, if given the chance at a fair and public trial, foment riots costing many lives? In desperation, Montanelli offers
the Gady a choice: to renounce violence or to submit to a secret execution.
Faced with this ethical paradox, the Gady loses his calm:
And you talk of cruelty! Why [the governor] couldnt hurt me as much
as you do if he tried for a year; he hasnt got the brains. All he can think
of is to pull a strap tight, and when he cant get it any tighter hes at the
end of his resources. Any fool can do that! But youSign your own death
sentence, please; Im too tender-hearted to do it myself. Oh! It would take
a Christian to hit on that. (22728)
Montanelli regrets the arrogance with which he had set the terms, but he
does so in a manner that draws out the deeper revelation: I never meant to
shift my burden on to you. . . . I have never consciously done that to any living
creature (228). Arthur, the son, speaks to that: By submitting to the church,
he argues, Montanelli forced him, still a youth and nearly an orphan, to make
all the hard decisions for both of them.
Now it is his turn to set terms, cutting short Montanellis joy and amazement: You have come backyou have come back at last! Yes . . . and you
have to ght me, or kill me (229).
Montanelli tries to dispel the political conict in light of their reunion:
Oh, hush, carino! What is all that now? We have been like two children lost
in the dark (229).
But it is not the political conict that is motivating Arthurs terms; rather,
it is a primal sense of betrayal, the betrayal of the responsibilities of a father
by Montanellis choice to remain loyal to the church, to renew his vows, and
only father his son in the guise of confessor, teacher, and church father of all
orphans. For Arthur, they cannot have the innocent reconciliation that was
possible with Gemma, this reconciliation of two lost children, because the
151
failure of a parent to a child does not imply the same kind of mutual responsibility involved in broken peer relationships: When you had nished [your
prayers], and kissed the crucix, you glanced round and whispered: I am
very sorry for you, Arthur; but I darent show it; He would be angry (230).
The original hard choice presented by Montanelli to the Gady, the revolutionary, is now turned against Montanelli by his son: free Arthur, leave
the priesthood, and acknowledge him publicly or consent to the governors
request for a secret execution of the Gady. From the time he had recognized
his son, Montanelli had no doubt of having him freed but not at such a price, a
price he had already paid many times psychologically in order to become the
best of priestsgenerous, devout, loving, justthe model of the attainment
of celibacy as a commitment to universality of accessibility, as a charism.5
Furthermore, his faith had been a great consolation after the disappearance
of his son: Arthur, how can I help believing in Him? If I have kept my faith
through all these frightful years, how can I ever doubt Him any more, now
that He has given you back to me? (230).
But Arthur retreats behind the rhetoric of the Gadys sardonic anticlericalism: And I accept no favours from priests. I will have no more compromises, Padre; I have had enough of them, and of their consequences. You
must give up your priesthood, or you must give up me (232).
Montanelli wrestles with this impossible choice; his decision, his verdict, is
pronounced in an unlikely way, yet one that is deeply signicant, through an
observation he makes more to himself than to his son: You have your mothers eyes! (233). The previous double movement of commitment and betrayal
of commitment to a greater family at the expense of his own is recapitulated
in the moment that past and present are collapsed through resemblance.
The court-martial and execution are narrated with a solemnity and realism in striking contrast to the earlier mood of adventure that had surrounded
the political events of the narrative. It seems as if there are no longer any
grounds for simple oppositions in this earthly realm and, therefore, no need
to paint the combatants in simple terms as manifestations of the forces they
represent. Even stock villains are humanized:
There was something almost like pity in the Governors face. He was not
a cruel man by nature, and was secretly a little ashamed of the part he had
been playing during the last month. Now that his main point was gained he
was willing to make every little concession in his power. (235)
Ironically, this mood of regret is the cause of a messy and prolonged death
agony before the ring squad: Each man had aimed aside, with a secret hope
that the death-shot would come from his neighbors hand, not his . . . they had
only turned the execution into a butchery, and the whole ghastly business
was to do again (238).
152
Montanelli arrives in the midst of this ugly scene, and the psychological
impact it has on him is narrated in the nal chapter in which Montanelli
breaks down during Mass. Collapsing the sacrice of sons by his God and
himself, he rants at the parishioners that their self-assurance in salvation is
the mark of their guilt in the murder and hurls the Host into their midst as
twenty hands seized the madman (253).
In Graham Greenes The Power and the Glory, the politics are reversed, but
the ambiguities, also brought to a close before a ring squad, remain much
the same. The protagonist, the last surviving priest of an anticlerical purge
in one of Mexicos revolutionary provinces, ees from village to village in the
backcountry, whether motivated more by a sense of duty or by fear of capture is impossible to say. This priest is not the unequivocally heroic martyr
described in the Catholic propaganda of the time, snatches of which we overhear a mother reading to her children at key points in the book. Although
Greenes priest most often receives the epithet of whiskey priest, his propensity for alcohol is of less signicance to his spiritual crisis as a priest than
the result of one drunken indiscretion: a bastard child, a young daughter.
The importance of this daughter to the priests inner struggle is felt in
three passes, three symbolic encounters with a living memory that coincide
with three encounters with his pursuer, the police lieutenant. In this way, the
daughters signicance is felt at those moments of the most intense quickening of spiritual life, that is, when he comes in closest proximity to his physical
annihilation.
The rst occurs when he hides out in the hut of the mother of the child,
during which the police catch up with him and search the village. The second
occurs when he is arrested for drinking and dealing in contraband wine and
is imprisoned under the guard of his very pursuers. The nal agony coincides with his deathwatch at the conclusion of the novel.
When he arrives at the hut of his onetime lover, Maria, disguised in peasant clothes, he confronts the child he has not seen in six years, feeling the
shock of human love (65).6
The child stood there, watching him with acuteness and contempt. They
had spent no love in her conception: just fear and despair and half a bottle
of brandy and the sense of loneliness that had driven him to an act which
horried himand this scared shame-faced overpowering love was the
result. (66)
But this love is not reciprocated; instead, the daughter, Brigitta, pays him
back for six years of abandonment with a maliciousness as much a projection
of the guilt-ridden priest as it is an expression of a childs bitterness:
He caught the look in the childs eyes which frightened himit was again
as if a grown woman was there before her time, making her plans, aware
153
of far too much. It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him,
without contrition. He tried to nd some contact with the child and not
the woman. (67)
His last image of his child in this encounter is a grotesque collapsing of time,
the symbol of an annihilated childhood: The seven-year-old body was like a
dwarf s: it disguised an ugly maturity (68).7
This depressing encounter nds a disquieting contrast in the role Brigitta
plays in saving him from the police. She tells the lieutenant, the man obsessively committed to destroying the corrupt priesthood in the name of the
children, the future generations, that the priest is her father: Thats him.
There (76). The priest is so moved, he attempts to give himself up, to save
the villagers from providing a hostage or other reprisals, but he does this so
clumsily that the police refuse to take him seriously:
He could feel all round him the beginning of hate. Because he was no ones
husband or son. He said, Lieutenant . . .
What do you want?
Im getting too old to be much good in the elds. Take me.
The lieutenant said, Im choosing a hostage, not offering free board
and lodging to the lazy. If you are no good in the elds, you are no good
as a hostage. (78)
The will to sacrice himself quickly fades, if it had ever been truly present.
The police leave with another hostage. I did my best, he says, defending
himself from an unspoken accusation.
This episode concludes with a last encounter with the daughter, one that
forces the priest to consider the nature of her special challenge to his responsibilities as the last representative of the church in this province. He meets
her in the village rubbish dump, her eyes red-rimmed and angry. He recognizes her vulnerability, her inevitable victimization, a victimization no worse
than his own but one for which he shares the blame. The conict between
father and Father makes itself felt:
He prayed silently, O God, give me any kind of deathwithout contrition,
in a state of sinonly save this child.
He was a man who was supposed to save souls. It had seemed quite
simple once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a
little incense, wearing black gloves. . . . It was as easy as saving money: now
it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy. (82)
But at the moment he seems about to realize that it is precisely because

of his divided loyaltiesto self and community, now incarnated in the presence of his daughterthat he can save neither this one nor the many, and
154
certainly not himself, from spiritual struggle or corporeal death, the priest
nds solace and self-worth through an abstract comparison with his political
opponents:
He said, I would give my life, thats nothing, my soul . . . my dear, my dear,
try to understand that you areso important. That was the difference, he
had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the
people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was
more important than a whole continent. (82)
The irony is that his love for this soul, worth more than a continent, is
not what makes him unlike the political menafter all, the lieutenant nds
the justication of his anticlerical purge in the person of a young boy he
meets in the streetbut what makes him like any loving parent, ready to put
his child before all else. He leaves the rubbish dump denying the truth of the
encounter, but the central conict has been dened for the reader.
The thought emerges only half formulated much later when he is again
facing the scrutiny of the lieutenant as an imprisoned drunk. He notices
an old photograph, used by the police to search for him, on the ofce wall:
What an unbearable creature he must have been in those daysand yet in
those days he had been comparatively innocent. . . . Then, in his innocence, he
had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt (139).
The thought is forever interrupted by the interview with the lieutenant,
during which he again goes unrecognized, but its ambiguity raises the question again of the origin and object of his deepest spiritual feelings. He has
just found communion with his varied cellmates, even the most dissipated,
but the reference to his own corruption cannot fail to remind us of its result:
a daughter and a profound parental bond. At this point, his increasing fellow
feeling seems to be growing alongside the discovery of a personal love, but
they cannot merely reinforce one another ad innitum.
In the nal episode, the priest confronts this conict head on as he awaits
execution by ring squad the next day. Drinking brandy given to him to
make the wait more bearable, he attempts a confession, but while dwelling
on the absurdity of his mortal sin with Maria, it seems to go nowhere; then
the signicance of his lapse strikes him:
As the liquid touched his tongue he remembered his child, coming in out
of the glare: the sullen unhappy knowledgeable face. He said, Oh, God,
help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live for ever. This was the
love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the
wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep; it
was as if he had to watch her from the shore drown slowly because he had
forgotten how to swim. He thought: This is what I should feel all the time
for everyone, and he tried to turn his brain away towards the half-caste,
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the lieutenant, even a dentist he had once sat with for a few minutes, the
child at the banana station, calling up a long succession of faces, pushing
at his attention as if it were a heavy door which wouldnt budge. For those
were all in danger too. He prayed, God help them, but in the moment of
prayer he switched back to his child beside the rubbish dump, and he knew
it was for her only that he prayed. Another failure. (208)
Although he dies a public martyr, we the readers are left with his nal ambivalent meditations on love and saintliness.
In these two novels, the themes of fatherly and priestly love are played
out in all of their metaphorical and psychological intensity. Despite many
differences in detail, the force of their private love of their offspring directly
erodes the spiritual and temporal powers of both priests. The differences in
their cases reinforce the similarity of this underlying theme.
Montanellis love for Arthurs mother and his lifelong relation to his son
stand in striking contrast to the eeting squalor of the Mexican priests
drunken sexual encounter and abandonment of his offspring. Yet the emotions and choices remain the same. Voynich relies no less than Greene on the
almost instinctual bond between parent and child, an instinct arising just as
forcefully from a rich intellectual bond as from a brief and awkward physical
reunion.
Likewise, although Montanelli is a powerful cardinal and the Mexican is a
fugitive, both are publicly viewed as gures of mystery and meaning to their
people. And though both are driven to a similar despair by the irreconcilable conicts of fathering, biological and priestly, it is perhaps ironic that the
more powerful of the two, the cardinal, is publicly destroyed, whereas the
weaker, the fugitive, suffers only privately, dying a martyr and the symbol of
spiritual strength.
In this conict between father and Father, the meaning of celibacy is perhaps best represented for what it isthe sublimation of personal affections
for communal onesthereby providing a more signicant exploration of the
theme than could be accomplished through narrations of sexual temptation.
The latter can lead to lapses yet be assimilated on the path to the achievement of celibacy or provoke a choice to leave the priesthood for married life.
But the child remains present, physically or psychologically, with much more
profound consequences and requiring much more profound choices.
Because of the press of political circumstances, neither Montanelli nor
Greenes priest can make a lasting choice. Nevertheless, in both characters
we see the potential of celibate achievement emerging from the parent-child
bond and the risks to both that this entails.
CHAPTER
12
V OCATION , L OST AND F OUND :

J. F. P OWERS
How can one avoid becoming a manager of souls in a social context that demands such an ofce?
Jacques Lacan, crits
In his novel Morte DUrban,1 J. F. Powers took on the difcult project of narrating the struggle for meaning, and social meaning at that, in the inhospitable climate of the world of commerce in the United States of the 1950s.
That he chose as his protagonist a Catholic priestand a priest in a monastic
order no lessby no means mitigates this aim of grappling with what Max
Weber called the disenchantment of the world in such a calculating society.
In fact, the man of mystery in a disenchanted world becomes Powerss ideal
vehicle for testing that societys apparently innite power, its necessity as
the medium of human interaction.
A tense double irony, one much closer to Cervantess style than that of
Malorythe somber medieval muse evoked by the titleis maintained between the search for meaning and its worldly impossibility through the problematic character of Father Urban. He eschews the withdrawal from the world
through which some of his colleagues attempt to insulate themselves from a
world without mysterytheir pathetic otherworldliness being the only mystery leftand instead he practices a vocation based on the churchs history of
worldly engagement as an institution.
Of all of the chapters in this book, this one has been the most difcult
for me to write. First, the irony and humor of Powers are so balanced and
subtle, analysis is daunting in any but his terms and his narration without
Vocation, Lost and Found
157
distortion. Beyond that, he deals with a fundamental corruption of the institution, the Catholic Church, disguised as one priest. I am reminded of Dorothy Days comment, which was often repeated by her and appeared in her
autobiography The Long Loneliness: [T]he church is my mother. Sometimes
she acts like a whore, but she is still my mother.
Mary Gordon neatly sums up the materialistic context of Urbans vocation
(symbolized by sectarianism) in her introduction to the novel:
Urbans reasons for joining the priesthood and the Clementines are revealing: the boy Harvey Roche became the man Father Urban because
he perceived at a young age that the best of America was reserved for
Protestants. The one man Harvey meets who seems to have it made
like the Protestants is the visiting Father Placidus, a Clementine who
spurns rectory hospitality to put up at the Merchants Hotel, where
bootblacks, bellboys, and waiters whod never seen him before seemed to
welcome him back. So Harvey becomes Urban, not because he is called
to serve God but because he sees the priesthood as the easiest way to
stay in the best hotels, to meet the best people, to live like a Protestant.
(Introduction)
The narrative of Father Urbans ambiguous travels proceeds between two

allegorical tableaux. The one is his fantasy of the good life of the perfect social animal: the successful businessman, the indifferent agnostic, the carefree
family man with no children and no regrets. Urban knows that despite his
social facilityhis golf game, his affability, and his business acumenhe has
the tragic-comic aw of using such worldly talents in the service of otherworldly ends.
That tableau of a life in perfect harmony with disenchantment, dreamed
in the ironic enchantment of the castle on Belleisle, his monastery, stands
opposed to an ominous tableau from scripture. The exegetical key to the
novel is chapter 16 of the Gospel of Saint Luke. Powerss novel can be read
as a sermon, one Urban scrupulously avoids composing, on that paradoxical
parable.
That parable and Urbans relationship to it will start us down the road of
Urbans vocation. Along the way, we nd the sociological context of vocation
in Urbans world, a context so omnipresent in the novel that it precludes any
direct speculation on what the ideal of spiritual vocation might be for Urban.
This is in striking contrast to Ignazio Silone, who makes Spinas spiritual
vocation clear. Powers allows instead only room for a hypothesis about its
possibility and the role of celibacy in Urbans vocation. Finally, the signicance and meaning of Urbans death becomes key to understanding him.
Here a new question is prominent: Are we still on the road to vocation (i.e.,
meaning), or is it simply the end of all roads, all quests?
158
THE ROAD TO ETERNAL HABITATIONS IS PAVED

And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. (Luke 16:9)
Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Luke 16:13)
In Luke,2 two alternative allegories of the spiritual vocation are set forth
side by side without any narrative effort to reconcile or compare them. Only
the reader or hearer can bridge this gap and decide the fate of vocation in
such a world, for the world of Luke 16 is surely as disenchanted as any sociological or economic analysis of our own iron cage of rationality.
In the chapter entitled Twenty-Four Hours in a Strange Diocese, the
reader accompanies Urban burning up the pavement in a red Barracuda
sports car to Mirror Lake, where the good father will have ample opportunity to study his reection. In his essay on the so-called mirror stage in ego
formation, Jacques Lacan concludes in words that express Powerss narrative
process in the scene at Mirror Lake:
At this juncture of nature and culture psychoanalysis alone recognizes this
knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.
For such a task, we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the
aggressivity that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist,
the pedagogue, and even the reformer.3
One objection to such a formulation would be to question why psychoanalysis alone should claim a monopoly in that function that so precisely describes
that of the novel and, with a surprising congruence of details, the narrative
of Morte DUrban.
At Mirror Lake, Urban meets two classic American cranks, the letter-tothe-editor writer and the devils advocate, in neither of whom does he see the
slightest resemblance to himself. They are the Red and the Black that Urban,
the consummate status quo man,4 so carefully avoids. But unlike the heroic,
if corrupted, Red and Black of Silones world, these opponents, lounging in
the comfortable surroundings of Mirror Lake, are merely ridiculous. The
Catholic beer tycoon Zimmerman, with a larger-than-life photograph of the
late junior senator from Wisconsin on the wall of his writers cabin (211),
is the reactionary black clericalist in this narrative world. The corpulent
and slovenly Mr. Studley, an argumentative atheist with a bright red World
War I airplane decorated with heraldic devices and on which appeared the
words SIR SATAN (217), is its man of the people.
But in this scene, Urban also enters forcefully the register of biblical
allegory. In keeping with the novels parody of the medieval theme, it is
thoroughly carnivalesque in style. Accordingly, Zimmerman and Urban must
159
play, respectively, the nervous shopkeeper and the humorless Pharisee to

Studleys witty Lucifer.5
From the start, Studley has Urban dancing to his tune, driving a playful
wedge into the opening offered by Urbans public relations man affability:
Mr. Studley laughed. Say, I hope you wont mind if I dont call you Father.
Thats entirely up to you, Mr. Studley, said Father Urban.
Im not a Catholic myself. Im not much of anything, as a matter of fact.
But you know what it says in the Good Book. Call no man thy father.
Yes. Well, its O.K. with me.
I see you dont wear the collar, Mr. Urban.
Father Urban could do without the Father, but that didnt mean hed
take Mister. Nothing was better than that. Up in the car, he said slowly,
with my coat. (215)
Confronted with such an interlocutor, eager to talk shop with a priest, Urban
nds he has an uncharacteristic problem with speech and is barely more articulate than the dull Mr. Zimmerman.
At Studleys cottage, a place much like the Zimmermans, Urban must join
the roster of priests who have made this questionable pilgrimage:
Now you have to sign my guest book, said Mr. Studley.
Father Urban, tempted to sign himself Father, wrote Rev. and hoped
that was all right. Now Ill show you something, said Mr. Studley.
Here, here, here, he said, pointing to other names in the guest book.
And over here. And here. All priests like yourself. (218)
Urban nds himself in the awkward position of the friar in the Summoners
prologue of the Canterbury Tales who, while touring hell like Dante, nds a
disquieting number of his fellow religious already residing there.6 Signicantly, Urban feels more comfortable signing this guest book than the one
proffered to him by the reactionary Catholic, which he nally signs under the
alias Pope John XXIII as he leaves (224).
He and Studley return to the Zimmermans, where the topic of Luke 16,
the mornings Gospel reading, is introduced. That is the passage in which
the steward called the masters debtors together and wrote off the debts. The
rich master oddly praises the stewards action (219).
Urban, who had preached that morning, prides himself on his handling of
this difcult text. He read dutifully but segued into an Old Testament text
he could make more acceptable. His sermon on nancing the temple was one
of his better jobs.
But Urbans professional pride is hurt when he realizes that nobody had
mentioned his sermon. Despite his efforts to explain the reading, Mr. Zimmerman, like many before him, was worried about Luke XVI, 19.
160
What apparently troubles the wealthy shopkeeper is the idea of condoning an employees mismanagement and theft of his employers property.
Urban tries to reassure him but is soon confused by the playful pedantry of
Mr. Studley:
Our Lord, said Father Urban, isnt commending the steward for cooking the books, or even condoning this. Youll note this man is called the
unjust steward.
Yes, I know. said Mr. Zimmerman, but he still didnt like it.
And I think youll nd unjust means inaccurate, said Mr. Studley.
Theres a difference, you know.
Well, I dont know about that, said Father Urban. I know theres a difference, yes. Where they were now, Father Urban didnt know. Mr. Studley
not only made it seem that he and Father Urban were together but that he,
Mr. Studley, was, of the two of them, the sounder man. (220)
Urban is so off track in his approach to the text to begin with that Studleys
play on a single word derails his apologia. Studley is able to manipulate the
discussion so easily because the others are so eager to ignore the crucial ethical passages of the reading.
And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely:
for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children
of light. And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon
of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in
much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore
ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to
your trust the true riches? And if ye have not been faithful in that which
is another mans, who shall give you that which is your own? No servant
can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other;
or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God
and mammon. (Luke 16:813)
The difculty of the text lies in its paradoxical assertion of two contradictory morals: rst, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness and Ye cannot serve God and mammon. The rst moral appears to
gain subtle support in the 11th verse, which urges faithfulness to unrighteous
mammon as a sort of test of ones general ethical soundness. The knottiness
of this paradox begins to unravel, however, when one considers the rhetorical
context of the parables utterance and the relative position of the transcendent in measuring the ethical signicance of the worldly allegory.
Jesus tells this parable in the context of responding to the derision of
his ministry by the Pharisees.7 His audience in Luke 16 is not the people in
general but his disciples, troubled by the mockery of religious authorities.
161
This rhetorical context, in turn, structures the allegorical positions of the

characters in the fable. The lord is none other than God, the owner of the
true riches. The unjust (or, equally appropriate, inaccurate) steward is
the guardian of those riches, the priest or Pharisee. The debtors are those
sinners who receive their worldly accounting only from Gods steward.
With the transcendent clearly positioned, the ironic delivery of the lesson
becomes lucid. The Lord (God) commends his steward (the priest) for being
wise in mundane matters with the sarcastic qualier in their generation. In
the same vein, the Lord advises that the steward/priest make friends with
the Lords debtors, the unrepentant sinners, so that when you fail with
Me, they may receive you into everlasting habitationsthat is, in their
residence in hell. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Mr. Studley, contentedly pulling out tufts of Mr. Zimmermans grass, understands this message full well, but he prefers to play the devils advocate
and draw out his devout neighbors obsession with worldly interests. By proposing a spurious liberation theology reading of the passage,8 Studley exposes Zimmerman as the polemical spokesperson for mammon:
Mr. Studley yanked up a nice handful of Mr. Zimmermans grass and threw
it away. Look at it the right way or not at all, he said. You people are
always looking at things from your own view point. Youll never get it that
way, I can tell you. Look at it from the employees viewpoint. Christ was
always on the side of the employeethe little guy. Thats what Christianity
means. Thats what all your great religions mean. Thats why we fought
two major wars. Ask him, said Mr. Studley, referring to Father Urban.
Mr. Zimmerman started again. If somebody in bookkeeping tried
something like that on me, Id prosecute. Id have toor set a bad example.
See what I mean? Thats my point, he said, looking to his two friends for
support. (22021)
Even when it is not costing him, Zimmerman closes ranks with his class
interests, and he is so concerned with the punishment of the employee that
he fails to note the obvious gaps in Studleys reading, which ignores the applicability of this moral to the story and the comparisons in verses 10 and 11,
which hardly condone the employees theft. But, of course, Studleys real interlocutor is none other than the steward himself, Mister Urban.
No longer able to steer the conversation, Urban reects on his own understanding of the passage, one that, like his general spiritual outlook, contains
insight but is nonetheless hopelessly fragmented:
Ill grant its a difcult text, said Father Urban . . . and let it go at that.
Father Urban had some ideas of his own about this text. Our Lord, in Father Urbans opinion, had been dealing with some pretty rough customers
out there in the Middle East, the kind of people who wouldnt have been
162
at all distressed at the stewards conducteither that or people had been

a whole lot brighter in biblical times able to grasp a distinction then. It
had even entered Father Urbans mind that Our Lord, who, after all, knew
what people were like, may have been a little tired on the day he spoke this
parable. Sometimes, too, when you were trying to get through to a cold
congregation, it was a case of any port in a storm. Youd say things that
wouldnt stand up very well in print. (221)
Although he implies recognition of the texts meaningits construction

of a subtle distinctionhe ends up deriding, though more sympathetically
than the Pharisees of the Gospels (Luke 16:14), the Lords failure on the
day he spoke this parable. The scene at Mirror Lake concludes with a carnivalesque repartee in which Urbans equivocations are mercilessly parodied:
The man whose wife had brought the shortcake said, Father Tom just
skips it. Every year, he says, I come to it and I just skip it. It does more
harm than good, he says. So I just skip it.
Whos Father Tom? said Father Urban.
I think Ive met him, said Mr. Studley, from his prone position.9
Our pastor. He just skips it, said Mr. Shortcake.
Too bad Father Prosperus isnt here. Hed be able to tell us a thing or
two, Ill bet. This from Mrs. Potato Salad.
I guess he could at that, said Mrs. Zimmerman. Whos Father Prosperus? said Father Urban.
Our son, said Mrs. Zimmerman.
Your sons a priest?
Yes, hes a Dolomite father, said Mrs. Zimmerman. (22122)
Instead of recognizing his reection in Mirror Lake, however, Father

Urban merely mimics it:
That did it for Father Urban. There hadnt been much reason before to
hope that Mr. Zimmerman would make a benefactor for the Order of
St. Clement. Now there was none. (222)
In all fairness, Urban only went to Mirror Lake to befriend the mammon
of iniquity, not to contemplate his vocation. This theme of his vocation is
strongly sounded in the closing melody of the overture:
And still he found the time and energy to make friends, as enjoined by
Scripture, with the mammon of iniquity. (10)
Urban uses his native intelligence: [P]erhaps it was a job for the Jesuits (8)
to weave a clever theology, complete with edifying historical examples, around
this mission. That at least one critic follows Urban in his interpretation that
163
he is doing as Jesus advises in the puzzling passage from Luke that informs
the novel10 reveals that he is in good intellectual company and explains part
of Urbans dazzling appeal, both to his fellow ctional beings and the novels
readers.
The theological and historical rationales that Urban uses to gird his concept of vocation could be summed up as the middle way:
Charity toward all, even when a few sharks get in among the swimmers,
is always better than holier-than-thou singularity. That, roughly speaking,
was the mind of the Church. (97)
In practice, this means husbanding a diplomatic relationship with the rich

and powerful:
Not running off the mouth at every opportunity, but knowing when
to cast ones pearls, and howthat, in the best sense of the word, was
priestcraft. (14)
Urban is planning to write a book on this aspect of ecclesiastical history

to accompany his own history of conquests. Even his Brother Clementine,
the saintly and humble Father John, or Jack, reminds him of the pedigree of
such behavior: [T]here were a number of occasions when Our Lord dined
with the rich and well-to-doPharisees and the like (24).
Urban sees church history in terms of such diplomatic successes and
blunders:
Father Urban felt that Clement VII had been the wrong pope to deal with
Henry VIII, and he wondered what the feeling was in Heaven on this point.
Centuries later, Pius IX, who had begun so well, had thrown down his cards
in a t of self-righteousness, and the Church was still trying to get back
in the game. A bad mistake, that, since it had left the other players at each
others mercyand thus had prepared the way for World War I, the Russian Revolution, Mussolini and Hitler, World War II, and now the bomb.11
Father Urban had preached a great many thrilling sermons on saints
who had really asked for the martyrs crown, but he believed that there
were others from whose lives we might learn more. (276)
It is with just such bait that Urban hooks his big one, Billy Cosgrove:
Billy . . . had warmly praised the sermonin which Father Urban had roared
and whispered and crooned about Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola and
Clement of Blois and Louis of France and Edward of England and Charles
of the Holy Roman Empireit was he who, you might say, owned and operated Europe but who, in the end, desired only the society of monks.
Billy becomes Urbans Charles the Bold.
164
In his early encounters with Billys egoism and violence, he remembers

that some of the most powerful gures in history had been spoiled children
like Billy, and he hopes to make Billy a Constantine whose legions would
come later, now there was only his chauffeur (14). Urban later dreams that
Mrs. Thwaites, another rich conquest, is an old queen in late medieval times.
That was a time of uncertainty when church and state were mingled, when
kings and prelates were selling out right and left. He imagined himself as a
tall handsome cleric on business of church and state (247).
These powerful gures, Billy Cosgrove and Mrs. Thwaites, are the two
debtors of his Lord to whom Urban ministers his discounted bills of ethical
credit. Right from the start, Urban catches glimpses of the price involved in
befriending the mammon of iniquity when riding with a recklessly driving
Billy. Stopped by a squad car, Billy:
smiled at the ofcers andpointed to Father Urban in his clericals. The
squad car dropped away and the red convertible went on for a while as
before. I hope you didnt mind that, Billy said presently. He was now
driving at a reduced speed, and Father Urban took this into consideration.
Oh, I guess not, he replied, with a laugh. He had minded, though, and
still did. (23)
Nevertheless, Urban hews to the middle way and keeps the situation in the
hazy focus of historical distance. That moment recalls Ignazio Silone, with
an ironic ethical inversion, Spinas fear of hearing the confessions of the peasants and their hopeless lives of poverty. Urban reveals the myopia required
by his methods:
Billy, a widower and childless, didnt seem to have a problem in the world.
In a waybecause so many problems were simply insolubleFather Urban
was glad. (5)
Keeping his benefactors in this sort of moral limbo is the only possible
basis for continuing the relationships, but even a priest as cynical as Monsignor Renton draws the line at a Mrs. Thwaites:
Father Urban felt that Monsignor Renton was probably right about
Mrs. Thwaitesup to a point. After that, there was no knowing, and, in
any case . . . Who are we to judge her? he said. What if she is only motivated by old age and fear of the Lord? Thats enough, thank God. It takes
all kinds to make the Church.
God is not mocked.
The womans a daily communicant. That should count for something.
God is not mocked.12 (138)
165
Urban, however, continues to discount her ethical debt, recalling that

he had heard Mrs. Thwaitess confession once: [He] had talked over her
chances in the next world, giving her all the reassurance he couldwhich
wasnt quite enough, he felt (165).
The reward for all of his good intentions is to be given a tour of
Mrs. Thwaitess eternal habitation, her underground bomb shelter, as if to
say he too will be received there after failing in his vocation (244).
In his use of Luke 16, Powers constructs a narrative sermon on its meaning. This exegesis, however, is performed in the same sort of earthy medium
Jesus chose for his parable of the two vocations for stewards, the hard-edged
realities of the business world: The one is clear and compromised; the other
is merely suggested and amounts to a negation of compromise beyond narrative representation. That makes up the repertory of spiritual vocations after
disenchantment.
VOCATION AFTER DISENCHANTMENT

They (the Clementines) were like the blind men in the fable who, touching
the elephants body here and there, could not agree about it. The elephant,
in the case of the blind men in the upper room, was their vocation. (139)
Carol Iannone, writing about Powerss novel, makes what is perhaps the
most damning criticism one can inveigh against a serious novel: that it falls
short of universality.13
It cannot precisely be said, however, that Powers transcends his Catholic
material to give it universal applicability. So closely is the novel bound
to the history of the Church, to the perennial antagonisms among levels
of its hierarchy, to the relationship of priests to their vows, to certain
insider jokes, and so on, that probably few would recognize Father Urban
as Everyman.
Although Iannone blames this failure on the quantity of church-related

details in the narrative, the judgment follows hard on her major qualitative
reading of the novel. She argues that the novel concludes with a vertical transcendence of the protagonist, an interpretation that I would see as itself an
adequate basis for dismissing its claim to universality in the radically secular
context of a disenchanted social world. But the issue of Urbans death in
the nal section of this chapter renders a different conclusion. Iannones criticism of the novels bonds to the church, however, does raise serious questions
about Powerss choice of protagonist. Is a priestand not merely a priest, but
one in a particularly obscure monastic orderan appropriate vehicle for a
social novel of middle-class America in the age of Eisenhower?14
166
Lukcs observes that the narration of a unique individuals accommodations to his or her world is only of factual interest unless the process reveals
the possibility of the conventional worlds being penetrated by meaning.
Powerss choice of protagonist reveals much more than the idiosyncrasies of
this poor specialist, as Urban refers to himself and as some critics like to
think of Powers:
Powers specialty, moreover, is not merely the priesthood per se but the
priesthood as practiced in the cities and small towns of Minnesota and the
Midwest.15
However, Mary Gordon writes in the introduction to the rst edition

J. F. Powers is one of those master writers whose genius expresses itself in
the description of a small area perfectly understood.
More than that. The Clementines are no more simply a broken-down religious order than Sinclair Lewiss Main Street is a story about a Minnesota
town. Urban and his fate constitute a portrait of the Catholic Church in the
United States painted with such subtle hues and comic grace that one is
tempted to laugh before one realizes whose picture it is.
Powerss choice is an intuitively brilliant response to both the crisis of the
social novel and to the disenchantment of the world. Urban is not only a representation of an archaic and dying institution, the Order of Saint Clement,
he is also a person capable of dreaming perfectly a successful life and making
us believe he could have attained ita life with no regrets and, hence, with
no meaning either. But something unspoken drives Urban to combine his
striving for success with a desperate desire to enchant the world.16 His fantasy world suggests a romantic imagination on a par with the knight of the
doleful countenance. This active imagination is easily overlooked as Urban
wheels and deals his way through Minnesota, but it is the narratives literary
anchor.
The problem for the social novel, and one that grew considerably more
acute with the growth and prosperity of the middle class in the 1950s, was
that of maintaining its orientation to meaning and its signicance beyond
that of mere satire.17 Through the gure of the Clementine father, Powers
seeks to restore to the social novel the comic status, in which humor serves
meaning as well as critique, so central to the novels history as a form. There
is much satire in Morte DUrban, but the comic balance of the narrative keeps
the double irony of the novel form active.
To comprehend Powerss dilemma fully, compare his social world and his
choice of genre with those of Silone. In the 1930s, Silone could still nd his
U.S. reection in John Steinbeck or Michael Gold, but in the 1950s United
167
States, Powers may have been the only echo possible. Certainly, Silones world,
both social and spiritual, seems remarkably enchanted compared with that of
Powers. Perhaps it would be unfair to Silone to say that he ends up playing
Feliciano de Silva18 to Powerss Cervantes. Nevertheless, if Silone could narrate spiritual vocation as an ideal, Powers can only do so as the Unseen.
There are two aspects of this unseen elephant of vocation. The rst is Urbans dual desire as a white-collar cleric to combat the U.S. religious climate
dominated by a Protestantism so closely integrated with economic patronage and to ght the disenchantment of the world through an odd combination of public one-upmanship and private escapism. The second aspect is the
possibility of spirituality through withdrawalnow given the social status
of failurea possibility only briey glimpsed in the novel and in the vocation
of the novelist.
WHITE COLLAR
But one must ask every man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can
stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you,
without becoming embittered and without coming to grief ? Naturally, one
always receives the answer: Of course, I live only for my calling. Yet,
I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.19
At the heart of every novel lies a paradox: In Morte DUrban, it is Urbans

loyalty to the Clementines. Harvey Roche seems to have been driven into the
unlikely vocation of Father Urban by a brief, almost perverse mood of resistance to the domination of Protestantism in the midwestern United States.
Although this may explain something of Father Urbans origins, it does not
explain his fascination, his charisma as a novelistic protagonist. Rather, this
relationship to Protestantism shapes the context of Urbans ambition and
his sense of limits. His vocation, on the other hand, is a comic quest to nd
a space for mystery within that world, a quest that is comic because Urban
seeks mystery in the hopeless form of enchantment, in fantasy rather than
in the Unseen.
In his essay on The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max
Weber exposes the mutual inuences between changes in religious institutions and socioeconomic structures. Whereas the rise of Protestantism can
be clearly linked to the shift from a traditional feudal and guild economy to
one based on the market and prot, changes within the institutions of the
Catholic Church can be viewed as a related struggle to adapt. Urban certainly feels that the church has not done enough in this regard. Father Urban
could not see how the Catholic Church among large corporations could be
rated second to Standard Oil in efciency, as Time magazine had reported.
168
Urban struggles with Father Wilfrid, the steward of his monasterythe

Hill. His confrontations give parodic expression to this frustration. Urban
cannot help comparing the economy at the Hill with that of real institutions
when Wilfrid argues at length about saving 30 cents by phoning station-tostation rather than person-to-person. Wilfrid was also a monk who felt that
money should be no object when it comes to national defense (4546).
The comparison, however, leaves little room for meaningful ethical action.
Later, when the Hill is threatened by competition from other ordersthe
Jesuits and the BenedictinesWilfrid longs for a return to a more feudal socioeconomic order. He wants borders to protect their territory (62). When
it comes to the struggle for economic power, Urban knows that the Protestants must serve as his role models.
Weber analyzed both the theological and practical reasons for the success for which Urban envies them. Theologically, Protestantism took a more
ascetic attitude toward this world than Catholicism. This attitude led to the
devaluation of earthly beauty and good works. The ironic result was a higher
valuation of rational behavior and professional success as emblems of ones
grace.20 Over time, however, Protestant sects became intimately connected
with the world of commerce in a way that could yield economic rewards
for their members. This interconnectedness became most pronounced in
the United States where no previous economic and social norms prevented
the simultaneous competition of sects and businesses. But the question, To
which church do you belong? is telling to determine ones credit worth.21
Similar to, To which country club do you belong?:
Admission to the congregation is recognized as an absolute guarantee of
the moral qualities of a gentleman, especially of those qualities required in
business matters. . . . Only those men had success in business who belonged
to Methodist or Baptist or other sects. . . . He found not only easy contact
with sect members but, above all, he found credit everywhere. . . . A fairly
reputable sect would only accept for membership one whose conduct
made him appear to be morally qualied.22
Why then, aside from the obvious ethnic prejudices, were the Catholics at
a disadvantage? Protestant afliation meant a certicate of moral qualication and especially business morals. This stands in contrast to membership
in a church into which one is born and which lets grace shine over the
righteous and unrighteous alike.
Afliation with the church that one is born into is obligatory. Alone it
proves nothing about the members qualities. To make matters worse, Catholic mores were harshest in regard to those areas of personal conduct least
oriented to business conduct: contraception, masturbation, and remarriage, for
example. Weber notes that, religious organizations that facilitated remarriage
had great attraction.23
169
Urban knows that relations between confessional afliation and business

matters are not so smooth or dependable in his church. Father Urban tells
the rector of the monastery that it can sometimes be a mistake to count on a
Catholic concern (54).
But even if Urban cannot share in the same material rewardsbusiness
contacts and creditworthinessas the Protestants, he can still create the
illusion that he belongs to the same exclusive club. Urban is obsessed with
competition between Catholic orders and even other denominations for the
higher type of patron and convert. This snobbishness even applies to vocations, although here Urban meets with dubious results. The novice master
talked of beeng up the Order. Father Urbans idea was to raise the tone
by packing the Novitiate with exceptional men. He had overshot the mark
on occasiontwo of his recruits had proved to be homosexual and one homicidal (9).24
On his excursions beyond the church, it is unclear whether Urban is acting like a Protestant to win over non-Catholics or whether he is using his
status as a priest (but a friendly one) to escape the connes of the church.
This infatuation with the public vocation, one that puts him in close company
with Fulton Sheen, with whom he is twice compared (27, 113), and Andrew
Greeley, also ranks him alongside the Protestant evangelists such as Billy
Graham and Oral Roberts, with whom he is also compared. His specialty, like
that of his mentor Father Placidus, is oratory. Again, it is Weber who notes
that along with the market and democracy, the West has seen the rise of the
demagogue as a gure of moral and political authority.25
In one particularly revealing scene, Urban, who tries to talk and smile at
the same time, a thing hed noticed Protestants did better than Catholics
(175), speaks to the Great Plains Commercial Club, in which he takes their
side against Wilf s campaign to put Christ back into Christmas. During the
question period, he distances himself farther and farther from his church to
win over the audience to him personally. In response to every question, he
begins, Im glad you asked that. Even when the questions turn to church
authorities, he is accommodating and gracious until the discussion turns on
belief that it is going to rain because the Pope says so? At that point, Urban
had reached his limit of endurance:
[T]he question was tasteless and irrelevant, but Father Urban smiled. . . .
He had no choice but to shoot the woman down. As a Catholicthat is,
as one who respects proper authorityIm afraid Id be more inclined to
trust the weather bureau in such a matter. (8688)
Urbans sermons generally reect polished Protestant oratory; this, however, also reects a deep bitterness toward the dominant society under
his interdenominational style. That bitterness, with its origin in Urbans
170
youththe Ku Klux Klan cross burning he witnessed comes to mind (68)

is expressed here in his contempt for the very audience he is trying to win
over, whether Protestant, agnostic, or mainstream Catholic.26
Urban always combines a thirst for applause and respect with aggression
a trait common in the clergytoward any convenient victim. He tortures
them publicly when possible, privately when he cannot. This resentment toward society that which his desire for popularity nds archetypical expression
in his reaction to the reception he gets in Duesterhaus: [I]f this was how the
town welcomed a priest . . . there was plenty of work to do there (30). Father
Urban has no intention, while avenging himself on society, of being a little
Tarcisius martyr for the church or any cause.27
So why is he a monk? Powers tells us that he fell under the spell of a certain Clementine father, but what is the symbolic signicance of that choice
in the novel? At the sociological level, Urbans vocation puts him in the awkward position of being a success-oriented white collar while wearing the
Roman collar. This double signication of the collar suggests deeper homologies between the church and a hostile Protestant society than are evident in
the Harvey Roche story.
Historically, the monastic orders rst cultivated a rationalized life of economic production as a basis for ethical contemplation much like that which
became the basis of the Protestant ethic. Nevertheless, the monastic order is
closer to the medieval guild, with its emphasis on a collective economy, than
to the Protestant churches, which measured worth and wealth in individualistic terms.28 Urban has little in common with either of these ways. He mocks
the economy of the novitiate and a little bit of community life went a long
way with him (7). And he hurls the harshest epithet he can throw at the
Protestant ethic and his fellow clergyPuritanismimplying a narrowness
of both mores and economic vision (16, 231).
What Urban strives to be is a good company man, combining the loyalty
to the collective required of the white collar with the individualism of an
employee seeking to be a winner within the company.29 By striving to be a
successful white-collar man as a monk, Urban seeks the only form of resistance to his society he can nd: a strange sort of have-your-cake-and-eat-ittoo form of revenge. Ironically, it is not society that ghts him, but his own
church, and it does so in two ways: by the incompetence of his colleagues
among the Clementines and by the hostility and competitiveness of other
Catholic institutions.30
The rule of mediocrity and incompetence in the Clementines, which Urban
nds so limiting, is, in fact, a function of an institution that seeks to subordinate (rather than exploit) individual ambition to an appearance of a consensual will. Weber noted this as a structural element even in papal elections in
which the cardinal thought to be the favored candidate seldom wins.31 As the
ancient saying goes, He who enters the conclave a pope exits a cardinal.
171
Urban nds this pattern to hold true throughout his order, from the inexplicable election of Boniface to his feeling that indigence was too often a
cloak for incompetence (35). This cynicismFather Urban had long since
stopped looking to his superiors for gratitude (177)eventually feeds a resentment on his part that poisons his sense of vocation. He harbors a malicious attitude even toward the survival of the order. He is willing to go down
with it (84).
Urbans attitude of social superiority shows itself in his regard for the
people who come to his retreats, whom he demeans as Teutonic and Central European types. Instead of the wealthy audience he wants, he draws
only the ham-and-sausage-supper horseshoe pitchers who set the wrong
tone (179).
But almost as discouraging to Urban as his own orders incompetence is
the resistance the secular clergy accord his efforts. In the course of the novel,
he enters two such conicts: the one with Monsignor Renton over building
a new church at Saint Monicas parish (chapters 7 and 8) and the other with
the bishop over the ownership of the golf course at the Hill (chapter 11).
Although he wins both, he does so without any sense of satisfaction. The
reward for winning is never worldly success. Rather a sense of loss is the result of both encounters: the death of Father Phil and Urbans dismissal from
Saint Monicas in the former and the concussion and permanent headaches
from the bishops golf ball in the latter. Urbans entrepreneurial and publicrelations skills win him momentary applause but no institutional recognition. So what keeps Urban and, of greater importance to the signicance of
the novel, the reader interested in serving the church?
Max Weber diagnosed the ambiguous position of the church in our disenchanted time in a way much more true to Powerss (and Urbans) worldview
than to Silones. For Silone, both spirituality and history are rendered enchanted with meaningful possibilities. Precisely because of his clear-sighted
disenchantment, Urban stands squarely in the abyss of that ambiguity,
thereby offering Catholic and non-Catholic, believer and nonbeliever, a sympathetic yet challenging vantage point from which to observe their world.
More mysterious and signicant to the force of the novel than the question of his conversion at the end is Urbans faith throughout the narrative.
If he often seems to lack faith, it is because of his need to measure up to
workaday existence. Weber saw this confrontation between faith and the demands of socioeconomic structures as a struggle between Christianity and a
disenchanted polytheism:
Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives
and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. What is
hard for modern man . . . is to measure up to workaday existence.32
172
Urban, a priest with a gift for sociological insight that surpasses even his
entrepreneurial skill, is an appropriate protagonist for the narration of this
struggle. Urban applies this social insight with the rigor of an ethnographer
in the eld when he makes his appraisal of parish life in the United States.
Parishioners resist a pastor who encourages them to think for themselves as
Sheen encouraged his TV viewers. Pastors resist people who try to raise the
status of parishioners as Greeley encouraged his readers. These agitators are
products of higher Catholic education or converts. He discounts the so-called
ideal parishes.
The most successful parishes were those where more was going on than
met the eye, where, behind the scenes, a gifted pastor or assistant pulled
the strings. God, it seemed, ran those parishes, which was as it should
be. Wherever parishionership became a full-time occupation, whether it
consisted in liturgical practices or selling chances on a new car, the wrong
people took over. (15253)
Similarly, a sociologist could have written his assessment of the U.S. seminaries. They are institutions, Turning out policemen, disc jockeys, and an
occasional desert father (167). In it, too, however, is the crucial recognition
and respect for the mystery still adhering to our godless and prophetless
time.33 In the light and comic yet striking addition of that occasional desert
father resides the last refuge of the irrational and the Unseen. The source of
Urbans own power, it adheres in his loyalty to the Clementines as a vehicle
for a quixotic struggle against disenchantment.
Urbans desire for enchantment takes two forms, the one comically absurd, the other containing the grain of truth that keeps the scales of judgment
hanging over him in perfect balance. The rst is his refusal of our time, his
retreat into a medieval fantasy world when saints were bold (294). The
second is his subtle yet conscious awareness of the charism lurking within
his vocation.
Urban veils his mission to the mammon of iniquity in a fantasy of feudal
relations between clergy and benefactor. In Billy he thinks he has found the
perfect King Arthur to serve, the charismatic warlord whose power is not
yet rational and managerial but still personal, arbitrary, and, therefore, in
need of spiritual guidance. Billy conducts himself with the noblesse oblige of
a Dark Age seigneur and barbaric independencedrowning a deer with his
bare hands. He is hardly recognizable as a modern businessman. The only
glimpse we even get of his business is an oblique reference to his having the
heavy stockholders loyalty to the railroads (270). Is he a racketeer? Urban
asks no questions.
Billy treats Urban as his personal priest, and Urban cultivates this archaic
relationship, even though he recognizes the inadequacy of Billys noblesse
173
oblige in practice. Billy sends his broken model railroad trains, which he enjoys crashing, to another set of his dependents, the invalids in the veterans
hospital.
Nevertheless, Urban accepts Billys feudal contract. He supplies the ofce space in Chicago, a color TV set for the invalids at the monastery, and
a check made out to Urban for the entire cost of the golf course in exchange
for three cords of oak rewood annually and prayer. More ominous is Billys
desire to perpetuate relations of dependence. He teases about ways the Order
could make money, like the Dalmatian fathers who were selling hams. But
Billy had no condence in priests who went into business (45).
On one disastrous shing trip, Urban discovers another such feudal patronage system, one in which Billy and Doc Strong subsidize Henns Haven
in return, it appears, for sexual favors from Mother. Doc Strong has access
to the late Mother Henn, while Billy is the current lover of Honey Henn (262,
27273). This arrangement and the Tarzan-like attack on the deer prove too
much for Urbans overstrained powers of imagination.
Urban makes a similar effort to cast a spell of medieval enchantment over
Mrs. Thwaites, with similar results. In addition to his fantasy of being a
papal emissary, he tries to play Saint Francis for her benet. He wears his
cassock and walks under the trees on her estate:
When he saw Mrs. Thwaites watching him from one of her windows, and
tried to get a squirrel to take a green acorn out of his hand, but it wouldnt,
nor would a dove. (244)
In these episodes of theatrical medievalism, Powers represents Urban

with Cervantean irony. Only in the golf tournament with the bishops champion, Father Feld, does Urban fully share in that ironic self-consciousness.
Here, Urban recognizes that the metaphor of an Arthurian joust may be
accurate, but it does not serve any kind of spiritual vocation:
In Father Urbans mind, informed as it was by a good deal of solid reading,
the match between him and Father Feld took on the appearance of a judicial duel. Victory for Father Urban in the eld, however, would not mean
victory for his cause. That was the hell of it. Father Urban had read of
many ordeals by combat (in the dim past even religious men, unfortunately,
had sometimes appealed to the God of Battles for justice), but he doubted
that history would reveal a parallel case. (234)
Although he can never succeed in becoming, like Twains Connecticut

Yankee, the boss in this archaic court, Urban allows himself to be inspired
by his mentors all-American sloganBe a winner! (236)and in this key
moment we see the subterranean connection between his medievalism and
his Americanism. They combine in a mutual irony that can hardly serve his
vocation.
174
What does serve Urbans vocation, at least according to its own ambiguous logic, is his sense of its charisma and mystery. Even some skeptical clergy
must concede him this point. When Urban brags about his ability to preach
a clean mission without razzmatazz, one assistant priest agrees. Another
assistant also responds, Yes, and thats why I cant understand it (28).
Urban may not have the compensations of the successful businessman nor
the support of a rational institution, but he does have a blend of personal and
religious charisma that he hopes to use in the last resort to turn his wealthy
charges onto the path of righteousness. No matter how ruthlessly or cynically pursued his projects, Urban never loses sight of the fact that they are
ultimately seless and otherworldly. Whether he is dealing in real estate or
souls, Urban, like Andrew Greeley, lends the patina of transcendent mystery
to all of his activities. We get a glimpse of this blend of self-condence and
altruism in Urbans attitude toward the young novices with whom he took
time to walk and talk in the hope of breathing quality into them. He could
hope and pray (199).
Urbans consciousness of the value of this charisma also helps explain his
choice of vocation. When he encounters the hostility of the secular clergy, he
pays homage to the advantages of being a Catholic priest and a monk. The
lower clergy were seen as lukewarm less traveled, less learned, and less
spiritual than the monks:
In short, they know that they suffer from a deciency of mystery and romance, as the Protestant clergy do, compared with them. (178)
Here, Urbans medievalism nds a more substantive, if subtler, basis.

The monastic order has that special charisma of the male community. They
are the Knights Templars, the Arthurian Round Table. In his essay on the
Arthurian romance, Erich Auerbach observes the special charismatic appeal
of the knightly ethos:
[I]t has a great power of attraction which, if I mistake not, is due especially
to two characteristics which distinguish it: it is absolute, raised above all
earthly contingencies, and it gives those who submit to its dictates the feeling that they belong to a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity.34
The possibility of attaining this ethos provides the veiled object of Urbans
desire and the key to Powerss use of the Arthurian reference. Urbans grandiose hope for a vocation that is both meaningful and successful, however, is
the source of Urbans isolation and his tragic-comic death. Urbans fate is
that of a self-conscious Quixote as Auerbach points out:
Don Quixotes rst setting forth . . . is a perfect parodyprecisely because
the world which Don Quixote encounters is not one especially prepared for
the proving of a knight but is a random, everyday, real world. (137)
175
It is the supplementing Urban is forced into doing that gives Powerss novel
its force and Urban his picaresque appeal.
Powers found his protagonist, his problematic hero, in the type of the
modern so-called organization man situated in an archaic order of a premodern institution. But he does not leave the denition of vocation solely in his
protagonists hands. Urban is only one of the blind men around the elephant,
albeit the one through whose hands we most feel what it is like. If there is an
ideal of spiritual vocation comparable with that in Silones world, it resides
far off at the margins of the narrative, just as it does in the society narrated.
Out of focus as it may be, this ideal still has a determinant inuence on any
understanding of the life and death of Urban. I call it, with intended Weberian overtones, failure as a vocation.
FAILURE AS A VOCATION
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the
ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into
the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct
and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art
is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today it is only
within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in
pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic
pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like
a rebrand, welding them together.35
When Urban refers to himself as this poor specialist (200), he is playing

to the crowd, and his modesty rings false. His goal in such self-presentations
before the world is summed up in his success with the housekeeper at Saint
Monicas: If he in any way fell short of the ideal (and of course he did), Mrs.
Burns didnt know it (14647).
But what is this ideal he falls short of ? It is not the heroism of Monsignor Morez who, admonished a hooded mob from the porch, then red off a
shotgun, which did the job as words hadnt, and then broke a bone in his foot
kicking over the ery cross (68). That sort of act was only possible in a lost
age of heroes as remote from Urbans world as Homeric Greece. The ideal is
expressed only in the pianissimo still, small voice of God.
Urban certainly does not recognize the presence of any ideal in the Order
of Saint Clement as an institution. Its failings are the result of a merely
worldly incompetence. He thinks they live under a curse of mediocrity: The
Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all (89).
Their social failure is not the result of an excess of spirituality either.
Urban recognizes a certain basic pettiness at work in his superiors: [T]here
176
are those who resent excellence of any kind, having none themselves (72).
Urban harbors his own resentment.
Between the resentment of thwarted success and the resentment of the
incompetent lies the humility of failure as a vocation. Father JohnJackis
the exception to the rule of resentment among the clergy in Morte DUrban.
Jack is the one Clementine for whom, in a way, [Urban] had a lot of respect
(15). Even while pitying himreally a hidden form of self-pityUrban recognizes without qualications that of course, his spiritual life was good
(94). Jack has the crucial role in the novel of suggesting the presence of a
lived spirituality, even if it is often unseen and always difcult to discern. Its
nearly invisible quality, to Jack as well in his holy navet, is symbolized by
Jacks own blindness: Without his bifocals, he was almost blind (15). Nevertheless, he is the only one of the blind men . . . touching the elephants body
who at least sees his own limitations.
Jacks spiritual accomplishment is played entirely in pianissimo in simply
cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations.36 The power of his spirituality nds full expression in the chapter A Couple of Nights Before Christmas in which he gives the resentful star and the resentful incompetent
Urban and Wilf respectivelya lesson in the meaning of Christmas that has
nothing to do with its exploitation by shopkeepers or preachers.
As in Silones novel, game playing becomes a useful allegory through
which to reveal the limitations of man-made rules and the truly human capacity to transcend them. Wilf and Urban are locked into a gaming mentality
in which all is measured by victory and defeat. On this occasion, it is Wilf
who shows a greater awareness of what is at stake between them when he
enters a discussion on chess and checkers. Urban and Jack are playing checkers but have never played chess. Wilf claims that although the boards are the
same, the counters are different. Altogether different. Its a different game.
Urban intends to up the ante by saying, Id say the principles the same.
Wilf has the last word. Id say the principles the same in all games. Father
Urban couldnt think of a single exception, try as he might (9495). That
principle is none other than Urbans cherished motto, Be a winner.
Then Urban discovers that he and Wilf are engaged in a erce competition, one that began with Urbans betrayal before the Commercial Club
of Wilf s campaign to put Christ back into Christmas. When Urban begins proudly to survey the nativity scene Billy sent him, he realizes that
the bambino was missing and wants to know why. Wilf replies, Hes not
born yet (98), and thereby lets Urban know that he has gotten revenge by
taking Christ out of Urbans Christmas. Urban is immediately engrossed in
this phase of the game initiated by Wilf. Urban does the only thing could do:
nothing; he sits down (9899).
At rst, Urban, like a child, resents and is angry at Jacks passivity and
blindness. Why does Jack not say something? He is chicken; he hates trouble.
177
When Jack starts to investigate the scene of the crime for himself, Urban
snaps at him, You can see its not there. But when Urban, waiting for Wilf s
move, resumes playing checkers with Jack, he ponders his friends qualities:
It occurred to him that Jack would have been an entirely different sort of
person if hed handled himself as he did his checkers. Jack could have been
a big success in lifeand not a very nice person to know. (99)
Urban realizes that the Jack he wishes were on his team would no longer
have the very qualities he cherishes in him.
Jack, however, is in the game, and his rst move is not absurd chatter but
a subtle feint. At this point, Urban, and the reader, cannot grasp the method
in Jacks apparent madness because Jack is playing by a set of rules based on
a different principle than that of Be a winner. Jack muses toward Wilf:
I see what you mean, Father, he said, and cleared his throat again. But
Ive been wondering if the shepherds should be present yet. Or even Mary
and Josephin the attitudes we see them in, I mean. And the Magi. The
animals, yes, but not running around in circles. (99100)
Bafed and feeling defeated, Urban asks himself what he was doing there:
Why had he been cast into outer darkness, thrown among fools and failures? But to Urbans surprise Jack has actually turned the tide in Urbans
favor: Wilf reached up into the branches of the tree and brought out the
bambino and put it back where it belonged.
Urban is not grateful, however, because Jack has set things right in a way
that precludes any division into winners and losers. Wilf makes his next
move. Plugging in the crib, he says, Just shows how wrong we can be sometimes. Father Urban rejects any thought that We had been wrong and
continues his game of checkers with Jack with a vengeance, only to realize
that Jack let him win. Jack was satised. There was peace even Father Urban
could accept (100101).
In this intimate scene, Jack reveals the ideal of spiritual vocation, an ideal
that can only be played in pianissimo in Urbans world. This scene is also the
only time Urban grants Jack such charism. Usually, his resentment gets the
better of him, as, for example, in their encounter after both have received notice of their transfers to the monastery. When Urban witnesses Jacks humble resignation, he knows it is the better way, but he thinks it is easier for
Jack, who has nothing to lose. Jack mistakes Urbans bitter mood as a show
of sympathy and brotherly love:
I just want to say that in a thing like this I dont much care what happens
to me, but its nice to know somebody else does. (22)
178
Even then, Urban belittles his generous companion and quickly buries the
glimmer of the spiritual ideal he sees under a contempt for worldly failure (25).
Later, after the Christmas chapter, Urban and Wilf begin another rivalry,
but this time Urban dismisses Jacks peacemaking as simple ignorance. Wilf
tries to steal Urbans thunder when Billy Cosgrove gives the monastery a
TV set. Jack attempts to make peace, but Urban will have none of it, this time
dismissing him: You mean well, Im sure. Jack did not know Billy Cosgrove
(11011).
Although Jacks wisdom still peers through, he is beginning to disintegrate (his rattling cup) under the ironic gaze of the narrative itself.37 This
narrative must strike a bargain, like Urban, with a disenchanted world and its
often mocking principle of Be a winner, if it is to exist at all.
This narrative irony joins forces with Urbans acerbic wit (always an irresistible invitation to the reader to laugh along), pushing Jack beyond the
pale of sympathy:
[A]t the mention of Our Lord, Father Urban saw Jack drop his hands and
take leave of his senses. (114)
At such a point, we remember Jack as the man who gets chewed out for putting on another mans trousers (108) and who sets out to write a scholarly
childrens edition of Le Morte DArthur (246) rather than as the Yuletide saint
of the fth chapter. In the visible social world of Morte DUrban, Jacks vocation cannot avoid a quixotic appearance.
URBANE CELIBACY: GOOD CARS

AND EVIL WOMEN
He got out of the car, took off his coat, rabat, and collar. . . . Then he got
in, started the motor, which had a plummy sound he loved, shifted himself
into a slouch, and, with his head resting easily to one side as if he were
dreaming . . . 38
Father Urban loves good cars. He also loves power. Cars are the ultimate
expression of possessive individualism. Father Urbans missions to the mammon of iniquity always begin with cars being put at his disposal and always
end with the withholding of that privilege at an especially awkward moment.
But cars also symbolize sexual power in Morte DUrban. Urbans celibacy
meets sexual temptation in the sensual seats of sporty cars.
Perhaps the most difcult area of Powerss novel to explore is the structure of celibacy and the vision of sexuality implicit in Urbans vocation. Iannone argues that there really is not that much to look into. She observes:
Powers priests do not suffer from sexual repression or from closet homosexuality. They are manly (or boyish) men with mostly real if not always
179
very inspired vocations who enjoy smoking, drinking, sports, and a good
game of cards. They like being priests, mean to keep their vows, and try to
handle temptation when they are able to see it.39
This is very much in accord with the public-relations picture the church still
strives to project even after the crisis of sexual abuse of minors has disabused
most of the public of that asexual scene.
Urbans celibacy, however, hardly conforms to Iannones simple and unproblematic summation. The centrality of the scene in the tower with Sally
Hopwood alone would suggest great signicance and complexity lurking
behind Powerss only apparently offhand representation of sexual conict.
First, the institution of celibacy holds an uncertain position in Urbans
disenchanted social world. Urban does have attitudes and strategies that he
uses to support his practice of celibacy, but his supports are not those of an
achieved and integrated celibate. His practice is maintained with difculty
and much regret.
There are two sexually charged relationships in the novel, both between
Urban and the women with good cars. His irtation with Sylvia Bean reveals
the workaday practice of Urbans celibacy, and the critical encounter with
Sally Hopwood exposes, through its magical, dreamlike narration, the depths
of Urbans spiritual crisis through the allegory of a failed celibacynot failed
in the esh but in the spirit.
When Powers introduces the poverty of the Clementines, he subtly reminds us that the churchs sexual teachings have been left behind in a world of
economic prosperity and liberalizing mores. The old building occupied by
the Clementines had been in receivership for years and looked it, looked
condemned, in fact. The Clementines were on the fth oor. The previous
tenant, a publisher of sexual-science books, had prospered and moved.
The same forces that are driving the church to rationalize its administrative and economic structure have called into question the legitimacy of the
doctrine of celibacy. Early Christianity, which came into being in a major
spiritual revolution, saw celibacy as an extraordinary charism that no set of
rules could either mandate or contain.40 The transformation of the church
into a dominant institution of society, however, required the discipline and
laws Weber calls the routinization of charisma.41 As an institution whose
legitimacy, like that of the other power centers of feudal society, was based
on traditional and patriarchal authority, the church needed to consolidate its
sexual teachings as a regularized body of law that was incontrovertible and
one that served the lines of a patriarchal control outside family lineage.42
To survive the transition from a feudal to a capitalist society, a traditional
institution like the church had to shift its legitimacy to a more modern basis.
Even if the content of the churchs teachings remains based on mystery, the
management of the church as an institution had to become administratively
180
bureaucratic and economically rational. The difculty for the doctrine of celibacy in this transition is whether it, too, can nd a rational basis in a new
economic and social order. For this reason, the debate around celibacy in
todays church often takes the form of a struggle between traditional and
rational positions.43
Urbans own rational practice of celibacy is based on his recognition of
the power and charisma it can lend to the supposed celibate. Erving Goffman
has noted the value of systems of self-concealmentmystication, manners,
and, we might add as an especially rigorous case, celibacy, in which the individuals sexuality remains a secret world, as tools of establishing personal
power. Self-concealment serves, among other purposes, that of preserving
a sort of ascendancy over the unsophisticated,44 or what could be called the
uninitiated. Urban maintains his celibate practice with the organization mans
loyalty, a loyalty that seeks institutional rewards in return for personal sacrice. These personal rationalizations of celibate practice force Urban into a
lonely struggle with the irrational aspects of traditional disciplinewhat he
calls the churchs Puritanism and with an internalized set of conicting supports for that practice.
Urban rejects Puritanism in favor of a casual sociability with Catholics and
non-Catholics alike. But behind his sociability lurks one of the same attitudes
typical of that Puritanism: a profound misogyny. The use of misogyny as
a defense, a sign of an immature sexuality and a fragile celibate practice,
combines dangerously with his gregariousness, propelling him into sexually charged and destructive relationships with women so common among
Catholic priests.45 This reality is diametrically opposed to Greeleys romantic assumption that a woman who has a conding relationship enhances the
relationship of her and her husband.
Urban gives the impression of having been previously able to avoid such
situations through a highly mobile lifestyle supported by a condent sense
of achievement in his work. The crisis that opens the novel, howeverhis
transfer to the Hillremoves these supercial supports of celibacy, and
women become threatening to him.
At the age of 54, Urban has had no positive mature relationship with any
woman, or with any male friend, for that matter. Although he is worldly and
insightful enough to be able to imagine a balance between work and sexual
lifein his fantasy of being a businessman (29295)he has found no way
to strike such a balance as a celibate salesman. Achieved celibacy is, after all,
a form of sexual life, not the mere negation of sexuality.
One of the reasons Urban is such an effective protagonist is the sympathy
he can win from the noncelibate reader through his sociability and worldliness. He is true to his clerical role model, Father Placidus, who would sing
such ballads as Kiss Me Again and Im Falling in Love with Someone in
mixed company (70).
181
Urban offers the mixed audience, Catholic and non-Catholic, in Great

Plains a nonthreatening yet attractive image of the celibate:
Differences of opinion can occur in any organization human or divine, large
or smallyes, even in the best-run families, between husbands and wives,
so Ive been told anyway. Laughter. People who, perhaps, hadnt entirely
trusted the speaker . . . were now in a mood to get cozy with him. (88)
Nothing rankles Father Urban more than the idea that he might be seen
otherwise. Even Billy considered Urban to be very unworldly:
This was an idea that many people had of the clergy, and perhaps the
clergy indulged them in it, as did the major communications media, but
Father Urban didnt see how he could have conveyed that idea to quite this
extent. (27576)
Urban tries hard to distinguish himself from those clergy who project a
lack of sexual savvy or, worse, an outright prudishness. He even explains
his major conict with the bishop over ownership of the Hill through a contrast of his own tolerance and modern outlook and the hypocrisy behind the
bishops Puritanism.
The conict centers on attitudes toward the golf course that the monastery
owns. Women wearing shorts used it, and one laughed at the bishop, teeing
off on his rst visit to the course, had swung and missed the ball completely.
Father Urban wondered if a thing like a womans laugh might not be at the
bottom of the mans desire to seize St. Clements Hill (227).
His confrontation with the bishop reveals itself to be a fairly straightforward power struggle over turf behind a sexual front like the need to install
toilet facilities to accommodate women and other improvements.
Therell be some changes here next year, Your Excellency, said Father
Urban. . . . Everybody except yourself, that is, said the Bishop. (23031)46
In fact, the bishops threat strikes much closer than his views on lay sexuality to
the supports of Urbans celibacy. Urbans success as a career man is at stake.
Urban could practice celibacy successfully as long as he moved irresistibly
forward. As Andrew Greeley has observed, celibacy is not impossible if
priests are happy in their work. But what happens when that happiness is
threatened? On his transfer to Duesterhaus, Urban immediately realizes his
vulnerability, not only as a celibate but also as a person, not only as Father
Urban but also as urban man. Urban resists the temptation to drink, although
he had a silver ask in his attach case. He reminded himself:
Many a good city man had gone down that drain. Yes, and even worse
fates, it was said, could overtake a city man in desolationwomen, insanity, decay. (13)47
182
The kind of work that Urban exults in is just one of the physical elements
that I observed as supporting achieved celibacy.48 Work is only part of a
celibate life built on service, community, and spirituality. Urbans exile to
Duesterhaus does not cut him off from any of these aspects of the spiritual
vocation per se. As far as service is concerned, however, Urban specializes
in managing the souls of the rich and powerful, a specialty ill suited to such
an assignment. He does have a spiritual lifea key point raising him above
the status of an Elmer Gantryand one without which his vocation would
be entirely impossible. Over the years, however, it has receded to a secondary position. He knew that it was easy to neglect prayer living at the pace
he had; now he reminded himself to spend more time before the Blessed
Sacrament (37).
Finally, his view of community life is one more rmly based on the U.S.
success ethic and individualist responsibilitythat is, with work, narrowly
denedthan it is on love. Urban criticizes Wilf for the inadequate job he
was doing as rector (116).
As in all of his cynical soliloquies, Urban is savedas a protagonist, if not
a priestby his ability to comprehend the social truth of his spiritual poverty. Father Urban is a priest James Joyce would recognize.
Morte DUrban is not a world of easily achieved celibacy but one of secrecy.
Powers demonstrates great novelistic rigor by remaining on the social plane.
He narrates only what is visible in this secret world. When we do obtain
glimpses of the private lives of priests, they are far from unproblematic. Wilf
is hiding somethingwe never learn whatfrom Urban. Wilf covered the
clutter of papers and photographs on the desk with a newspaper (39). Wilf,
in turn, suspects Urban of having a girlfriend (117). There is homosexual
activity among the Clementines (9, 38). The description of the activities of
Dickie Thwaites among the Dolomite fathers suggests both heterosexual
and homosexual possibilities (162).
Powerss subtle awareness of the gaps between discipline and practice are
captured by Monsignor Rentons deadpan remarks about canon law that
made Father Urban think (226).
It would be a serious enough mistake to equate these understated glimpses
of the difcult sexual lives of priests with an unproblematic view of celibacy,
but Powers is quite explicit about the limitations of Urbans celibate practice
in the narration of his exploitative and misogynist relationship with Sylvia
Bean. Urban himself recognizes his regrets in the tower of Belleisle.
Misogyny has become a major negative support of Catholic celibacy since
its routinization as a required discipline of the clergy. Rather than building
celibacy on the positive sublimations of community and service, contempt
for womenportraying them as more evil and less human and spiritual
than menhas been used to ennoble celibate practice as purication. When
celibate practice lapses, it becomes logical to cast the blame on women.49 Of
183
course, this tendency is compounded by the general misogyny of the society

as a whole. The churchs failure in this regard is one of not rising above an
attitude that has a less than spiritual basis.
As Urbans excitement about his work and his sense of success become
threatened, he falls back on this misogyny as the central support of his continued celibacy. Given his ability to rationalize and equivocate on so many
other ethical matters, it is noteworthy that Urban manages to handle temptation at all, but his resistance has a price. He cannot resolve the sexual tension
in any productive way but must simply externalize it and, failing that, ee
from it.
When Urbans condence erodes, so, too, do his sociability and worldliness, and, in their place, an increasingly unbearable sexual tension arises.
Even though his relationship with Sylvia has been built since the beginning
on Urbans manipulation of the sexual tension between them, he abruptly
breaks off his contact with her out of a sudden fear but projects the fear onto
her. It is really a failure of Urbans self-condence. Later, at Henns Haven, he
repeats this uncharacteristic gesture of ight before attractive women in his
rst encounter with the second Mrs. Henn:
She was dark, perhaps part Indian, and so attractive that Father Urban was
relieved when she left them for the kitchen. Her scent remained, however.
Father Urban moved away from it. (263)
The next evening, Urban begins talking with a Mrs. Inglis, not a badlooking woman, but he pulled out of the conversation after she said she
was going to tell him a secret if she wasnt careful (272). Although such
defensive reactions could be a necessary part of someones personal adjustment to celibacy, they are clearly a new development in the practice of the
once sociable Urban.
Urbans nervousness around attractive women would only be an honest
admission of new limitations if it were not based on a subtle contempt for
women and a consistent tendency to see them as the source of the problem.
In Morte DUrban, both clergy and laymen use the woman as temptress as a
metaphoric motif of their everyday speech. Urban considers the difculty of
using the medium of television for evangelism in these terms: Even Bishop
Sheen had not been able to make an honest woman of a whore (11213).
Likewise, Father Louis, who had spent all but one of his seminary years
with the Jesuits, sees his unfortunate career with the Clementines as a sexual
indiscretion with a fallen woman:
He had met Father Placidus and joined the Clementines on the rst bounce,
as a divorced man takes up with the rst oosie he meets, so hed once told
Father Urban. (188)
184
The handiness of such metaphors extends well beyond the clergy and
moral lessons. Billys golng expert, Mr. Robertson, laces them into his own
mundane sermons about the golf course:
Shell be a little jewel in a few years. . . . Always remember a golf course is
like a fancy womanyou have to take care of it. (198)
His nal word to Urban: And dont think you can cheat your course (198).
Although these clichs may seem harmless enough in the mouths of specic
characters, they are reected more ominously in Urbans general attitude
toward women.
Urban is at best condescending and at worst contemptuous in his relations with women. His positive reactions, like Andrew Greeleys, are almost
exclusively limited to compliments on physical appearance. When he agrees
to speak to a Catholic business and professional womens group, an invitation he had previously declined with only veiled derisionHow do I know it
isnt just this womans idea to have me come and give a talk? How do I know
the Bishop would be there for it? (119)he delivers a talk with rather ambiguous implications for precisely that audience. The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle Rules the World (171) may atter some, but it seems to suggest that
the listeners would do better to return to mothering as a vocation. Even
women in the church come in for a similar dose of male condescension: nuns
could coo their way out of difculties (226).
But Urbans scorn for women who fail to meet his idealthe upper-middleclass society womanis as sharp as his other observations at Saint Monicas
and much more acerbic when he considers the squalor in which so many of
his parishioners live. It was not a slum, just households miserably neglected
by women who drink coffee and eat pastry togethertrousered queens
and disregard or do not care about keeping house. They could never guess
what he thought of them, so courtly was his manner. Ladies, the pleasure was
all mine.
He does not limit his blame to them: The U.S. male had gone soft. And he
guesses the source: another green-eyed European, another G.I. whod married an Asiatic and the Mexicans who had no sense of time (14849).
The audacity of the kind of racist and ethnic slurs that come naturally to
Urban (Mighty white of you, Cal, 180) can be understood from the biography of the author. J. F. Powers was a civil rights advocate, short story author
of The Trouble, He Dont Plant Cotton, and The Eye. To the end of his
life, he was faithful to the pacism that had cost him four years in prison. In
this area, there is no ambiguity concerning the narrative point of view. This
is the secret world and communications of Powerss Catholic priests.
Powerss disdain of prejudices and priests who harbor them seems at times
to ignore ethical implications in favor of dramatic effect. The slurs against
185
Eastern Europeans are clearly Urbans prejudices; Father Wilfrid is a stereotyped Bohunk. Billys racismGrow up, Greaseballis acceptable to
Urban as is the reference to the blackamoor coffee boys in the Pump Room
(2225), but the use of Honey Henn as an image of animal (scent) seductiveness because she is part Indian combines clichs of race and gender
based on notions of nature versus culture (263, 279).
The question of the relationship between the narrative point of view and
the character is an open one but, as we shall see in the case of Silone, inescapable once the ethical issues around celibacy are raised. Although Silones
second version addressed itself precisely to these concerns, only later novels
and stories of Powerss can be examined by way of a comparison. Certainly,
in regard to Wheat That Springeth Green, Powers has been criticized for onesidedness and didacticism, but of a decidedly different stripe. Iannone, again
missing the sense, says:
[The] ending seems shockingly cheap, hitting the hitherto exhilarated
reader like Father Urbans golf ball, but without any spiritual payoff
afterward.50
In the case of Urbans relationship with Sylvia Bean, the irony is present but still gentle enough to be ambiguous. What maintains the narratives
edge of critique in this subplot is the use of the car as a symbol of power
crossing the sexual and the social. Urban is so bewitched by the privilege
of driving the Barracuda that he only breaks with Sylvia when she herself
becomes, in his eyes, a witch of seduction, Urbans Morgana. Through the
middle two-thirds of the novel, she is his Maid Marian: [S]he was Robin
Hoods girl friend, whatever that might mean (191). We do learn, however,
what that means for Urban. He plays the celibate martyr, trapped between
the irresistible, though permissible, temptation of a good car and the illicit
temptation of an evil woman, but his martyrdom is only the refuge he seeks
after failing to control the woman through his celibate allure.
Sylvia is the devout, attractive Catholic woman Urban chooses to shoot
down in order to win over the non-Catholic members of the Commercial
Club (87). When he discovers that his cruelty only increased her interest in
him, he begins, after her husband had acted as matchmaker51 (123), subtly
to manipulate her intellectual masochism. First, he savages The Drover, her
favorite Catholic magazine:
In no other paper would you nd everything that was wrong with the
Catholic press. The Drover had it all, all the worst features of the bully
and the martyr. (124)
Despite his rudenessbehavior he would never indulge in with a wellto-do man like Sylvias husbandUrban has no intention of driving her out
186
of his life (125). In fact, he soon learns that she is quite willing to play the
martyr to his bullying. His refusal of her offer to host a pair of charlatan
preachers, the Shrapnel Brothers, at Saint MonicasOver my dead body,
Mrs. Beanonly quickens her ardor (155).
In the next stage of their relationship, Urban shifts from bullying to exploiting her. Powers introduces this shift with great subtlety, presenting it
in a manner that is strikingly offhand when Cals Body Shop shows up with
Phils repaired car:
Father Urban was sorry to see it. For two days, hed had the use of Sylvia
Beans little English sports cara Barracuda S-X 2. (17980)
The use of Sylvias car, which is apparently only an exceptional event,

turns out to be a regular occurrence. Again, this important fact is presented
in the most passing sort of way:
[W]ith Wilf s permission, and with Sylvia Beans little Barracuda, Father
Urban became the Hills roving ambassador of good will. (202)
In the chapter in which he meets Mr. Studley, Urban is tooling around in

her car as if he were a teenager showing off his graduation gift. He even drag
races a group of teenage hot-rodders (223).
Urban, enjoying the feel, the roadability, of the little Barracuda, thought
of Sylvia. (208)
In this reverie, Urban atters himself both as a handsome and charismatic

man and as a priest true to his vows, while revealing a thoroughly misogynist
view of women: their intellectual inferiority, their lack of self-consciousness,
and, in contradiction to the rst two attributes, their craftiness. She had asked
him to read just one verse of a poem. He did:
An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest of woman born
Out of the mouth of Plentys horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?
When he nished, he said to her, Is that what you mean? And yes it
wasthe poet had put it very well.
187
Yes, and so had Father Urban. But Father Urban, with and without benet
of poetry, had been through this sort of thing with too many women. He was
afraid Sylvia might be building herself up for a letdown. In effect, by asking
him to read the poem, she had put words in his mouth he might think but
would never speak. In the privacy of her imagination, Sylvia might distill
pleasure of an illicit nature from the words that might be said to compromise
him. And loveliest woman born was pushing it some in her case. Damned
attractive redhead would have been more like it. Experience had shown Father Urban that a handsome priest could not be too careful with women.
Even though Urban is worried about her and cannot be too careful,
he chooses to keep using her car for the supposed good of his ministry, and
hed be lost without it (2089). Certainly, Urban cannot be expected to
give up his little trips to the mammon of iniquity. They are the core of his
vocation.
When Billy invites Urban to go shing, Urban is expected to provide the
car. He has a problem. He tried and failed to get a response from two laymen
(253). The third possibility is Sylvia, but we learn only now, post factum, of
their signicant parting. Powers again handles the most sexually charged
episodes in an offhand and understated way, almost as an afterthought or
ashback. In this case, Urban reminds himself that he has not seen Sylvia
lately; in fact, not since a trip to Rays farm. They had arrived just as two
hired men were about to breed a mare. Father Urbans rst concern was
for Sylvias sensibilities. But, much to his surprise, Sylvia got right into the
act. She was crying encouragement to the stallion and being cross with the
mare. Father Urban had not seen Sylvia or Ray or asked for the little Barracuda since that day (254).
The importance of having a good car for his ministry is revealed simultaneously with the fate of his relationship with Sylvia, who, it turns out,
has gone too far. She upset the convenient balance Urban had established
between them.
The balance between his sexual/celibate power and her material possessions collapses when she tries to exact the price he can only pay at the cost of
his mystique. A vocation based on the courtship of power, of sexual mystique
and the mammon of iniquity, is an extremely fragile one. The shing trip destroys the balance, rst by Billys petulance over Urbans failure to provide a
car (25558) and then by stranding Urban at Henns Haven (27980).
In the nal dramatic confrontation of the novel, Urban meets the united
threat of sexual seduction and economic power in the gure of Sally Hopwood, the daughter of his benefactress Mrs. Thwaites. Sally is a small, nely
made, attractive woman in a white convertible, who arrives on the scene of
his recent defeat with Billy. Powers, the layman, elicits modest verbal descriptions of women that stand in stark contrast to Greeleys lush Playboy
vocabulary. Ironically, as Urban departs with Sally, he has a nal encounter
188
with Sylvia. She drove by in her Barracuda. Father Urban waved, but Sylvia
cut him dead (28082).
In the episode about Sally, Powers shifts from an offhand, deadpan narration of Urbans sex life to a highly direct and probing one. Urban eats forbidden fruit on the way into the tower of Belleisle:
Hed hesitated . . . about eating one of the tiny red berries from a bush by the
castle door. The berry had tasted sweet and then bitter. (286)
Inside, he sees Sally in her literal nakedness and himself in his spiritual
nakedness:
In a matter of moments, she was standing before him, before the re, back
to him, wearing nothing but her shoes. They were high-heeled shoes. Calf.
Golden Calf. Lovely woman. No doubt of it. (297)
The Golden Calf, however, is not what she is but what Urban has been
worshipping in place of lovely women. Sally tells Urban the truth about all of
his spiritual charges among the mammon of iniquity: Dickie Thwaites isnt
very well off ; Mrs. Thwaites is a hard, hard old woman; his relationship
with Billy is all wrong; and she herself is simply not a religious person
(28790). But, worst of all for Urban, she tells the truth about him:
Has it occurred to you that people might be disappointed by you and your
reasons, and even more by you?
Im not sure I know what you mean, said Father Urban.
I mean youre an operatora trained operator. And an operator in
your heartand I dont think you have a friend in the world.
Father Urban smiled. Now youve gone too far. Name one. (291)
After Sally strips away his pretensions, Urban imagines an alternative

vocation with a surprisingly precise vision of its sexual life:
Father Urban just sat there, sipping scotch and seeing himself as he might
have been. . . . Until his marriage, hed played around a lot, but hed never
touched waitresses, stewardesses, receptionists, the wives or mistresses of
his friends, or anybody who worked for him in the ofce. . . . His life hadnt
been quite right, thoughhed known it all alongand so hed xed that.
Hed married late, but not too late. Always partial to mature women, hed
married a widow. Lovely woman. Not beef and not pork but woman. Her
throat not as full as it had been, perhaps, but otherwise she was good as
new. . . . He had no children, so far as he knew, and his wife had none by her
rst marriage. No regrets. (29294)
189
It is difcult not to recognize this fantasy as a more appropriate sexual life

than celibacy for a white-collar man like Urban, and Urban sees this alternative life with more clarity than he sees his own.52
When Sally strips away her clothes, however, there is a danger that she
will be read simply as another bewitching temptress when the signicance of
the act lies in its being the nal attempt to hold a mirror up to Urban:
Youve got me covered, he said, and took his eyes off her, and kept them
off, commending himself. It was like tearing up telephone directories, the
hardest part was getting started. (297)
The reader is left to ponder whether his looking away is an act of looking
inward or merely the continuation of his blindness. In any case, there is more
at stake than Urbans ability to handle temptation.53 Is Sally then the best
of the lot, as Urban puts it, before getting into her convertible, or is she the
best of a bad lot, as Monsignor Renton says? Is she evil (like her mother) or
only a mirror in which evil sees itself ? In the Catholic allegorical tradition,
temptation may take physical form for the sake of visible representation, but
its meaning always concerns the struggles of interiority.54
The problem that Powers has in following the allegorical tradition, especially in the genre of social and psychological realism, is that of reproducing,
even if for symbolic reasons (e.g., to represent Urbans venality), a misogynist
view of women with a long pedigree. It perpetuates a confusion of antiquated
sexual moreswith which the church is rifeand a view of women as closer
to evil with both the eternal and contemporary evils of society. Powerss explicit views on these controversies remain mysterious, but his general outlook, even if it fails to inform every moment of his narrative, can be gleaned
from his more openly satirical passages.
These archaic sexual views of the church are cleverly parodied by the
efforts of Jack and Urban to edit Malory into conformity with Catholic doctrine. How to handle their tendency to initiate a pattern of ethical equivocations? The biggest problem for Jack was Sir Lancelot. He had not been
married to Lady Elaine, and he was under a spell when he fathered a child
with her. Elaine, the evil woman, had no such an excuse.
That left a problem of Lancelots relationship with Guinevere. In some
childrens editions, they referred to it as sinful love. Jack thought of calling
it untrue love or, as Urban suggested, high treason. Jack, however, did
not regard Sir Lancelot guilty as charged:
Theres good evidence that Sir Lancelot, on the night he was surprised by
Sir Agravaine and others, was innocent. I could show you where.
In the end, after considering the text, Urban is inclined to agree with Jack.
It was true that Lancelots past performances with the queen were against
190
him. Yes, even if, as Malory said, love that time was not as is nowadays,
Sir Lancelot had brast the iron bars clean out of the window to Guineveres
room on one occasion and had taken his pleasance and liking until dawn.
But on the night he was surprised by Sir Agravaine, Sir Mordred, Sir Colgrevance, and others, Father Urban found him not guilty. Jack was relieved
when Urban said Lancelot says hes innocent, and I, for one, believe him.
That solved Jacks problem, and he could write that Sir Lancelot and the
queen were wrongly accused of high treason on this occasion (3069).
Keeping Jacks symbolic relationship to his fellow writer (our author) in
mind, we can understand to what extent Powers recognizes the absurdity of
trying to force the ways of narrative to conform to a doctrine too narrow to
contain it. The results of such an effort, which include reversals of the ethical
tradition such as preferring high treason to sinful love and reducing ethical
questions to legalistic quibbles, can only lead to the disintegration of the
churchs teachings as a coherent and meaningful worldview.55
In Morte DUrban, the ultimate signicance of Urbans celibacy remains
implicit in and subordinated to the broader issue of the very possibility of
spiritual vocation in such a society. The satirical use of the Arthurian allegory has more to do with the meaning of death, the Morte of Arthur, than it
does with the sexuality of Lancelot.
Now is the time to take up this question of change in Urbans vocation: his
conversion and death.
DEATH OF A SPIRITUAL SALESMAN

And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak that lies in innity. . . .
He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings
forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and
not denitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence.
And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by
its very progressiveness it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.56
When Malory wrote Le Morte DArthur, he stood, in the last decades of

a philosophicallyif not politicallyunied Christendom, at the disintegrating edge of the medieval worldview. Malory defends rather woodenly
the meaning of death in chivalric and Christian terms. Cervantes writes the
epic parody of that world in which only death may retain any meaning. The
question here is whether for Powers, who writes his Cervantean version of
Malory at the far end of the process of disenchantment when it is easier to
fantasize about a distant Middle Ages than to live up to workaday existence,
the death of his protagonist could still have that meaning for his readers.
Does Urbans death represent a conversion, the embracing of the transcendent? Is it a reconciliation, after which he can die satiated with life? Or
191
is it only a premature decay, the retirement of a man of the world tired with
life?
How does one read the nal dirge of the novel? Mary Gordon sums up its
meaning with the same condence that some Catholic writers read the death
of Don Quixote:57
Morte DUrbans great distinction is that it is a conversion story told in
comic terms. Urbans peripeteia takes place in the context of a virtuoso
display of Powers talent for recording American kitsch. And instead of
being knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, he is knocked out by
a bishops golf ball. He nds his soul, but at a cost. (Introduction)
Carol Iannone concurs with Gordon and sees the loss of his material success
as a gain for his spiritual life. His humiliating trials purify and elevate him.58
Terry Teachout, however, nds in the end of the novel only Powerss rigorous use of negation: pursuing meaning by exposing its absence. When
Father Urban is hit on the head by the bishops stray golf ball, his life takes a
sharp turn for the worse. He loses his nerve and becomes fearful and uncertain. Teachout sees Urbans election as the father provincial of the Order of
Saint Clements as triumph. Is the death of the old Father Urban the product of inward contemplation or a delayed effect of concussion by golf ball?
The question is deliberately left vague. It is Powerss sense of literary grace
that allows him to leave the question unresolved (73).
Although the text itself only supports Teachouts argument for its ambiguity, none of these interpretations explores Powerss complex handling of
the alternatives. The death is not an either-or proposition. It is an interpretation of the hermeneutics of the visible and the invisible that structure the
practice of the spiritual vocation in a disenchanted world. The either-or of
the critics revolves around their reading of the comic incident of the golf ball,
but, in focusing on that scene, they overlook the importance of the Tower of
Belleisle in shaping the novels conclusion.
The Enchanted Tower

Thou art saved, thou art on the way to the goal. None of thy follies wilt
thou repent; none wilt thou wish to repeat; no luckier destiny can be allotted to a man.59
The golf tournament expresses Powerss Cervantean irony toward the

chivalric epic;60 nevertheless, the stark contrast between medievalist fantasy and disenchanted reality in Morte DUrban would suggest only a satire
motivated, in this case, by religious rejection of the mundane if Urbans will
to worldly reconciliation were not so engaging. After all, a contest between
192
Malory and Cervantes would be too uneven to hold us in suspense. The real
struggle for meaning occurs in the more subdued register of the prosaic
itself, the world of modern middle-class aspirations and failure. The image
of the tower may be the most blatantly Arthurian gesture in the novel. It
recalls a mediating literary reference: Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship. There, the enchanted tower is an openly fantastical device that allows an
optimistic reconciliation. The resolution is not based on the poles of the Cervantean universe, utopian illusion, or transcendence with the prosaic world
of commerce.
Meister, the upwardly mobilethrough marriage to an heiress/young
theater director, who has rejected the middle-class world of his parents
becomes reconciled to a life as a successful man of commerce by means of
a magical, dreamlike revelation in the tower of Lotharios castle. According
to Georg Lukcs, this device allows Goethe to portray bourgeois society
as a world of convention partially open to penetration by living meaning,
but at the same time revealing the limitations in such a forced and magical
reconciliation.61 Goethe introduced the fantastic apparatus at the end of the
novel, the mysterious tower, the all-knowing initiates, and their providential
actions:
He absolutely needed these methods in order to give sensuous signicance
and gravity to the ending of the novel, and although he tried to rob them
of their epic quality by using them lightly and ironically, thus hoping to
transform them into elements of the novel form, he failed.62
By comparison, Novaliss rejection of his contemporary Goethe and his willful attempt to enchant the world la Malory represents a more consistent,
more rational, if also failed, pursuit (Novalis was the pseydonym for Georg
Phillipp Frederick Freiherr von Hardenberg [17721801] was an author
and philosopher of early German Romanticism):
Novalis own harking back to the age of the chivalrous epics was not
accidental. . . . [He] wanted to create a totality of revealed transcendence
within an earthly reality . . . this fairy-tale reality as a recreation of the broken unity between reality and transcendence became a conscious goal.63
Lukcs says this is precisely why Novalis could not achieve a decisive and complete synthesis and that the artistic fault he detected in Goethe is even greater
and irreparable in his own work.64
Powers restages the revelation in the enchanted tower but in a manner
that refuses both Goethes desire for reconciliation and Novaliss escape to
the magical. Like Meister, Urban discovers the only possible good life, that
of the successful and married businessman, while dreaming in the tower. It
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is precisely the sexual imagery of the phallic tower and its role in generating
meaning by penetrating the world of conventionall of which remains implicit and symbolic in Goethe, Meisters route to success lying through the
sexual union of marriagethat becomes an image of Urbans impotence: his
symbolic phallus; that is, his sexuality, the tower of Belleisle, is only a kitsch
counterfeit of Lancelots tower, or even Meisters, for that matter, whose castle
is authentic, if a bit archaeological. Although sexual potency may seem a quality whose absence would be peculiar to complain of in a priest, it is in fact the
very basis of a productive celibate vocation. Because Urbans sexuality is not
integrated with his vocation beyond the success ethic, because it is not harnessed in the service of meaning, it remains only a weakly repressed regret.
Thus, the narration of his dream life, punctuated repeatedly with the coda no
regrets, is the mirror opposite of his experience as a priest (29295).
Meisters revelation in the tower is the turning point in his Bildung (formation) when he changes from a romantic and idealistic youth into a productive and mature man of the world. Urbans revelation comes too late for
Bildung. His only way out is vertical transcendence, the conversion the critics
search for in the novels concluding chapters. But there is no visible indication of grace, only of Urbans loss of the mundane. He leaves his dream life of
worldly happiness behind, like his shoes while escaping the tower:
Life here below . . . was shoesnot champagne, but shoes, and not dirt, but
shoes, and this, roughly speaking, was the mind of the Church.
Without his dream life, Father Urban is left only a shadow of himself (29899).
On the Road?
The ending of Morte DUrban is unresolved. The question that remains
open, however, is not where Urban has arrived, but where he is going. The
reader is left stranded like Urban, without a car, between a visible world of
decay and the invisible one of death. Urban takes on the responsibility of
being father provincial, but he has shed all costume-drama fantasies of the
late Middle Ages and accepts simply prose, for the order means the decadence of his own historical time. Any grandiosity that remains is laced with
irony, as when he is reading the speeches of Winston Churchill, he comes to
the passage:
I have not become the Kings rst minister in order to preside over the
liquidation of the British Empire, he thought, No, nor did Mr. Atlee consider himself so called, but such was his fate. (323)
Like all those who measure themselves against worldly criteria of success,
Urban can only be represented in his peripeteia as a victim of premature
194
decay. This decay is not, however, the exceptional fate of a tragically anachronistic hero.
Applicable here is the observation:
When men reach the age of forty or fty they tend to observe a curious
change . . . show signs of degeneration. Conversation with them becomes
shallow, threadbare, and boastful. Previously the aging individual found
mental stimulus in others but now he feels that he is almost the only one to
present objective interest. . . . Men of the world are not excluded from this
general rule. It is as though people who betray the hopes of their youth and
come to terms with the world, suffer the penalty of premature decay.65
In his mission to befriend the mammon of iniquity, Urban immerses himself in a social world that is precisely shallow, threadbare, and boastful as
described. His conversations turn on smoking, What dya smoke?; makes
of cars, What dya drive?, How dya like it?; and parking facilities in small
towns, Whatre you doing about parking in your town? Where you from?
(27071).
When he nally despairs of making his way in this life of shoes, Urban is
reduced to silence, a silence expressed by a jolting shift away from the dominant presence of his consciousness in the narrative point of view. The nal
chapter of the book is entitled Dirge. Iannone comments:
Powers almost seems to move outside of his characters consciousness, as if
to indicate that Father Urban has himself moved beyond the glad-handing
accessibility of his former self. It is an uncompromising ending, oddly
warm and chilling at once.66
The nal chapter is a mystery not unlike Spinas physical disappearance at

the end of Silones novel. Spinas total invisibility at the end of the narrative
suggests the accomplishment of transcendence. Urbans shadowy presence is
less dramatic but no less convincing that He who would save his life must lose
it. In his monastery, beyond the material-political world he had once trusted
and pursued so relentlessly, he embraces the Gospel that is scary, dark and
demanding.67 And he nds his vocation at last. The narrative gives a hint
that there is a greater spirituality residing in this diminished presence:
He gained a reputation for piety he hadnt had before, which, however, was
not entirely unwarranted now.68 (324)
Oddly enough, although for many years hed traveled out of Chicago, he
seemed to think of the Hill as his home. (326)
Urban had come to a full realization that a man truly cannot serve two
mastersGod and mammon. He had tried. He was content in his failure.
As I knew J. F. Powers, I think that he experienced the same triumph.
CHAPTER
13
W ILL THE R EAL P RIEST P LEASE

S TAND U P : I GNAZIO S ILONE
No word and no gesture can be more persuasive than the life, and
if necessary, the death of a man who strives to be free, loyal, just,
sincere, disinterested. A man who shows what a man can be.
Ignazio Silone
INTRODUCTION: THE SPIRITUAL VOCATION

IN A SECULAR WORLD
Ignazio Silones Bread and Wine and J. F. Powerss Morte DUrban are predominantly social novels of the spiritual vocation. These novels share sensitivity
to the problem of practicing such a vocation in a society hostile to it, understanding that practice as both a product and a reaction to social context.
Nevertheless, they narrate that problem in quite different ways. Silone writes
about the spiritual and, quite clearly, priestly vocation under the apparently
secular guise of the political activist. Powers presents the story of a nominal
priest whose vocation seems indistinguishable from the professions of his
white-collar clients. Yet this is only the most supercial and obvious level
of contrast.
In each, the relationship of the spiritual vocation to its social context unfolds according to a guiding principle by which the individual relates to social
norms: Bread and Wine is a narrative of resistance, whereas Morte DUrban
is one of conformity. Furthermore, these relational principles are intimately
connected to the status of death in both works. Although the gulf between
196
social success and spiritual realization remains a constant in both works, the
meaning of death, the crucial measure of the presence of the possibility of
transcendence, is radically different.1 The spiritual vocation, therefore, nds
its most profound expression at this divide in the tension between the structured repetitions of society and the existential imperative of the novel to
narrate the universality of the unique.
In Morte DUrban, the pursuit of the priestly vocation was undermined
by Urbans struggle to measure his vocation by the norms of his societys
success ethic. The books motto, Be a winner, stands in ironic commentary over this attempt to conform to incompatible standards. By contrast,
the ethic of resistance guiding the narrative in Bread and Wine allows the
spiritual vocation to be promoted precisely by the presence of social norms
hostile to it, the same conict between the spiritual and social that stulties
Urbans vocation.
These opposite points of departure should not be understood, however,
as the product of either opposing worldviews on the part of the authors or
of opposing psychological dispositions on the part of their protagonists. The
specic political and economic structures of each societyFascist Italy for
Silone, the white-collar United States for Powershave much more to do
with the so-called necessity of each authors representation of the conict
between the existential quest for meaning and the limits imposed by society
and of the role of death in mediating that conict.
Illustrating this point simply requires posing an imaginary reversal of
principles and settings. The novel of a priest trying to conform to Fascism,
while an interesting exercise in clinical narrative, is almost unthinkable as a
novel of spiritual vocation. On the other hand, a novel about active resistance
to the relatively tolerant ethic of the postwar United States is even more
difcult. The so-called hidden hand of the market exerts a much more indirect and depersonalized but no less coercive control over the heart and mind
of U.S. culture. It would be easier to produce a thinly disguised polemic, a
roman clef as Greeleys did in The Cardinal Sins, or a dramatization for some
memorable cause clbre.2 Another alternative is the production of narratives
of personal paranoia and isolation in which the social function of tolerance
makes the resister more eccentric than ethical, more victim than martyr.
The surest measure of this narrative necessity, however, is the status of
death in each novel. In Silones world, the nearness of violent and premature death guides the protagonist to spiritual realization. Personally
it marks the end and goal of the ethical lie under a dictatorship. Socially it
allows the achievement of an inspirational martyrdom. In the world that
Powers describes, death is a purely negative sign, marking the ultimate meaninglessness of all forms of social success and the senseless obscurity of any
who refuse to play the game. Urbans tragedy is to be a priest in a context
that allows only a choice between a success that will eventually be cut short
Will the Real Priest Please Stand Up
197
by deatha condition exacerbated by the celibates lack of familyor a resistance indistinguishable from that of the harmless and incompetent U.S.
eccentric, the crank (the denition ascribed by Urban himself to most of his
fellow clergy).
Despite these oppositions, between conformism and resistance and between death as failure and death as realization, both authors present the
practice of spiritual vocation against the constant of hostile, if different, social contexts. Each narrative uses a reversal of expectations to expose that
dynamic. Silones protagonist, Pietro Spina, disguised as the false priest Don
Paolo Spada, is one of the most fully realized representations of spiritual vocation in the secular genre of the novel. Powerss Father Urban, on the other
hand, ranks with Willy Loman as a tragic protagonist in the confrontation
between white-collar conformism and spiritual alienation. Taken together,
these novels offer a broad and insightful examination of the social practice of
such a personal vocation.
At the level of the relations between individual and society, the contrast
between these novels would remain a simple and self-evident one. But our
goal is to explore one of the most mysterious and ambiguous aspects at work
within and between these novels: the role of celibacy in the practice of the
spiritual vocation.
Celibacy is a particularly implicit problem in social novels of vocation; it
is not confronted directly because their focus is not on the crises of the individual as an individual. The celibate priest always has an aura of mystery
about him, but in the social novel, the protagonist, the individual per se,
often assumes a mantel of mystery as well relative to the exposed mechanisms of society. As a result, the dynamics of the celibate practice are doubly
shrouded. Fortunately, both the literary and theological modes of inquiry
recognize such an obstacle to direct analysis as the potential route to greater
understanding. The mysterious hero of Edward Albees rst play The Zoo
Story (1958) puts it well: [S]ometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly. Only close
readings of the texts can draw out the subtle handling of celibacy in each
novel, but some general parameters of the celibate vocation in each can be
cited by way of introduction.
Again, as with the spiritual vocations of each protagonist, the hostile social context serves Spinas practice of celibacy while threatening Urbans. As
a hunted outlaw, Spina has little inclination or opportunity, outside of a few
signicant episodes, to pursue romance, and the class difference between him
and the peasants as well as the religiosity of the women and the expectations
of a priest in a Catholic culture conspire to construct Spinas celibate vocation: Where theres a way, there may turn out to be a will.
Urban, on the other hand, is a worldly operator, a political animal, and,
therefore, a frequent socializer with noncelibate men and women, Catholics
198
and non-Catholics. What is more, he carries the anachronistic trappings of

his vocation almost as an afterthought or a quirk of fate into the United
States of the 1950s, a prosperous world little concerned with spiritual matters. It was a world already in the upswing of the sexual revolution. The
cure of syphilis ushered in for one brief Camelot-like era a pause in the
human medical record when every known sexually transmitted disease was
curable.3
The difculties of analyzing the psychodynamics of celibacy in the two
protagonists are also of a different magnitude because, on closer scrutiny,
Powerss novel reveals itself to be the more sociological of the two. That
Bread and Wine is more the novel of private vocation is another reversal of
expectations. Silone was closely associated with the political movements of
the 1930s and is considered a master of the novelistic genre of social realism. Powerss work tends to be received as a hybrid of Catholic confessional
literature and the dominant genre of 1950s U.S. ction, psychological realism. Although Marx and Augustine might appear as appropriate mentors for
Silone and Powers, respectively, as novelists Silone explores the concerns of
existentialism, Powers the terrain of critical sociology. Thus, the difculty in
analyzing the inner structure of each of their protagonists celibacy is the result of quite different narrative contexts. Urbans celibacy is almost entirely
taken for granted; Spinas is only an implied expectation of either his political
practice or his spiritual vocation.
The complexity of these contrasts between the handling of vocation and
celibacy in the novels requires a two-stage approach. We analyze the implicit
structure of each protagonists celibacy separately, attempting to construct
case histories, but placing special emphasis on the ambiguities and lacunae in
each text concerning celibacy. After that, we return to a comparative mode
to explore the interaction of genre, social context, and vocation in the novel.
The object has been to suggest what insights these novels offer the study of
celibacy as a psychosocial reality in clinical and empirical research.
There are methodological problems in attempting to uncover the presence
and meaning of celibacy in Spinas vocation. The rst concerns the riskiness
of applying literature to a question extrinsic to the literary per se, in this case
the study of the practice of celibacy. This problem is a generic one for all the
studies we have been dealing with, and it is invoked here only as a sort of fair
warning to ye that enter.
The reconstruction of ctional elements can only be done within the narrative structure of the literary text. These elements are not freely available
for alternative narration as, for example, a coherent life history built around
the problem of celibacy. This can be done in psychotherapy and is the backbone of our ethnographic study. The life of Pietro Spina is already as much
a reconstruction of mythical narrativesthe Gospel, the lives of martyred
saints, the secular hero, the revolutionaryas it is the construction of a
199
believable or realistic life history based on the experiences of the author and
his contemporaries.
Under the explicit rubric of ction, the novel is simply the most obvious
vehicle for understanding that all experience of the celibate vocation will
reach us ensconced in the structure of a narrative, a narrative of a particularly complex way of life.
The problem peculiar to the case of Bread and Wine is the existence of two
nishedthat is, publishedversions of the novel. One is tempted to follow
the path of most scholars and choose either the earlier or later versions as
the better version.
Scholars focusing on the works intrinsic literary merit and most critics
responding to Bread and Wine since the appearance of the substantially revised version have chosen the later edition, because it is, as the author argues
in the new preface, signicantly improved in terms of aesthetic economy and
discipline. The contrast between the two versions reveals a fascinating pattern of what remained constant in Silones views of the spiritual vocation and
what underwent development and change. Silones development is, in fact, a
quite stirring allegory for the potential future of the church and its teachings
on sexuality.4
Silones success, as both a thinker and a novelist, in eventually resolving the apparent tensions and contradictions that pervaded the presentation of each in the rst version (which also pervade the present-day Catholic
Churchs teachings on sexuality, its view of women, and its inexible and
defensive attitude toward change) makes his work extremely valuable to
any consideration of these issues. In this process of refashioning a coherent
worldview from the conicted fragments of his Christian upbringing and
secular education, Silone seems to have succeeded, at least within the world
of his novel, in seeking God without abandoning the search for understanding, the elusive task so desired by his character Murica (263).
THE IDEAL OF THE SPIRITUAL VOCATION

In Bread and Wine, Silones ideal of the spiritual vocation as an existential and social practice unfolds through the narratives of three peopleDon
Benedetto, Pietro Spina, and Cristina Colamartinias they approach a common conception of what it must be in their society. Each appears at rst as an
exemplar of one of three possible practices of the Christian, used here synonymously with spiritual or ethical, life: service to society within the institution
of the church (Don Benedetto), withdrawal from society into monastic purity (Cristina),5 and ethical resistance to society and, if necessary, the church
(Spina).
Both clergy and secularists also represent each ideal in the novel, whether
as mildly or severely compromised practitioners of it. They contribute to
200
the shaping of the ideal negatively by exposing the dangers of rigidityand

even more, instrumentalismin the name of serving ethics. Don Benedetto
and Cristina are eventually disabused of belief in the possibility of living
their ideals under Fascism. It is left to Spina to develop his own path as the
only possible ethical life available to them in such times. For this reason,
he emerges as the spiritual leader, predominantly through example, for the
others, albeit with strong mutual inuences at work in their dialogues.
When Don Benedetto, Spinas elderly teacher, is rst introduced, he has
already handed over his lifelong career as an active priest to the Piccirillis
and Girasoles, priests capable of accommodating themselves to Fascism. At
the opening of the book, Spina is living in a condition of almost hermitlike
withdrawal, the result not of spiritual need but of his having been dismissed
from his teaching post. Nevertheless, his equilibrium in this condition of internal exile is steadied by the same powers of sublimation that supported his
lifetime of spiritual commitment and his adjustment to the internal solitude
of celibacy: his love of nature and literature, his regimen of prayer, the support of his sister, and a strong faith in Providence (45). Strongest emphasis
is placed on his need for the timeless value of beauty: Don Benedetto . . .
lived in seclusion in his house above Rocca dei Marsi . . . devoting himself to
his beloved classics and poetry and plants, to everything that beauties the
world and does not change with changing fashions (5). In the appreciation
of beauty both secular and spiritual, interests in ethics have found a common
and visible sign of a celibates faith.6
Don Benedetto, however, had also intended to spend his life in the service
of others, one of the greatest supports of a celibate vocation. As his sister
puts it: [H]e who has the good fortune to live at Don Benedettos side receives a thousand times more than he gives (13); yet now she is the only one
with the courage to receive his gifts. Don Benedettos commitment to service
within the institution of the church had never been easy. Even as a young
priest, he had upset his family and the church authorities by holding his rst
mass in a prison (235). Don Girasole recalls to Spina that His brusque way
of ying in the face of public opinion worried his superiors even then. For
that reason they were unwilling to intrust [sic] him with a parish and he
was sent to teach in a school (236). Even this compromise between personal
vocation and institutional demands became impossible under Fascism, and
he was dismissed.
During the course of the novel, Don Benedetto undergoes a radical change
in his practice of the spiritual vocation. He begins in enforced but resigned
solitudehe took no interest in politics (5)but, under the inuence of
his reunion with Spina, he becomes such an active resister of the government
that he meets his martyrdom at the hands of assassins.7
Cristina Colamartini, the young woman Spina meets in Pietrasecca, who
becomes both a romantic interest and a spiritual interlocutor for him, is
201
committed at the outset to entering a convent and practicing the spiritual

vocation as a withdrawal from a fallen world. Unlike Don Benedetto, who
has been exiled to such a position, she believes withdrawal to be her vocation
of choice and debates its merits with Spina in two key scenes near the beginning and end of the novel, respectively (7981, 289). These dialogues on
withdrawal versus engagement are paralleled and parodied by two carnivalallegory vignettes in which Spina encounters the monk, Brother Antifona;
the rst follows Spinas rst argument with Cristina, the second shortly
precedes his nal debate with Cristina on the subject of vocation.
The monk is a minor character in the realist narrative of the novel, but
he gains signicance for his symbolic role in Silones construction of the
ideal of spiritual vocation. The carnival-allegory absurdity of his name, Antifona, which has the double meaning of a contrapuntal melody in music or a
repetitive response litany during the mass, implies that he plays the counterpoint melody to Spinas dominant. At the same time, he represents an ethically inspired yet inexibly formulaic response to the corruption of human
societies.
In the rst encounter, a balance is struck between their positions as Spina
nds a surprising congruence of values between himself and the monk.
In a monastery you live badly, too, but you are safe, said the Capuchin.
You have no family life, but you have no fear, either. Moreover, there is
hope.
What hope? asked Don Paolo.8
The monk pointed towards heaven.
Its not a way for everybody, said Mastrangelo. We cant all become
monks.
The demon of property lures people, said Brother Antifona. . . . How
many people is it sending to damnation!
So in your opinion one ought not to work? Mastrangelo said.
When Im not going round collecting alms I work, too, said the monk.
Behind the monastery there is a large expanse of elds, which are cultivated by the monks. We dont live well, but in security. (12425)
The monks valorization of work over property is an echo of the common

1930s apologia for the Soviet Union that people do not live well there but
have their needs met. This and his desire for hope make him a sort of spiritual
mirror of the socialist Spina. The recognition of their commonality, however,
breaks down in a brief but pointed comedy of errors:
Good-by, he said to Don Paolo. If we do not meet again down here, we
shall at any rate meet above.
Above? Where? In the mountains? the priest asked.
I mean in heaven, said the monk.
Don Paolo admired this way of making appointments. (125)
202
Although the monk is apparently lampooned for his literal religiosity, an

unavoidable impression given the sympathy commanded by Spinas dominance
in the narrative point of view, there is, in fact, an awkward standoff if one considers the lack of synthesis in Spinas own sense of vocation at that time.
When next Spina encounters the monk, the synthesis has already transpired within Spina himself, through both the tempering of his revolutionary
adventurism and his profound encounter with his Christianity during his meeting with Don Benedetto. Thus, the medievalist withdrawal of the monk can be
fully dismissed as a parody of the spiritual vocation, one that is even susceptible
to pathetic forms of collaboration. In this nal meeting, Spina nds Brother
Antifona hustling medals of Saint Francis, for the protection of the life of
combatants, to poor peasants whose sons have been conscripted for the war
against Ethiopia. The monk appears to have lost the values he shared with the
socialist in proportion to how fully Spina has accepted his Christian heritage:
The priest and the monk walked along the road up to Pietrasecca.
Are the medals selling well? the priest asked.
Not badly, the other replied. They would have gone better if we had
started on mobilization day. But the Church is always late. The father provincial is too old and does nothing but pray. Our father superior, who really
has the nose of a saint, wrote to him months ago and said: War is coming,
and what are we doing? War? What war? the old father provincial replied. Thus time was wasted and we were taken by surprise. (286)9
Because withdrawal from society can never be perfect, Silone sees the vulnerability of such an inexible vocation to debasement.
Cristina, however, is the more challenging interlocutor in this debate. If
she does not succeed in persuading Spina of her choice, she certainly engages
him in a dialogue on the spiritual vocation that shapes the development of
both characters over the course of the narrative. We will examine the signicance of those dialogues in the denition of Spinas vocation in the following
section on his struggle and development. Sufce it to say that Cristina, like
Don Benedetto, decides nally that the social realities demand the search
for a meaningful engagement and the abandonment of the search for a pure
withdrawal, an option left to the shallow medievalism of Brother Antifona.
In Cristinas case, however, the goals of such an engagement remain unformed, lost in an alpine wilderness of hungry wolves and icy cold. The nal
scene gives symbolic expression to the hard lot of the woman who chooses
resistance in such a brutal social world. Which is harder, that or the lot of
Annina, raped by the police (18788), or Cheluccis wife, who is abandoned
to poverty by the other Communists after her husbands arrest (18284)?
Despite any difculty, Cristina attempts to follow Spinas dangerous path.
Spinas choices call into question both the opportunism and corruption that must inevitably result from the churchs adjustment to the social
203
context of Fascism. That is an adjustment that will lead every servant of the
institution either to conform or lose his career. Also, the search for a pure
spiritual withdrawal, always a difcult goal, risks becoming compromised as
well when pursued under Fascism. Spina gives impassioned voice to the latter contrast in his efforts to persuade Cristina:
[W]e are in . . . a country in which there is great economic distress and
still greater spiritual distress. . . . Do you not think that this divorce between a spirituality which retires into contemplation and a mass of people
dominated by animal instincts is a source of all our ills? Do you not think
that every living creature ought to live and struggle among his fellow
creatures rather than shut himself up in an ivory tower? (80)
But when the normal institutional avenues to such an ethics of engagement,

such as the church and democratic political parties, are absent or corrupted,
what structures remain to shape and support such a lonely vocation? Silone
proposes that a life lived according to ideals rooted in human experience will
reveal deeper structures of support than those offered by institutions.
Silones ideal of vocation emerges in the course of the narrative as a practice based on noninstrumental human communication. The intimacy of companionship and the altruism of teaching express the highest values of his
ideal of spiritual vocation: friendship and truth. In his last encounter with an
agent of his political movement, Spina raises questions about their practice
that are equally relevant to church and Comintern:
And if the truth is demoralizing?
It is always less demoralizing than the most encouraging lie. (3012)
The Kantian ethics of treating people as ends in themselves rather than more
or less useful tools and of using only what is true as a point of departure are
the only appropriate means for a movement that claims to serve humanity.
The cornerstone of such a practice is an intimate knowledge of ones fellows
and ones social context.
Intimacy is repeatedly contrasted to the ethical compromises of a public
vocation built on the hypnotic powers of rhetoric and images. Spina knows
that for pragmatic reasons he cannot be a public agitator or preacher while
hiding from the authorities in Pietrasecca. At the same moment, he realizes
that there is something inherently wrong with such a means of communicating his beliefs.
The ethical superiority of intimacy over other forms of communication
is expressed throughout the novel in his relations with Cardile (2425), the
deaf-mute (11112), Pompeo (15759), and, to be sure, with Christina, Murica, and Don Benedetto. Intimacy is also valorized by the negative representations of public oratory. The mass hypnotic effect of the war rally, inciting
204
an irrational consensus for violence in the crowd (200204), and the chameleon
use of rhetorical skills by the ex-socialist Zabaglione in the service of new
masters (20911) cement the connection between oratory and ethical degradation in Silones world.10 Human intimacy and the manipulation of the public are juxtaposed within the circles of the Comintern as well: The intimacy
of a clandestine group gives Murica a purely human pleasure (25657),
whereas the agent Bolla uses people and language as mere instruments (301).
The spiritual value of intimacy is expressed perhaps most forcefully in Don
Benedettos relation to God, who speaks not in the roar of wind, earthquake,
or re but in a still, small voice (243).
The conclusion Spina arrives at concerning the modus operandi of the
spiritual vocation is nothing less than a modus vivendi. Preaching must be
subordinated to a way of life, the life of the free man under a dictatorship: No
word and no gesture can be more persuasive than the life, and if necessary, the
death of a man who strives to be free, loyal, just, sincere, disinterested: a man
who shows what a man can be (250). Later, Spina calls directly for revolutionaries who would be recognizable not because they wore emblems in their
buttonholes or a uniform, but by their way of living (284).11
Spina is inspired to nd more creative ways to awaken the critical spirit in
the new society beyond the sheltered intimacy of school or the open pulpit.
Nothing was more repugnant to him than to present himself as a master
and as an initiate (159). In the famous scene of the card game12 (11619),
Spina suggests to the peasants that they can make their own rules and laws,
their own history, through the parable of replacing one card, a king, with a
particularly lowly one, the three of spades. In essence, he is teaching them to
replace their king with a democratic process for arriving at mutually agreeable values and rules, but he does so indirectly, merely by raising questions
and posing analogies.
Silone constructs his ideal of the spiritual vocation from this dialectic as a
practice based on intimate community, an ethical way of life, and the teaching
of a critical spirit. In this way, Silone attempts to draw together the lessons
of the Gospels, early Christian resistance, community, the Reformations critique of institutional religion, Enlightenment freethinking, and Kantian ethics in order to suggest a way out of a world abandoned by God.13 Yet Silone
chose to express this ideal in a novel rather than a treatise because its compelling power resides not so much in its abstract simplicity as in its unfolding
development: the narrative of Spinas struggle to attain it as a lived vocation.
SPIRITUAL VOCATION AS A NARRATIVE

OF STRUGGLE
Next, the key passages marking Spinas initiation into the spiritual vocation
and the crises he experiences in the process of developing his commitment and
205
practice need to be highlighted. Bread and Wine is not the literal narrative of a
mans entry into the priesthood, so it is difcult to identify the precise stages
in such a process, such as the moment of taking vows. My working assumption, one based on taking Silones device of taking Don Paolos alias at its face
symbolic value, is that Spina takes the step from novice to priest at the moment
he dons the robes in the presence of his school friend Dr. Nunzio Sacca.14
There is, in addition to its manifest symbolic quality, a very real social
determinant in Spinas donning of the priestly disguise. It is from that moment that everyone treats him as a priest, forcing him to respond according
to peoples expectations. Spinas quandary is not really so different from that
of any newly ordained priest, who is less convinced of the reality of his being
worthy of the grave step he has taken than are those who adopt an attitude
toward him based on his collar. Nevertheless, the compressed form of ctional narrative makes it a hybrid of realist reportage and mythical allegory.
Spinas initiation to his priestly role occurs in chapter 2 and begins with
the recognition of his aptitude for the spiritual vocation by others. The
worker Cardile tells Dr. Nunzio Sacca about how his friendship with a mysterious traveler began and developed.
Cardile recognizes Spinas charism in one simple fact: He wants nothing
in a practical way from others. Perhaps even more signicantly, he awakens
in Cardile the awareness that he, too, could desire such a noninstrumental
companionship with the man I enjoyed talking to. Such an otherworldly
quality, recalling the Taoist allegory of the tree whose use is to have no
use, has long been the mythical measure of both the spiritual and, for humanist ethics, the purely human. Cardile, however, draws a sharp distinction
between his encounter with the man of mystery and his experiences with
men of the cloth and other representatives of institutions. Spinas capacity
for living this ideal of human interrelatedness is the sign that he is ready to
begin the process of vocation.
Sacca recognizes Spinas suitability to a spiritual vocation and responds to
Cardile: I can imagine who it was. But in his case, this vocation is equivalent to that of the Catholic priesthood. Although Spina had been outside the
church for many years, he has scruples about the disguise and does not want
to be irreverent. He feels that would be inconsistent with his character. Sacca
then makes a semiserious speech, one that links Spinas disguise to the eternal myth of initiation into the mysteries of vocation:
These vestments, he said, are descended from the primitive mystery religions, from the priests of Isis and Serapis, as, of course, you know. They
were inherited by the rst monastic communities in the Catholic Church,
who tried to preserve the Christian mysteries from worldly contamination
and to assure the essential charismatic virtues to a minority living apart
from the world and opposed to the world. Thus do usages outlive the age
206
in which they were born, and pass from one religion to another. And now,
here are you, a man dedicated to the new revolutionary mysteries, to the
mysteries of revolutionary materialism, donning the dark vestments that
have been the symbols of sacrice and supernatural inspiration for thousands of years. (36)
Here, Sacca invokes in ironic phrasing the underlying theme of Silones work:
the interchangeability of costumes and names under which one may practice,
or fail to practice, that most human of all vocations.
The ironic ambivalence of this initiation scene reemerges in Spinas rst
crisis during his stay in Pietrasecca, his rst so-called parish. The forced
idleness of his convalescence from tuberculosis and the need for clandestinity, as well as the desire he feels in the presence of the young women,
Bianchina and Cristina, combine to threaten his surety of purpose. This
dissatisfaction comes to a head during a conversation with Cristina in
which he seeks to talk her out of her intention of entering a convent. While
debating this choice with her, he begins to have an inner debate about his
own vocation:
Cristinas voice recalled Don Paolos own internal dialogue between the
adolescent and the revolutionary in him. Thus he had himself been greedy
for the absolute and in love with righteousness when he had cut himself
off from the Church and gone over to Socialism. But much time had passed
since then. What had remained in him of that generous impulse towards
the masses of the people? . . . He had broken with the old world and all its
comforts, cut himself off from his family, abandoned his favorite studies,
set himself to live for justice and truth alone, and entered a party in which
he was told that justice and truth were petty-bourgeois prejudices. . . . Had
he, perhaps, taken the wrong road? (8081)
Cristina has the last word: You cannot serve two masters (81). Spina is
left alone to ponder the contradictions of his situation, a situation surprisingly similar for both red and black in Italys Guerra civile.15
In his room, Spinas reections on his dialogue with Cristina lead him
to a Weberian insight into the conict between the social norms of professionalism and institutionalism, on the one hand, and his personal desire for
spiritual purity, on the other:
Alas for all professions that have for their ultimate aim the salvation of the
world! For the sake of saving others, you ended by losing yourself. . . . Don
Paolo saw clearly now that his return to Italy had been at heart an attempt
to escape from that profession. . . . Have I escaped from the opportunism
of a decadent Church only to fall into bondage to the opportunism of a
party? (83)
207
Spinas crisis deepens with his reections, and he begins to recognize an

inner lack, the lack of interiority, the knowledge of self and the inner peace
that support one through such difcult trials:
There was a kind of cleavage in him, dividing his being into two. As long
as he had been active the two parts had coalesced and dovetailed, giving an
impression of solid strength. But no sooner was he immobilized than the
two parts fell asunder. Here he was, with inactivity thrust upon him, and
the woodworm of his brain took advantage of it to gnaw obstinately at the
weak cartilages that still linked the adolescent to the revolutionary. (85)
In this uncertain frame of mind, he delves deeper into the sociological

connection linking priests and revolutionaries beneath their costumes and
rhetoric. These reections trouble him so deeply that he became obsessed
with the fear of going mad (86). In the midst of this crisis, Spina arrives at a
profound recognition of the social truth of the spiritual vocation. It is based
on a radical alienation from the natural order of the universe: If only I could
go back to real, ordinary life. If only I could dig, plow, sow, reap, earn my
living, talk to other men on Sundays, read and study; fulll the law that says,
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou earn thy bread (87).
His personality still poised uncomfortably between the ethical demands of
the adolescent and the rational materialism of the mature intellectual, Spina
is not ready to admit to the positive and active side of his alienation, his striving for meaning, for the transcendent, for the invisible. Spina seeks to resolve
his crisis, as many clerics do, through immersion in his work, through action
in the world. Chapter 6 narrates his efforts to preach among the peasants.
It is extremely signicant for Spinas later development that he begins his
ministry by rejecting, like Jesus, the institutional hypocrisy of the dominant
church, especially that central ethical mechanism of Catholicism: confession.
Confession works to the advantage of those with power in this world and
the next:
Whats the Church for? Does the Church forbid the carabinieri to shoot?
. . . You said that at Pratola the carabinieri shot at the peasants. That means
that afterwards they confessed. But what about the dead peasants? Who
confessed them? In this life they suffered from cold, and in the next theyll
suffer from re. (108)
The poor learn the lesson of their masters well. They, in turn, use the
confession as a cynical cover for their pathetic crimes. At this point, confession symbolized for Spina only a well-suited support for a social system that
is utterly corrupt and corrupting. Spina keeps trying to awaken the critical
ethical judgment of his parishioners against this institutionalized hypocrisy
in the manner of Jesus through parables.
208
He begins to formulate his concept of vocation as the example of a different way of life, but he does so with a nagging sense of self-doubt. He is afraid
that he might be seeking refuge in action because he is afraid of thinking
(129). But his success with young people leads him to regain a measure of
(over) condence in rhetoric and to greener pastures for his talents in Fossa
and Rome (chapter 7).
Spina requires a confrontation with the extreme limits faced by his secular
comrades under Fascism before he can integrate the entirety of that myth,
its tragic events, and the lesson of humility it contains for those with worldly
aspirations. In his fellow socialist Uliva, he is faced simultaneously with the
harsh realities of his comrades lives and conrmation of his own desperate
reections during his sojourn at Pietrasecca (Dry Rock). When he enters
Ulivas apartment, he enters a scene almost identical to the one Georges
Bernanoss country priest discovers at the at of the ex-priest Dufrty. In
fact, the scenes and their implications for vocation and its alternatives are so
similar that it is worthwhile to note the congruence of details: Both Uliva
and Dufrty live out of wedlock with poor and uneducated women in squalid
walk-ups; both exhibit signs of ill health and despair; both enter into intense discussions with their student friends, in which they try to debunk the
others illusions through contrast with the ugliness of social reality; and both
seek to hide the real depths of their despair (173).16
Uliva describes to Spina, in the same cold sociological terms in which
Spina saw his vocation while at Pietrasecca, the hopeless marginality of the
ethical life compared with the totalizing world of social convention and institutions: There has never been any other alternative for us. Either you serve
or perish. He who desires to live disinterestedly, with no other discipline than
that which he imposes on himself, is outlawed by society, and the state hunts
him like an enemy (173).
As he delivers his oration on the hopelessness of the struggle, Uliva simultaneously turns his piercing vision on Spinas own inner conict:
But I know you, said Uliva. I watched you when we were in the Socialist
group. Since then I have discovered that fear is what makes you a revolutionary. You force yourself to believe in progress, to be optimistic, you
make valiant efforts to believe in free will, all because you are terried of
the opposite. (177)
Spinas secular theology of progress is suddenly confronted with its dark

other, the rigorous secularism of the nihilist. He can admit that he believes in
the liberty of man or at least in the possibility of it and therefore progress.
On leaving, Uliva delivers the nal slap when he whispers, Life can control man, but man can control death. Suicide and murder called war.
Spina is heartsick at the horrors of war: the beatings of innocent protestors, the futility, disillusionment, and discouragement of ghting back
209
symbolically by writing grafti. He doubts himself and disparages his disguise as a priest in iodine makeup.17 He despairs at the popular frenzy for war
that grips all classes. In this mood, he seeks out his former teacher.
This meeting with Don Benedetto nds the latter on the brink, like him,
of despair. Yet, from their ability to give sincere voice to the same essential
question, Don Benedetto is able, through his ability to express the continuing presence of God and the transcendent in his life, to reassure both himself
and the younger man:
I started asking myself: Where then is the Lord? Why has He abandoned
us?
That is a very pertinent question, the young man said. Where is the
Lord? If He is not a human invention, but an objective spiritual reality, the
beginning and the end of all the rest, where is He now? His voice was not
that of an atheist, but that of a disappointed lover.
There is an old story that must be called to mind every time the existence of the Lord is doubted, the old man went on. It is written, perhaps you will remember, that at a moment of great distress Elijah asked
the Lord to let him die, and the Lord summoned him to a mountain. And
there arose a great and mighty wind that struck the mountain and split the
rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind the earth was
shaken by an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after
the earthquake there arose a great re, but the Lord was not in the re. But
afterwards, in the silence, there was a still, small voice, like the whisper of
branches moved by the evening breeze, and that still small voice, it is written, was the Lord.
Meanwhile a breeze had arisen in the garden, and the door of the room
in which the two men were sitting creaked and swung open. The young
man shuddered. The old man placed his hand on his shoulder and said,
with a laugh, Do not be afraid. You have nothing to fear. (243)
In the intimate circle of this faith, Spina is nally able to confront the
harsh truth Uliva sought to teach him:
We have reached a point at which it can be said that only he can save his
soul who is prepared to throw it away.
There is no other salvation than that, the old man said. (245)
Don Benedetto offers Spina an exit from the paradoxes of Ulivas cynicism
by offering him a vision that has united the ethics of Christianity and secular
humanism: the dialectics of I and thou. Jrgen Habermas has argued that
this simple discursive construction guarantees the truth of our value system:
The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it
can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing
whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy
210
and responsibility are posited for us. Our rst sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.18
Thus, the very materiality of our language expresses our highest ethical ideals, our relationship to the still, small voice of God.
Don Benedetto concludes by describing the ideal of the spiritual vocation
discussed in the previous section: the life . . . of a man who strives to be free,
loyal, just, sincere, disinterested; a man who shows what a man can be (250).
When the younger man expresses his impatience with things as they are
(I do not think it is enough), the older man responds: One must respect
time (250). Spina returns to Fossa and announces his renewed sense of vocation in the simple phrase: I no longer wish to go [abroad] now (251).
In chapter 11, Spina begins his ministry in earnest and discovers how
much more he must still understand about others and himself and how profound the problem of faith can be. As a true parish priest, one who hears the
confessions of others and grants them absolution and, thereby, hope, he must
learn to accept a humanity he previously held at an intellectual distance.
His rst trial is hearing the confession of Judas himself, the young man
Murica who became a government informer and betrayer of the small group
of socialists who had befriended him (25659). In the process, he learns to
value his humanity: For the rst time he saw before him the writhing soul
of a poor man in whom everything human and decent had been soiled, tarnished, and trampled underfoot (260). Through Murica and his act of confession, Spina is forced to reconsider his view of that practice as merely a
hypocritical prop of social corruption.
Murica began to escape the grip of his fear through witnessing the example of others:
After glimpsing the possibility of another life that would be clean, honest,
and courageous, after that frank communion with another and those lovely
dreams of a better humanity . . . I passed from dread of being punished to
dread of not being punished. (262)
My confession lasted ve hours, and at the end I lay prostrate and
exhausted on the oor. . . . He taught me that nothing is irreparable while
life lasts, and that no condemnation is eternal. He told me also that . . . good
was often born of evil, and that perhaps I might never have become a real
man without the calamities and errors through which I had passed. . . . I
was no longer afraid. (26364)
Thus, Murica has learned the deeper lessons of confession and shares them
with Spina:
I did not come here to seek pardon or absolution. . . . There are wounds that
should not be bandaged and hidden, but exposed to the sun. The usual
211
ritual and sacramental confession, generally carried out behind a grating,

is a ceremony towards which I have reservations, but a confession of one
man to another can be like the cauterization of wound. (264)
Murica accomplishes for Spina, through allegory, a synthesis of the enlightenment project (exposed to the sun; the medical metaphors) and
the meaning behind ritualized Christianity. Spina is able to recognize that
the ethical origin and potential of confession lie in this honest and intimate
communion. That is what allows faith in God (forgiveness) without blindness to the existence of evil. Spina then confesses his true identity to the
man who was an informer and the two men dipped the old bread in the
new wine (265), performing the ancient ritual of communion that connects
you and me, old wisdom and new understanding. Murica concludes their
encounter: I have been making my confession. . . . Now I am ready for anything (265).
In the nal chapter (chapter 12), Spina is ready to accept the personal and
intellectual synthesis that will support the next stage of his struggle to live
his vocation. Rather than resolve the conict between his secular rationalism
and Christianity, he can now see the proper place of each:
It seems to me now that for fteen years I was only half alive, Don Paolo
confessed. During that time I never ceased trying to smother and repress
my deepest impulses, solely because in my youth they had been bound up
with religious symbols and practices. I tried, with an obstinacy and a determination that sprang from my loathing of the Church, to substitute
logic and intellectual ideas taken from the world of economics and politics
for those deeper forces which I felt myself compelled to distrust. . . . Don
Benedettos words penetrated to the depths of me. Within a few days all
that remained alive and indestructible of Christianity in me was revived: a
Christianity denuded of all mythology, of all theology, of all Church control. (281)
At the same time, he can accept what he has learned from the world
of economics and politics as enrichment rather than a threat to his ethical
impulses:
He had not forgotten that the social question is not a moral one and is not
resolved by purely moral means. He knew that in the last resort the relations established among men are dictated by necessity and not by good will
or bad. Moral preaching did not sufce to change them. But there came a
moment when certain social relations revealed themselves as outworn and
harmful. Morality then condemned what had already been condemned by
history. A sense of justice caused the slaves to rise, put arms into the hands
of the advance guard, kindled the souls of martyrs, inspired thinkers and
artists. (290)
212
No single system, intellectual or theological, can explain the complexity

of human experience and choice. The only hope lies in a critical dialogue and,
in times of crisis, a mutual support between the search for understanding and
the desire for justice.
Silone implies that the full acceptance of the spiritual vocation means at
least a partial exit from the historical register to that of the mythical:
In all times, in all societies, the supreme act is to give oneself to nd oneself. . . . He is saved who overcomes his individual egoism, family egoism,
caste egoism, does not shut himself in a cloister or build himself an ivory
tower, or make cleavage between his way of acting and his way of thinking. He is saved who frees his own spirit from the idea of resignation to
the existing disorder. . . . In a society like ours a spiritual life can only be a
revolutionary life. (28990)
Silones intuitive sense as a novelist expresses itself most strongly in the

ambiguous and open ending of Bread and Wine. Once Spina has his vocation
so well in hand, he truly becomes the man of mystery, more myth and ideal
than protagonist, and he simply disappears into the wildness of the mountains. The price paid in rejecting a corrupt society for the elusive transcendent, however, is clear: [S]piritual life and secure life do not go together
(291).
SEXUALITY, WOMEN, AND THE CHURCH:

SILONES FIRST DRAFT OF CELIBACY
In neither the rst nor the second version of Bread and Wine does Spina
take a vow of celibacy, yet in both texts he remains chaste despite the presence of sexual desire and possible lovers. Only in the rst version is celibacy
explicitly upheld as a structural part of the spiritual vocation even as an ideal
(284). In both versions, the most persuasive argument for celibacy is expressed by the example of Don Benedetto, a priest who has achieved celibacy
and has integrated it to a remarkable extent.
Spina, on the other hand, passes from a highly conicted and uneasy relation to his sexuality and its place in his vocation to a much greater tolerance
of both human sexuality and his own sexual self. This development does not,
however, transpire over the course of the narrative but is the result of the
changes Silone himself underwent in the more than ten years that passed
before his writing of the second version.
Both Spinas are chaste, and their chastity bears enough of a relationship
to their vocation to be labeled celibacy. But it is the Spina of the rst version whose chastity is as much the product of sexual underdevelopment and
repression as it is the support of his vocation. His associations of sexuality
with depravity, irresponsibility, and the animalistic and egoistic aspects of
213
humanity are quite similar to the sexual teachings of the Catholic Church,
both of his time and our own.
In what follows, I will examine the construction of Spinas celibacy as it
develops in close relation to his views and experience of sexuality. Then, I
will explore two sets of views that reveal a deep connection to this sexual/
celibate process: Spinas attitude toward women and his attitude toward the
established Catholic Church. Although his views of women tend to mirror
the structural misogyny of the church19 and many individual celibates, Spinas hostility toward the church functions literally as a mirror, turning the
churchs antisexual dogma back at itself in an institutional portrayal of the
church as sexually corrupt, hypocritical, and pagan. In the section that follows, these aspects of Spinas personality in the rst version of Bread and
Wine will be contrasted with the handling of sexuality, women, and the established church in the second version.
In the rst version, the tension between the practice of celibacy and the
presence of sexuality grows over the course of the novel, as if the effort of
maintaining the practice requires the support of a rejection of the sexual as
inherently compromised ethically, the repository of evil. Although it is quite
easy to recognize Silones authorial viewpoint behind the ideal and practice
of Spinas spiritual vocation, the congruence of author and protagonist seems
to come apart, not so much over the need for celibacy as over Spinas hostility toward the sexual. In fact, the author is so absent from these scenes that
the reader is somehow abandoned between the characters prejudices and the
objectivity of the social-realist narrative, for Spina never seems so much the
object of a narrators critical scrutiny, never so much a clinical case study as
an exemplar for the reader and a mouthpiece for the author as he does in the
scenes dealing with the evils of sexuality.
In the rst half of the novel (chapters 16), Spina maintains a fairly balanced view of sexuality and accepts his own desire in a conscious and psychologically productive way. This disposition lasts through his rst visit to
Pietrasecca, and its collapse appears to be part of the adjustment that follows
his rst major crisis (chapters 46).
In chapter 2, Sacca at rst fails to recognize Spina because he had treated
his face with a special iodine mixture, in order to give himself the lines,
wrinkles, and complexion of premature old age, and thus make himself unrecognizable to the police (28). Spinas sexuality and the beginning of a
celibate vocation are introduced simultaneously in Saccas reaction to his selfdisgurement, a reaction that equates that act with a renunciation for ethical
reasons (although Sacca cannot label them so, preferring the pejorative term
sectarianism) of an active sexual nature:
Dr. Sacca looked in astonishment at the disgured and aged face of his
contemporary. Pietro Spina had never been considered good-looking, but
214
his impetuous nature and his sincerity had always made him attractive to
women. He had never been an idle petticoat chaser, but he had the reputation of having a passionate temperament and of being a violent and
tenacious lover. Dr. Sacca found it hard to understand how political sectarianism could have driven him to disgure himself. (28)
Spina reinforces this connection between serious aims and sexual renunciation in his kidding of the surprised doctor:
When the average young Italian stops wanting to become the lover of
every American or Swiss tourist and starts applying himself to more serious aims, perhaps it will be necessary to open an articial disgurement
institute for the handsomest and daintiest dandies, to take the place of the
present beauty parlors. (28)
Although the scene passes quickly, it reveals a deep contradiction in

Spina, one that will return ever more forcefully, between a serious and almost dangerously (violent) passionate nature, on the one hand, and an affected scorn, though still lighthearted, for sexual relations as frivolous and
secondary, on the other. If Dr. Sacca were his analyst, perhaps he would have
lingered longer on Spinas words and his act of self-mutilation.
If the disgurement symbolizes Spinas vows of celibacy, his rst trial as a
celibate comes in chapter 4. The same idleness that sets off his spiritual and
intellectual crisis also makes him prone to his sexual urges. When Bianchina,
the young woman he comforted when she appeared to be dying of an illegal abortion (4546), arrives, they begin a irtation that has its predictable
effect:
If I make love, is it really true that Jesus is angry? she said. Why should
He be angry? Who tells him to be angry?
Let us change the subject, the priest suggested.
All right, said Bianchina, laughing. But lovemaking is so nice that I
dont understand how anybody can do anything else. Dont you agree with
me?
Listen Bianchina, answered the priest. I am sorry, I am really very,
very sorry, but I do not belong to this diocese.
You mustnt think ill of me, she said.
Round her neck, under her chemise, she wore the scapular of the Madonna del Carmine. She unbuttoned her blouse, opened her chemise and
showed it. The scapular was green and her breasts were milky white. Don
Paolo felt his heart beating faster at the sight, after long abstinence, of this
tender and fresh fruit of his own country. (7071)
He feels even more strongly drawn to his spiritual interlocutor, Cristina,

addressing her in his diary with the tender expressions of a lover (84), and
215
it is his physical desire for her that makes him understand that he has taken
up a celibate path. Although he had dismissed his desire for Bianchina on
purely pragmatic groundsIt was a pity, it really was a pity, that he had to
be prudenthis desire for Cristina seems to threaten his ethical vocation
itself: Cristina was washing the oor. Don Paolo scarcely dared look at her.
He discovered what purity meant; what it meant to make chastity the guardian over ones body (98).
When he seeks to escape the boredom of the female atmosphere around
him (106), he surely is seeking to escape more than boredom. Despite this
light irony, Spina seems able to weather the trial as a celibate while maintaining a generally enlightened belief in sexual openness. His kindness to
Bianchina during her postabortion illness reveals his hostility to the churchs
outmoded positions on sexuality: [Y]ou are forgiven. What will not be
forgiven is this evil society that forced you to choose between death and
dishonor (46).
Spina also attempts to defend the lovers Bianchina and Alberto from the
intolerance of the village and even Cristina (1034). Spinas sexually enlightened worldview is also expressed during his efforts to preach to the peasants.
He is irritated with the difculty of getting past their sexual mores to talk of
important political issues:
Have you ever suffered from lack of liberty?
Liberty? he said. Theres only too much of it. Once upon a time a girl
was not allowed to be alone with her anc before marriage.
I am not talking of that, said Don Paolo. I am not talking of the behavior of engaged couples.
I see, sir, he said. You are talking of married people. With us things
have remained as they were, but down in the plain theres only too much
liberty.
I see, said Don Paolo, and gave up trying to go on with the conversation.
He is even more disturbed to see these mores, long inculcated by the

church and manipulated by the Fascist schoolmistress to foster hatred of
other nations:
The last announcement the schoolmistress read out was about the coalition of the Protestant countries against Italy.
The schoolmistress told the story of Luther.
Luther was a monk, she said, and he had taken the vows of obedience,
chastity, and poverty. One day he made the acquaintance of a nun, and fell
madly in love with her. He asked the Popes permission to marry her, but
the Pope refused. So Luther started protesting. All the monks who found
the vow of chastity vexatious joined him, and that was the origin of Protestantism.
216
It is puzzling that the same frustration with this manipulation of rhetoric that
leads Spina to seek vocation in a way of life also leads him to equate sexuality
with evil and irresponsibility, thereby adopting the same restrictive mores he
had earlier condemned in others.
The suddenness of this change is only comprehensible if the passages concerning his views on sexuality in the rst chapters are reviewed and more
carefully scrutinized. Even his most direct attack on the moralistic dogmas
of his society and the church, during his absolution of the autoabortionist,
is noncommittal on sexuality itself. In the prudishness of the new Spina, we
realize that the old one had never come to terms with the specicity of sexual
desire; that is, he never had a theology of sexuality.
The Protestants should not be hated, but there is no commentary on their
repudiation of celibacy; Alberto and Bianchina should be allowed to marry,
but there is no opinion expressed about their desire for free love. This noncommittal attitude, which the secular or progressive reader can easily conate with his or her own views, can also be easily supplanted by a dogma
close to that of the Vatican.
What runs as a constant theme through the novel is the contrast between
the animal (all that has to do with survival) and the truly human (that
which is purely disinterested). Sexuality is too easily subsumed under the
rst category, the animal instincts Spina speaks of with Cristina (80), and
becomes, therefore, a sign of all that inhibits the spiritual life: social and
biological necessity. This contrast between sexuality (animal) and celibacy
(truly human) undermines any possibility of arriving at a synthesis of the
animal and the human, sexuality and celibacy, the worldly and the spiritual.
As I argued in the previous section, however, Spina does accomplish a signicant synthesis between his intellectual and his spiritual views, and it is
precisely between that synthesis and a fragmented view of sexuality that the
largest contradiction in the novel looms. Before examining Silones response
to this contradiction after the publication of the 1937 edition, let us survey
the specics of that conict.
Even more striking are Spinas personal and visceral expressions of contempt for the physical side of human sexuality. Spina again lets his disgust for
the physical details of sexual desire take over his moral vision while he listens
to the cowherd recount the story of his perverse relations with the baroness.
Toward the end of the novel, the evil and ominous connotations of sexuality seem to have become embedded in the mythical structure of the narrative
itself. Spina has an unexplained reaction to a strange vision: On the windowpane the priest saw two ies on top of one another, surprised by death
in the act of love. Outside it was raining. Don Paolo shuddered (270). His
shudder seems to foreshadow, like the contrast between Cristinas virtue and
the love-making of wolves, a terrible fate in which sex and death, the inescapable powers of nature, are inseparably linked.
217
If Spina is openly conicted about sexuality, the narrative point of view

expresses a more objective ambivalence, one that is perhaps beyond good
and evil in its novelistic rigor. (This point of view cannot be equated with
that of the author; Silone was profoundly concerned with questions of good
and evil, but, as a novelist, he usually succeeds at critical moments to submit himself to the genres structural imperatives of ambivalence and irony.)
This ambivalence unfolds in three crucial episodes: the story of Annina and
Murica; Spinas second crisis of celibate vocation; and the sexual tension of
Spinas nal meetings with Bianchina and Cristina, his two lovers.
In his encounter with Annina (chapter 8), Spina reveals both a belief in
the value of celibacy, even for secular political activists, and suspiciousness
toward sexuality, even in its most positive manifestations. Spina expresses
himself with uncharacteristic malice and sarcasm:
Listen, said Spina. We revolutionaries are few and weak. Against us
there is a whole world of self-interest and fear. To hold out and not allow
ourselves to be annihilated we must concentrate our energies, support each
other in every way we can. Instead, we waste our best strength on sentimental stupidities.
Our friendship did not in any way diminish our participation in
the work of the group, the girl said. On the contrary, we were among
the most active. We organized excursions and reading evenings, and chose
novels dealing with social questions for the discussions. We even gave up
marrying, setting up house, and having children, in order to have more
time for the group.
I can imagine the rest, said Spina. Love faded, and with it all interest
in the group.
The girls mind was elsewhere and she did not hear Spinas interruption. (18586)
In this brief exchange, Spina expresses a dogmatic view of sex now shared
by the institutions of church and party. Despite Anninas comprehension of
what is at stake in her vocationthey gave up family life in order to serve
Spina demands more, mocking their relationship as a sentimental stupidity. What we see is the materialist version of moral Puritanism; despite early
Communist endorsements of sexual enlightenment, and even free love (e.g.,
the glass-of-water thesis), the party under Stalin began to promote sexual restraint and traditional family values for all and, for party cadres, the foreswearing of the bourgeois attachments of romantic love and even abstinence.20
Although the dark side of sexuality destroys the lovers relationship
Murica rejects Annina as a whore because she allowed the police to rape
her in order to protect him (18788)the narrative ambivalence toward
their sexual love is expressed in the irony with which Spinas view is presented. He becomes so spiteful that the reader cannot help condemning his
218
inexibility and looking for the good in their relationship. In narrative, overstatement always suggests its opposite, but in Silones novel the counter to
Spinas view nds its own positive expression during Muricas confession in
chapter 11.
Between his castigation of Annina and his hearing of Muricas confession,
Spina has himself passed through a second crisis in his celibate vocation.
Although emphasis is on his despair over the war enthusiasm, Spina regrets
his sexual abnegation, ruining his face with iodine (225),21 and briey considers a new life with Bianchina, whom he has begun to regard again with
desire (224).
In the critical scene with Don Benedetto that follows, Spina renews his explicit commitment to his vocation and an implicit one to celibacy. This latter
receives small yet signicant support from Don Benedetto, who remains in
the church precisely to preserve his reputation as a celibate, the loss of which
he censures in others:
In the last fty years every priest who has left the Church has done so
because of some scandalous infraction of the rule of celibacy. That is sufcient to give an ideal of the spiritual condition of our clergy. If the news
were spread in the diocese that another priest, one Don Benedetto, of Rocca
dei Marsi, had abandoned the priesthood, the rst explanation that would
naturally occur to the faithful would be that yet another priest had eloped
with his housemaid. (248)
This impulse to censure the decisions of others, one of the most troubling
aspects, partly because of its apparent ubiquity, of celibate practice, is carried over to Spinas rudeness to Bianchina (the temptress?) as he prepares
to embark on his vocation with new condence. In this thoughtlessness,
Spinas inner sexual conict remains unintegrated, projected unto others
rather than mastered.
In the nal chapter, Spina makes an explicit call for celibacy as part of the
vocation of the new revolutionaries:
You cannot conceive what it would mean to a country like ours, said Don
Paolo, if there were a hundred youths ready to renounce all safety, defy
all corruption, free themselves from obsession with private property, sex,
and their careers, and unite on the basis of absolute sincerity and absolute
brotherliness. (284)
The unresolved tensions and ambivalence underlying this condent call,

however, emerge in his nal confrontations with Bianchina and Cristina.
The former reveals a very real psychological tension in Spinas personality, whereas the latter touches on the central mystical ambivalence of celibate theology. His admission amounts to a confession that he is unable to
219
confront the sexual or help others resolve their sexual problems, much less
his own, a problem implied in his ight from the confessions of the villagers
in chapter 11.
When Bianchina gives voice to her seless love for him, however, Spinas
fragile celibacy seems to shatter. She asks quite simply, Can we spend the
night together? and Spina replies even more simply, Yes (307), a reply that
remains utterly mysterious because no such opportunity presents itself in
the last pages of the novel.
In fact, we are left with the mystery of Spinas celibacy, and of celibacy
itself, in the concluding encounters of the book. Spina has demonstrated a
sexual/celibate charismathe sexual power of the man of mysteryin his
relations with both women; both give up everything for him.
Nevertheless, the signicance of celibacy in the novel remains bound to
Spinas conicted sexuality. The harmful aspects of this inner conict manifest themselves most clearly in a tendency toward misogyny. The narrative
point of view maintains, as in its relation to Spinas prudishness, some ironic
distance from Spinas attitudes toward women, but much less so because of
the tendency of all the female characters to conrm Spinas attitudes in their
words and actions. Like the church, Spina gives women two roles to play:
Mary Magdalene before and after meeting Jesus.
Spinas uneasy relation to his sexuality leads him to project the problem
onto women, seeing them as prey to their desiresthe depraved baroness
being the extreme example (21517)and not, therefore, truly human. The
threat their presence poses to his chastity (chapters 4 and 4) leads him to
dismiss the value of their companionship (106). In his meeting with Annina,
Spina also hints that she carries the blame for the agging of their political
commitments: Love faded, and with it all interest in the group (186). In
both of these episodes, the narrative portrays Spina in a strongly ironic light.
The narrative point of view does not distance itself, however, from Spinas
construction of female subjectivity as one suited to a more passive form of
resistance through devotion to a male spiritual model.
Spinas conicted sexuality not only has these unsurprising effects on his
relations to women, it also exacerbates his hatred for the established church.
Just as a Catholic clergyman might nd support for his problematic celibacy
in church dogma, Spina seems to seek support in an antichurch dogma; both
rely on an association of concupiscence with evil. Throughout the novel, the
church is revealed to be steeped in hypocrisy, from the use of the confessional
as a cover rather than a confrontation with sin (1089) to its self-interested
endorsement of the war: The bishop is going to bless the Avezzano conscripts today, said the other. The death ray will open the way for the Popes
missionaries (192).
The war rally becomes a pagan and barbaric ritual, complete with patriotic fetishes, unintelligible cries and chants (CHAY DOO), and a symbolic
220
Witch-Doctor, which is presided over by the church (200203). Spinas rage

against this hypocrisy is sharper than his anti-Fascism and nds expression
in the grafti he writes on the church steps: Down with the Pope whos in
favor of the war! (218). This connection between the churchs evil and a reversion to paganism is also suggested in the appearance of Don Benedettos
assassins: One man wore a piece of snake skin in his hatband against the evil
eye; another had some badgers hair tied to his watch chain (278).
Celibacy is clearly the one unsuccessfully integrated element in Spinas
vocation; even as his vocation reaches higher levels of integration with each
crisis, the conicts in his sexual adjustment are, if anything, exacerbated. As
a narrative of the struggle for celibate achievement, Bread and Wine would
seem to suggest that celibacy should be jettisoned from the ideal of spiritual
vocation, if it were not for the example of Don Benedetto. Although Don
Benedettos vocation undergoes signicant transformations from service
within church institutions to withdrawal and, nally, resistance and martyrdom, his celibate achievement remains a constant that is never questioned.
It exhibits the earmarks observed by me of a fully integrated practice: appreciation of beauty, intellectual curiosity, tolerance of others, and respect
for women. He is at rst the unconscious then the explicit priestly model inspiring Spinas vocation, a crucial element in a young mans decision to take
up such a difcult life: Men will follow Christ if they can nd persons who
have already done so with honesty and joy. Nothing is more powerful than
example. Nothing exerts more authority than simple truth lived.22
With astounding insight into the process of celibacy, Silone contrasts
Don Benedettos achievement of celibacy with Don Girasoles uneasy practice of it. Don Girasole hints at his uncomfortable adjustment to his vocation
through the mouthing of an old clich: The man of God must always be
tired, he said. For idle thoughts occur in idle moments, and behind them
lurks the Evil One, who is always on the watch (233). At rst glance, this
modus operandi seems harmless enough, and it may even be regarded as part
of a rich life of service to his parish, if it were not soon revealed to be a cover
for moral lassitude:
By the way, said Don Paolo, what do you think of the war?
A country priest has many things to do and little time to think, Don
Girasole replied. (233)
When Spina probes into his repudiation of Don Benedetto, that very rash
man of God (235), and his refusal to condemn evils in society, Don Girasole
murmurs: O God, O God, why do you torment me? (238). Don Girasoles
resigned pessimism and his need to be busy are ways to hide from his sexuality and, by implication, his social responsibilities. To be able to resist social
injustice effectively, as Don Benedetto does, the celibate cannot be hiding
221
from his sexual nature and desires but must master them. In Don Benedettos person, the successful conscious resistance to the demands of sexuality
(his natural destiny) becomes a metaphor for the strength needed to resist
human oppression.
It is Don Benedettos achievement of celibacy rather than Spinas conicted sexuality that guided Silones reworking of the narrative between the
rst and second versions.
HOPEFUL REVISIONS: SILONES SECOND

DRAFT OF CELIBACY
In his preface to the second version of Bread and Wine, Silone relates an
anecdote that he credits as the origin of his revision. He notices that a Swiss
woman sharing his train compartment is reading his novel, and he becomes
riveted on her progress:
It was a strange sensation to be faced with a stranger to whom I was secretly telling a long story. . . . In fact a strange uneasiness came over me.
The page she was reading did not satisfy me at all; indeed, at the moment
it struck me as actually absurd. Why had I written it? If I had foreseen that
a person like this was going to read the book, I said to myself, I should certainly have cut that page, as well as others, besides giving much thought
to certain expressions. . . . Perhaps I had never before felt so immediately
and so acutely the privilege and the responsibility of being a writer. (2nd
ed., xiv)
Which page was it that he wished so badly to cut? Were the revisions limited to tightening the narrative? Silone implies as much in his only statement
about the results of his editing project:
As critics have noted, the structure, the moral essence, the vicissitudes
of the characters have remained unchanged; but these books have been
stripped of secondary or non-essential material and the basic theme has
been deepened. (2nd ed., xv)
That basic theme certainly did remain intact, a theme that is succinctly
captured in Silones statement about his responsibilities as a writer: The
only commitment that deserves respect is that of a personal vocation (2nd
ed., xvi). Nevertheless, the revisions are by no means limited to so-called
extraneous elements. What has been most noticeably eliminated are the episodes and scenes, at times mere lines, that made up the narrative of Spinas
inner struggle with a prudishness that linked sexuality to depravity, evil,
and irresponsibility and his corollary treatment of womens subjectivity as a
threat and the churchs compromises as a metaphor for concupiscence.
222
Although Silone makes no direct commentary on the fact, one cannot help
being struck, in light of the revisions he made, that the encounter that motivated him to make the changes was that of the woman reading his novel. He
notes that earlier some workers had questioned him concerning the meaning
of certain lines but that this had not been sufcient to convince him of the
need to revise it. When we examine the substance of the changes, however,
the signicance of his embarrassment before a female audiencea person
like thisbecomes understandable. Perhaps there is nothing more disconcerting to a mature man than having a woman discover the adolescent within
him, especially if it is exposed in the printed page.
The discussion of the revision and its thematic results would be limited
almost exclusively to a cataloguing of deleted scenes, a trimming that goes
far beyond matters of artistic economy because their absence reveals a newly
conceived understanding of the role of sexuality in the spiritual vocation,
if it were not that these cuts found a substitution in Silones addition of a
crucial new scene at the beginning of the novel. That scene, in which Spina
attempts to seduce a peasant woman living near his hiding place, establishes
the sexual issues at stake in his initiation to vocation, and especially the idea
of celibacy, much more vividly and subtly than the combination of symbolic
(the disgurement) and rhetorical calls for celibacy in the rst version.
Spina meets a woman beside a stream and sets up a liaison with her for
the same evening. In his desire for her, he seems to forget everything to do
with his mission; He is impatient and rude with Cardile (2nd ed., 3940)
and risks exposing himself to capture: [H]e . . . made straight for the water
trough, without worrying about hiding the direction from which he came
(2nd ed., 40).
After an initial idyllic rendezvous, their conversation turns to Spinas real
identity, and the woman, Margherita, reveals that she knows that he is wanted
by the police. Spinas reply expresses his cynicism about women, a cynicism
that was present throughout the rst version, but he meets an active resistance and dignity in Margherita that makes explicit what was only shrouded
in vague irony in the gure of Bianchina. Although the disgurement remains, though now more subordinated, the explicit call for celibacy (284)
was cut. The invisibility of the disgurement to women, however, is still a
mystery, especially in the added scene.
As both a lover and as a celibate, Spina ceases to see in women his human
peers. In this symbolic initiation to celibacy, which precedes the initiation
scene of donning the priests robes, Spina is also initiated to the subjectivity
of women. Thus, in the second version of Bread and Wine, celibacy is not the
continuation and exacerbation of an immature sexual development; rather,
it is the beginning of the possibility of true relationships with women. In
the physical distance that Margherita establishes, Spina obtains a space for
reection and understanding.
223
In the development of the second version, the ambivalence in Spinas

generally enlightened view of sexuality from the rst half of the novel now
remains focused throughout the text on the productive tension within celibate sublimation. Rather than degenerating into a conict between sexual
perversion and prudishness, Spinas sexuality intensies alongside his growing appreciation of female companionship as more of a support than a threat
to his vocation. As a result, the nal ambivalence about the love between him
and Cristina gains in mystery, meaning, and power.
After the scene with Margherita, this change of perspective is expressed
mainly through what has been cut. Missing in the second version are the
scenes linking sexuality to moral corruption: Achilles seductions (and Spinas disgust at the physicality of sex); the story of the depraved baroness;
and, most important, Bianchinas turn to prostitution and Spinas disgust
with her and pornography. Even the sexual descriptions of the Ethiopian
women are toned down. Perhaps the change is most powerfully felt in the
revised dialogue during Spinas visit with Annina.
In the nal scene with Murica, Silone not only drops the call for celibacy,
he even portrays Spina as respecting, if not envying, the relationship of the
reunited lovers:
When does Annina arrive? Don Paolo asked.
Perhaps tomorrow, Murica said. She writes to me every day.
Shes a marvelous girl, Don Paolo said. Im certainly jealous of you.
(2nd ed., 256)
Closely bound with this altered view of sexuality is a revised view of

womens subjectivity, evident in the added lines in the dialogue with Annina
and in the character of Margherita, which is expressed with particular force
in the revision of the concluding scenes of the novel. Not only is the entire
encounter with Bianchina in Rome, with her fall, her self-effacement, and
Spinas attempt to play the pedagogue cut, but Silone also adds a signicant
scene between Spina and Cristina. Their dialogue is much richer in the preceding pages than it was in the rst version, and Cristina seems much more
aware of the world, much less childlike and dependent (cf. 288 and 2nd ed.,
249). They then confess the sexual nature of their affection for each other
in a veiled but forceful way. The scene over the loom that follows reveals to
Spina the deep connection between his spiritual vocation and the active inuence of women in his life and his desire to recapture their community.
In an almost perfect inversion of Spinas efforts (in the rst version) to
play the pedagogue to Bianchina, in which he attempts to bequeath to her the
abstract world of male philosophy,23 Spina now offers Cristina instruction
based on the learning he received from women. This new world of intersubjectivity and exchange across gender lines was also expressed in perfect
224
complementarity by Margherita, who tells Spina that she learned from a

man, her father, to protect the persecuted, inverting in turn the gender determinism of the scene in the rst version in which Spina makes the distinction
between the good of woman, who resists the war passively, instinctually, and
the evil of male careerism. This cycle of cross-gender sharing makes possible
a sphere of honest affection.
Here his return to Christianity is connected, in striking contrast to the
rst version in which it leads to prudishness and misogyny, to memories of
the affectionate bond with women in which work and companionship weave
a world of shared feelings and intersubjectivity. In addition, he can share
that affection with Cristina in a way apparently beyond him in the scene with
Margherita and, most signicantly in the paranoid world of a Fascist society,
let the truth come out. As a result, the nal scene of Cristinas martyrdom,
while still steeped in mythical and symbolic imagery, gives way to a more
vivid poignancy, a more real sense of human loss.
This higher integration of sexuality and celibacy, vocation and affection,
is accompanied by a greater forbearance for the foibles of institutions, church
and party, that claim, yet fail, to serve ethical ends. Silone cut the scenes in
which the monk sells medals to make money on the war and Spina mocks
the church as constipated. When he writes grafti against the war, Spina no
longer writes one against the pope. And by cutting the melodramatic martyrdom of Don Benedetto, Silone also frees the church from implication in
his murder. Even the party is handled more gently; both as a representative
of the party (in his meeting with Annina) and as its critic (the scene with
the agitator Bolla, which was cut), Spina seems less trapped between moral
absolutes and rank opportunism. Although one could take issue with these
decisions, arguing that both the church in Fascist Italy and the Communist
Party under Stalin are hardly deserving of forbearance, it is clear that the
more tolerant mood is the result of both Silones greater distance from the
events and a more integrated ethical system, one with less need for resentment toward others as a form of self-justication.
In the process of revising Bread and Wine, Silone appears to have found a
smoother integration of his Christian and secular values through an allegorical process of integrating the ideal of celibacy with the realities of human
sexuality and the subjectivity of women. That his is achieved largely through
cutting heterogeneous24 materials, however, suggests that some problems
were avoided rather than resolved, an observation that holds for both the
disturbing aspects of the sexual and the depth of gender conict in a maledominated society. Perhaps the truth of ambivalence has been lost: Is the
result too perfect an ideal? Is Spina no longer a truly literary gure, the picaresque saint, as one critic named the protagonist of the rst version, but
only an edifying, and perhaps impossible, role model? What is certain is that
this most difcult process, the process of achieving celibacy itself, is absent
225
from each separate narrative; that process is only restored by reading both
versions as a single narrative of celibate struggle and achievement.
Silones successful integration of such issues as sexual freedom and womens liberation to both a fairly timeless standard of Christian ethics and way
of life and an implicitly positive presentation of celibacy suggests reason for
optimism about the possibility of synthesizing Christian ideals and celibacy
as a mode of practicing the spiritual vocation, with a modernized anthropology of human sexuality and the contemporary values of gender equality
and multicultural tolerance not only without losing the meaning of the former but, in fact, with much to be gained all around. We can only hope that
Silones optimism is not an illusion of that value system, known generally as
humanism, which upholds the potential of human consciousness and actions
to create and maintain its values against the apparent limits, the necessities,
of natural and social structures.
There is perhaps a Christian tradition better able to endure the threat of
an implacable necessity, one more grounded in the acceptance of the fallen
condition of the world and original sin than any activism. It is such a Christianity that weathered the Dark Ages, the Black Death, and much more. And
it is such a Christianity that sustains J. F. Powers in his effort to narrate the
life and death of a priest in a hostile context: postwar United States.
Whereas Silones novel is triumphant, especially from a Christian point
of view, Powerss is tragic, but it is not the tragedy of a single individual, the
priest who attempts to succeed, nor, by any means, is it the tragedy of Christianity, which is content to fail, to endure in the minds and souls of those
incompetents and cranks who submit to it with humility. It is the tragedy of
a society.
In these two great social novels of the spiritual vocation, Bread and Wine
and Morte DUrban, society and vocation are handled with the most striking contrasts for their signicance; yet celibacy, as a mediating structure
between society and individual, remains surprisingly constant in its practice,
limitations, and potential.
As I have sought to demonstrate, the radical contrasts between the novels
express less the differences between the outlooks of the authors than a response to two very different societies. Heroic resistance to social norms and
a meaningful death are still possibilities for Spina because his world, that of
rural Italy and, oddly enough, dictatorship, is still enchanted; that is, it still
offers a realm for meaningful action.
Even if Powers had desired to produce such a narrative, he could have
done so only as a latter-day Don Quixote, the victim rather than the wielder
of Cervantean irony. His white-collar world, as a quintessentially disenchanted one, dees the visible representation of meaning, forcing the writer
to suggest the presence of meaning only in the Unseen. Neither Max Weber
nor Georg Lukcs predicted the last heroic age of the novel, its engagement
226
as a literary form in the anti-Fascist struggle, but their foresight is all the
more striking in the work of someone like J. F. Powers.
Although celibacy is pursued differently in the two novels, its structure
remains the same: Whereas Spina seeks to tap into a sublimated sexuality to
build greater affective relationships with his community and with meaning,
Urban manages only to sublimate his sexuality to a success ethic. Spinas
celibacy deepens as his commitment to service outside institutional measures
and rewards grows. Urban, however, loses the very meaning of celibacy when
his ambitions collapse; thus, his nal resignation to vocation occurs in a postsexual state, in a dirge of age, illness, and death.
Neither novel allows for the narration of the achievement and integration
of celibacy within their limited time frame, that of a single year. In Silones
case, however, the 20 years that elapsed between the two versions of the
novel reveal the process of achieving celibacy in an almost magical way. In
both versions, Spina is still the same young man, but in the second one he
seems to have acquired 20 years experience as a celibate priest, eschewing
his earlier misogyny and prudishness for the rmer supports of community,
service, and hope. Urban has had that same time span to grow with his vocation, but his faith in mundane success reveals a celibacy ever in crisis, still
needing the crutches of misogyny and institutional gratication.
These two novels comprehend the sweep of twentieth-century Western
society, in which, at one moment, resistance and a meaningful life and death
appear still possible and, at another, only conformity or failure seems to be
an option. In both cases, however, spiritual vocation functions as a litmus test
of the possible, and the actual practice of celibacy is one of its most telling
signs.
CONCLUSION
This book represents an excursionliterary and psychologicalinto the
discovery of a long noted, but little explored sexual backwaterreligious
celibacy. Sexual backwater dened as a place or situation regarded as cut
off from the mainstream of activity or development and consequently seen
as quiet and uneventful or unimportant and dull seems to me an accurate
characterization of celibacy in the minds of many people today.25. Idea associations with energy withheld and even stagnant and sewer-like situations
complement this notion.
Religious celibacy has been touted as a sign of the most supreme altruistic
human achievement at the same time as receives the label as the greatest
sexual perversion. Both claims may very well be true.
This book does not pretend to solve the contradictions or expose the
range and depth of this sexual adjustment either individually or socially.
227
What I have done is look for the revelations and half-hidden knowledge and
awareness of celibacy wherever I could note them in the hope that the results will contribute to the welfare of individuals and societyespecially in
groups that hold sway over peoples lives and exert immense spiritual power
precisely because of their perceived purity.
For near half a century I have labored to construct an accurate account of
this form of sexual adjustment because I think it is important for the welfare
of many people who nd religion an important element in their spiritual
striving. The odds and powers set against this process of discovery and reconstruction are daunting from the idea that there is nothing to talk about
to accusations of disloyalty, and outright instances of blackballing and attempted character assassination because of the work have, in the end, proved
minor excommunications if major annoyances.
No entirely reliable research tools to study human sexuality are currently
available. People tend to misrepresent themselves (read lie) on sociological
surveys about their sex lives. Nonetheless, these, too, can be of use in putting
an accurate picture of sex and celibacy together. Neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, and plain, sturdy, reliable human curiosity will provide new
challenges and opportunities for discovery in this very important area of life.
I have chosen clinical observation and ethnographic means to describe some
of what I have learned.
Extending observation into literature and autobiography is simply an extension of my clinical and psychoanalytic bentold fashioned as that may
be. My work has been like putting a mosaic (or a tapestry) together. That
method is not executed on a continuous surface like a canvas nor advantaged
by possibilities of nuanced color blending and shading at a stroke. Piece by
uneven piece is assembled and placed adjacent to other isolated pieces allowing the picture to emerge from the interrelationship of all the discrete pieces.
The work has meaning only from a distance. A tapestry, too, takes time and
faith that the nal pattern will emerge even if it cannot be comprehended or
appreciated in the process.
To return to my original metaphor of my work as an exploration: this
book is not the end of a search. It has led me to three elements of celibacy/
sexuality that need to be examined in greater depththey are elements of
mystery, dimensions of myth, and the effects of celibacy as miasma.
Religious literature is rife with the idea of mystery in relationship to
celibacy. Indeed, celibacy is puzzling way to live out ones sexuality. In my
experience it has moved some men and women to the heights of universal love, service, and self-giving. It is also often posited as a divine grace
and therefore unquestionable by any spiritual person, and unquestionable
to anyone else. Purposeful or not, the assertion of mystery is off putting for
examination, discovery, and discourse. This represents a loss for religion and
society.
228
Mystery is not an answer. It is a puzzle to be struggled with and solved.

Mystery should not be used as a No Trespassing sign to keep anyone from
searching the meaning of sexual human nature, the persistence of celibacy
as a practice, or the real character of altruism. Nor should mystery be a
prerogative of any religious discipline; to make it so is an impediment to spirituality and can make the claim of celibacy a cover for perversion.
Myths related to celibacy abound in the Roman Catholic tradition. The
most remarkable is that celibacy irreversible linked to priesthood raises a
man to a state of perfection. James Joyce recorded his interpretation of the
Catholic teaching on the place of the priest in societynot less than the angels. He was accurate in his account of what the church teaches on the basis
of declarations of the reform Council of Trent.
Belief is one thing; to be respected, even if disagreed with. Behavior is
another separate question. One of the most obvious defects and ideas detrimental to religion is the myth that every man or woman who claims celibacy is, in fact, abstaining from sexual gratication or practicing celibacy. Of
course, the shadow myth that no one claiming celibacy is actually abstinent
is equally dubious.
According to gures published in the 2005 Annuario Ponticio, 410,695
Catholic clergy were committed to celibacy as of 2003. In addition to
priests that number includes 4,695 bishops, 745 archbishops, and 190 cardinals. In 1993 Cardinal Jose Sanchez, at the time secretary of the Vatican
Congregation of the Clergy, was asked by a reporter for the BBC what was
his reaction to studies that claimed that at any one time 45 to 50 percent
of Catholic clergy were, in fact, not practicing celibacy. His response on
TV: I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those gures. Already in
1970 at a Synod of Rome where the question of mandated versus optional
celibacy for priests was being discussed, Cardinal Franjo Seper of Zagreb
made the statement, I am not at all condent that celibacy is in fact being
observed.
It is a source of amazement that with the still huge coterie of Catholic clergylet alone the long tradition of the requirementliving under to
moniker celibate there are so few explorations of the actual practice of religious celibacy. Myth should help explain reality, as Greeley has so eloquently
expounds, not serve obfuscation and crime.
Considering the miasma of celibacy, that is its potential harmful, poisonous, and criminal effects, brings us back full circle to the rst chapter of
this book on the foundation of the current so named crisis in the Catholic church in the United States.26. It is a crisis of celibacymisunderstood
celibacy, unobserved celibacy, mythical celibacy that proposes that clergy are
sexually safethat has potential to do great harm and wreck havoc on lives
under the guise of religion and virtue.
229
The search for understanding celibacy, in and out of religious traditions,

will continue because it is a recurring and persistent drive within the spectrum of sexual adjustments and sustains attraction from impulses to control,
to create, and to serve. Celibacy can be a reality in response to the human
striving for meaning beyond oneself. Celibacy is part of human experience
and spiritual striving. Many people beyond committed religious men and
women have garnered knowledge of the value of sexual restraint. It is of
nature.
N OTES
SERIES FOREWORD
1. L. Aden and J. H. Ellens, Turning Points in Pastoral Care: The Legacy of Anton
Boisen and Seward Hiltner (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1990).
PREFACE
1. Cf. A. W. Richard Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited (New York:
Brunner-Routledge), 32; and The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, (2000)1045.
INTRODUCTION
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Ministers Black Veil, in Hawthornes Short Stories, ed. Newton Arvin (New York: Vintage, 1946), 923.
2. Edwin OConnor, The Edge of Sadness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961).
3. Victor Hugo, Bishops Candlesticks, Les Misrables, trans. Lee Fhanestock
and Norman MacAfee, based on the C. E. Wilbour trans. (New York: New American
Library, 1987), 52113.
4. Leon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor, trans. I. J. Collins (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1947; originally published 1896).
5. Georges Bernanoss Diary of a Country Priest is an account in which a physically ill, saintly, but psychosexually immature man discovers profound inner strength
in the solitude of his celibate vocation. Dying in the company of a fallen priest, the
protagonist expresses a tolerance and universality beyond that of any particular doctrine. Tout est grace. We have analyzed this book, but we have not included it in
this series. Robert Bresson, who made the book into a movie, recounts, through the
232
Notes
pages of a diary, the daily life of a young priest, his self-doubts, and the problems of
his small parish at Ambricourt in the province of Pas-de-Calais. He is upset that no
one comes to Mass. The villagers wrongly suspect that he is greedy and an alcoholic.
However, in his own despair he is able to bring spiritual peace to a dying countess,
who has long rejected God. He ultimately dies alone, painfully of stomach cancer,
murmuring, All is Grace. The dying words of St. Theresa of Lisieux were the same
but are often translated Grace is everywhere (http://www.kirjasto.sci./bernanos.
htm). Georges Bernanos, Under the Sun of Satan, trans. J. C. Whitehouse (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Georges Bernanos, The Imposter, trans. J. C.
Whitehouse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
6. Franois Mauriac, Vipers Tangle, trans. Warre B. Wells (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1953). Mauriacs novels were condemned by the Catholic right when he rst
wrote them. He deals with the mystery of sin and redemption.
7. Paul Claudel, The Tidings Brought to Mary, in Two Dramas, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 161295; Paul Claudel, Lord, Teach Us to Pray,
trans. Ruth Bethell (New York: Longmans, Green, 1948).
8. Canon 277 states: 1. Clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual
continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are obliged to observe
celibacy, which is a special gift of God, by which sacred ministers can adhere more
easily to Christ with an undivided heart and can more freely dedicate themselves
to the service of God and humankind. 2. Clerics are to conduct themselves with
due prudence in associating themselves with persons whose company could endanger their obligation to observe continence or could cause scandal for the faithful.
3. The diocesan bishop has the competence to issue more specic norms concerning
this matter and to pass judgment in particular cases concerning the observance of
this obligation; Code of Canon Law, Latin-English ed. (Washington, DC: Canon Law
Society of America, 1983).
9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (New
York: Penguin Books, 1985).
10. Investigative Staff of The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2002).
11. A. W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (New
York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990).
12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
The Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale is presumed to be celibate by the entire community, much
like the public gure of Father Coughlin.
13. W. Somerset Maugham, Rain, Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham,
2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1932). Sadie Thompson was Maughams most
famous story, which became the short story and play Rain and was made into several movies. A missionary and a prostitute who were among his fellow passengers
on a trip to Pago Pago inspired the story. The minister, who demeans and shames
Sadie into repentance and conversion, is the archetypical hypocritical clergyman, and
Sadie becomes the prototypical good prostitute when the minister tries to rape her
on the beach.
14. Ethel Voynich was a fascinating Irish woman and a genuine revolutionary.
Her novel Gady sold 600,000 copies in the United States, 700,000 in China, and
Notes
233
more than 2.5 million in Russia, where she became an icon. She died at 96 years of
age in New York in 1960. Pamela Blevins draws a fascinating prole of her in Ivor
Gurneys Friends.
15. Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, 3 vols. (New York: Viking Penguin, 19952004).
16. J. F. Powers, Wheat That Springeth Green (New York: Knopf, 1988); J. F. Powers, Prince of Darkness, and Other Stories (London: Lehmann, 1948); J. F. Powers, Lions,
Harts, Leaping Does, and Other Stories (New York: Time, 1963). Many of Powerss
short stories deal with priests. His observations about his characters never invade the
privacy of what cannot be seen by the average parishioner. The sexual/celibate lives
of the priests are implied behind the personalities of his characters.
17. Timothy Radcliff, What Is the Point of Being a Christian? (London: Burns and
Oates, 2006).
18. Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).
19. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Knopf, 1927).
20. Graham Green, Monsignor Quixote (London: Bodley Head, 1982).
CHAPTER 1
1. Thomas Doyle et al., Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Churchs
2000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse (Los Angeles: Volt Press, 2006).
2. H.O.P. Kramer and J.O.P. Sprenger, Malleus Malicarum (New York: Dover,
1971).
3. Rainer Nagele, Reading after Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
5. See A. W. Richard Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited (New York:
Brunner-Routledge), 297.
6. See A Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004). This report contains a statement from the National Review Board for the Protection of Children
and Young People and the results of the survey by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. At the time of the report, they concluded that 4,394 priests had been reported for sexually abusing a minor between 1950 and 2002. In the year after the
report, however, another 750 priests were credibly accused of abuse during that time
period. It is safe to say that not more than half of the priests who have abused minors
in the United States over the past fty years have yet been recorded or identied.
Their ranks are estimated at 10,000. The casualties from clergy abuse are safely
estimated at 120,000; no more than 10 percent of the victims have spoken up in public. See also Richard Sipe, Why Victims Need to Tell Their Story, March 7, 2006,
http://www.richardsipe.com/Click_&_Learn/2006-04-07.html.
7. The paternal uncle of the Marquis de Sade was a Benedictine abbot who kept
a stable of mistresses, including a mother and daughter, and a vast library of pornography, from classical works to current pamphlets. Later in life, he participated in orgies staged by Sade at one of Sades castles. (One group of villains in the novel Justine
consists of Benedictines.) Sades absent father, who was the French ambassador to
234
Notes
Bavaria and whom Sade adored, enjoyed picking up young men in the park and wrote
a couple of poems celebrating homosexuality. Cf. Maurice Lever, Sade: A Biography,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1993).
8. Cf. Ethel Voynich, The Gady, in which the consequences of Arthur learning that he is the illegitimate son of Father Montanelli are life changing; likewise
Graham Greenes priest in The Power and the Glory recognizes the result of his sin in
the sadness of his daughter.
9. Cf. Shanta R. Dube et al., Long-Term Consequences of Childhood Sexual
Abuse by Gender of Victim, American Journal of Preventative Medicine (2005): 43038;
D. Finkelhor, A Source Book on Child Sexual Abuse (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1986).
10. Lever, Sade, 117. A letter (dated June 1783) from Donatien to Renee-Pelagie
makes it clear that the couple regularly practiced anal intercourse: Heres to a good
screw up the ass, and may the devil take me if I dont give myself a hand job in honor
of your buttocks! Dont tell la Presidente, though, because shes a good Jansenist and
doesnt like for women to be molinized. The allusion is to Luis Molina, the sixteenthcentury Spanish Jesuit whose doctrine of grace the Jansenists opposed. She pretends
that M. Cordier never discharged anywhere but in the vessel of propagation and that
whosoever distances himself from the vessel must boil in hell. But I, who was raised by
the Jesuits, who was taught by Father Sanchez not to swim in a vacuum any more than
was necessary, because, as Descartes tells us, nature abhors a vacuumI cannot agree
with Mama Cordier. The phrase nager dans le videto swim in a vacuumcomes
from Voltaires Dictionnaire Philosophique. It refers to Epicuruss theory of atoms.
There was a sixteenth-century philosopher, Francis Sanchez, who wrote Quod nihil
scitur in 1580. He was a skeptic and held that a human being can know nothing except through observation and sensation. It seems that Sade was using Voltaire wryly
to refer to what his teacher really taught him. Donatien is Sades Christian name,
Renee-Pelagee is his wife, la Presidente is Renee-Pelagees mother, and Cordier was
Renee-Pelagees maiden name. Sade was at the Jesuit school from age 12 to 15, before
he joined the army. The College Louis-le-grand still exists on the Rue St. Jacques in
the Latin Quarter. It was nationalized in the French Revolution, and its name was
changed to Lycee Louis-le-grand. There is a clear implication that Sade was sexually
involved with at least one of his Jesuit teachers who taught him about sex and from
whom he learned the connection between pain and sexual pleasure.
11. Cf. J. M. Masson, The Assault on Truth (New York: Ballantine, 2003). See also
Sigmund Freud, The Aetiology of Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, vol. 3 (London:
Hogarth, 1961; originally published 1923).
12. Sigmund Freud, The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1961; originally published 1923), 3: 38.
13. See E. Hollander, Obsessive-Compulsive-Related Disorders (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1993). See also L. Salzman, The Obsessive Personality
(Lanham, MD: Aronson, 1973).
14. D. Finkelhor, Whats Wrong with Sex between Adults and Children? Ethics and the Problem of Sexual Abuse, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 49 (1979):
69297.
Notes
235
15. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, Treating the Lifetime Health Effects of Childhood Victimization (Kingston, NJ: Civic Research Institute, 2003).
16. Scenes in James Joyces Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man indicate this
dynamic, particularly when the Jesuit headmaster banters with Stephen about the
brown skirts that some order priests wear, implying effeminacy or homosexuality.
Stephen gives up his resolve to purity and immediately returns to a prostitute. Father
Flynn in The Sisters and the man in the park from An Encounter imply abuse of
children. Certainly, Joyce persisted in a lifelong distrust of the church.
17. Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
18. Jennifer Freyd et al., The Science of Child Sexual Abuse, Science 4 (2005): 22.
19. Shirley Jlich, Stockholm Syndrome and Child Sexual Abuse, Journal of
Child Sexual Abuse 14, no. 3 (2005): 10729.
20. Patrick Carnes, Dont Call It Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction (New York:
Bantam, 1992).
21. The classic description of this personality is found in Hervey Cleckley, The
Mask of Sanity (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1964). The book is still in print in a fourth
edition.
22. In The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986), Robert Jay Lifton
describes this psychological dynamic that parallels what many priests employ.
23. See Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis; A. W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the
Search for Celibacy (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990).
24. National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, Rev. Andrew M.
Greeley, Director, The Catholic Priest in the United States: Sociological Investigations
(Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1972).
25. Cf. Los Angeles Times polls in 1993 and 2002 cited by Andrew Greeley in
Priests: A Calling in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). This is a
book that considers some of the research done on celibacy, the priesthood, and the
crisis; it is an example of a secular newspaper cooperating with sociological investigation.
CHAPTER 2
1. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with
Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
2. Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980).
3. Andrew M. Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography (New
York: Pocket Books, 1987).
4. Gandhi considered Raychandbhai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale to be his
teachers. Although married like Gandhi, Raychandbhai practiced celibacy and encouraged Gandhi to do the same.
5. The signicance of male-male bonding, master-servant delity, and avuncular kinship in the adventure genre, on the one hand, and male celibacy in real spiritual vocation, on the other, can be seen repeatedly in literature, such as Auerbach,
Dorfman, and even in the repeated theme of the Grail in Greeleys books. This link
deserves further study in relation to the celibate ideal and the resistance to democ-
236
Notes
ratization and feminism both in Western culture overall and within the church in
particular.
6. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). One cannot project contemporary Western
values onto Gandhis apparent indifference to his Hindu cultures class distinctions
between master and servant or his describing them with the same enthusiasm usually
reserved for friendship between unconstrained individuals. Given the pervasive British colonial inuence of Gandhis India, we should instead note how prominently such
relationships are depicted sentimentally in British literature rather than ironically as
in Continental literature, such as Don Quixote or Jacques and His Master.
7. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist
Ideology in the Disney Comic (Para leer al Pato Donald), trans. David Kunzle (New York:
International General, 1975). This motif is also linked to a world of male-male bonding and the avuncular genealogies that Ariel Dorfman detected in the antifeminist
and antisex biases of much Anglo-American childrens literature and the sexless,
misogynist, and avuncular world of the hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings,
dominated by the sentimental master-servant relationship of Frodo and Sam.
8. Tolkien, like Gandhi, was educated in South Africa. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord
of the Rings, 3 vols.:
1. The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1954).
2. The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of The Lord of the Rings (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1954).
3. The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of The Lord of the Rings (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1955).
9. Erich Auerbach, The Knight Sets Forth, in Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 12342.
10. George Orwell, Reections on Gandhi, in A Collection of Essays by George
Orwell (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954; originally published 1949), 17786.
11. Erik Erikson, Gandhis Truth (New York: Norton, 1969).
12. In one conference, Pope John Paul II said that sex between a husband and wife
out of lust was not free of sin.
13. Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
14. Cf. Italo Calvino, The Watcher and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1971). This question of ends is also one of Orwells concerns in his For God or Man
credo. Literary reection offers the best vehicle for reconciliation. Italo Calvinos
story The Watcher, which narrates a Communist Party election observers day at
the polls in a Catholic home for monsters, the ill, and the mad, explores the philosophical limits at which the secular and religious worldviews meet in a contemplation
of the mystery of the human condition.
15. In fact, it may be in this area of sexuality that a rapprochement is more possible than in the arena of ultimate ends. Here I am referring to the question of the
goals of service; that is, the act of serving versus the eradication of the need. The latter is, of course, the goal of progressive or secular humanism: the curing of disease,
Notes
237
the elimination of poverty, the cessation of war, the promotion of justice and human
equality. These also are traditional religious goals and meant to be facilitated by
the practice of asceticism, especially celibacy linked with the vow of poverty. There
is a connection between charity and economic rights. Both Gandhi and Orwell
stood for both. Cf. Georg Simmel, The Poor, in On Individuality and Social Forms,
ed. Donald N. Levine, Heritage of Sociology Series (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press: 1971), 15354:
In the cases examined so far, a right and an obligation seemed to be two

aspects of an absolute relationship. Completely new forms appear, however,
when the point of departure is the obligation of the giver rather than the
right of the recipient. In the extreme case, the poor disappear completely
as legitimate subjects and central foci of the interests involved. The motive
for alms then resides exclusively in the signicance of giving for the giver.
When Jesus told the wealthy young man, Give your riches to the poor,
what apparently mattered to him were not the poor, but rather the soul of
the wealthy man for whose salvation this sacrice was merely a means or
symbol. Later on, Christian alms retained the same character; they represent no more than a form of asceticism, of good works, which improve
the chances of salvation of the giver. The rise of begging in the Middle
Ages, the senseless distribution of alms, the demoralization of the proletariat through arbitrary donations which tend to undermine all creative work,
all these phenomena constitute the revenge, so to speak, that alms take
for the purely subjectivistic motive of their concessiona motive which
concerns only the giver but not the recipient.
CHAPTER 4
1. Page Smith, Redeeming the Time: A Peoples History of the 1920s and the New
Deal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 17.
2. Ibid., 26.
3. Ibid., 18.
4. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920 1933
(Boston: Houghton-Mifin, 1960), 2.
5. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New
York: Harper and Row, 1959), 261.
6. John Dos Passos, The Big Money, U.S.A. trilogy (New York: Modern Library,
1937), 527; James T. Farrell, Judgment Day, Studs Lonigan trilogy (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 98100, 16970, 17475.
7. Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties: A History (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982), 44041.
8. Factual biographical information on Coughlin comes from Allen Brinkley,
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York:
Knopf, 1982), 85; Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest
of the Little Flower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
9. Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 91.
10. Frank Sheed.
238
Notes

12. Marcus as well as Coughlins other biographers agree that he drew a weekly
audience of 40 million listeners. At the time, it was an unprecedented achievement for
any religious broadcaster, and it remains a respectable record today.
14. Page Smith, Redeeming the Time: A Peoples History of the 1920s and the New
Deal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 6023.
16. Coughlins National Union for Social Justice set forth a 16-point plan. Among
its demands were freedom of religion, a minimum wage, nationalization of the most
basic resources, private ownership of the means of production with government
control over the production itself, the abolition of private banking, the protection
of unions, a progressive income tax, and the general alleviation of the tax burden.
Coughlin recognized that the National Union would attract attacks, but he assured
his readers that God would protect them.
17. Marcus, Father Coughlin, 156.
18. Ibid. James T. Farrell gives a sickening account of one such beating in Tommy
Gallaghers Crusade (New York: Vanguard, 1939).
19. James T. Farrell, To Whom It May Concern: More Stories by James T. Farrell
(New York: Sun Dial Press, 1944), 188.
20. James T. Farrell, Judgment Day (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 32.
21. Farrell, To Whom It May Concern, 204.
22. Charles Coughlin, A Series of Lectures on Social Justice (Royal Oak, MI: Radio
League of the Little Flower, 1935), 267.
23. Ibid., 268.
26. Mary Christine Athans, The Coughlin-Fahey Connection: Father Charles Coughlin, Father Denis Fahey, C.D. Sp., and Religious Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1938
1954, American University Studies, Series 7, Theology and Religion (New York:
Peter Lang, 1991), 102: 19.
27. Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1965), 246.
29. Ibid., 221.
30. FBI le obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, 62-41602-1.
31. David Grafton, Red, Hot, and Rich!: An Oral History of Cole Porter (New York:
Stein and Day, 1987), 108.
32. Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter (New York: Dial, 1978); Jerry Hughes, Cole
PorterLarry Hart: Making Beautiful Music, In Touch for Men 42 (August 1979):
3840.
33. FBI le, November 11, 1942, date-stamped November 17, 1942.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Leo H. Bartemeier, personal communications with author, 1979.
37. In April 1934, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau released the information that Coughlins personal secretary, Amy Collins, held contracts on 500,000
Notes
239
ounces of silver, purchased for $20,000 on behalf of the Radio League of the Little
Flower; Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 125.
39. Ibid., 229.
40. FBI le, November 11, 1942.
41. The Witness (Dubuque, IA), June 6, 1940.
43. Ibid., 226.
CHAPTER 5
1. Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1985), 106.
2. Newsweek, October 28, 1957.
3. Time, April 14, 1952, 72.
4. John Tracy Ellis, Catholic Bishops: A Memoir (Wilmington, DE: Michael
Glazier, 1983), 357.
5. Ibid.
6. Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980).
7. Ellis, Catholic Bishops, 359.
8. Ibid.
9. Newsweek, October 28, 1957.
10. John T. Ellens, personal communication with author.
11. D. P. Noonan, The Passion of Fulton Sheen (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972);
reviewed in Commonweal, March 31, 1972, 8992.
12. Time, April 14, 1952, 72.
13. Sheed, Frank and Maisie, 106.
14. Ibid.
15. Roger A. Burns, Preacher (New York: Norton, 1992), 67.
16. Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Viking, 1999), 72.
17. Fulton J. Sheen, Thinking Life Through (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 26.
18. Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953),
20110.
19. Ibid., 2019.
20. Sheen, Thinking Life Through, 14048, 17989.
21. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living, 23141.
22. Ibid., 234.
23. Sheen, Thinking Life Through, 63.
24. Ibid., 12939.
25. Ibid., 7180.
26. Ibid., 12939.
27. Ibid., 22130.
28. Ibid., 251.
29. Ibid., 117.
30. Sheen claimed, [T]he reason why chastity is on the decline is that we live in
a sensate culture. In the Middle Ages, there was an Age of Faith, then came the Age
of Reason in the eighteenth century; now we are living in the Age of Feeling. Dur-
240
Notes
ing the Victorian days, sex was taboo; today it is death that is taboo. Each age has its
own taboos. I think one of the reasons for sexual promiscuity today is the absence
of purpose in life. When we are driving a car and become lost, we generally drive
faster; so when there is an absence of the full meaning of life there is a tendency to
compensate for it by speed, drugs and intensity of feeling; Thinking Life Through,
2034.
31. Andr Malraux, Mans Fate, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Modern Library, 1961); Andr Malraux, Mans Hope, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Alastair
MacDonald (New York: Modern Library, 1941).
32. Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
33. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
35. Ibid., 59.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 104.
38. Ibid., 1078.
39. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living, 5159; Sheen, Thinking Life Through, 21626.
41. Ibid., 11928.
42. Ibid., 15970.
43. Ibid., 17180.
44. Ibid., 1118.
45. Ibid., 71.
46. Ibid., 7679.
47. Ibid., 74.
48. Ibid., 75.
49. John Rocks Error, New Yorker, March 13, 2000, 52.
50. Andrew M. Greeley, The Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography (New
York: Pocket Books, 1987), 356.
51. Ibid., 362.
CHAPTER 6
1. Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 202.
2. Cf. Sheen, Treasure in Clay, 20113.
3. Even his most signicant insightthat his antisexual form of celibacy is
best supported by an earlier conception of human sexuality and a premodern life
cycle, in which death is more omnipresent than the duration of human desire and
relationshipslacks the pathos and insight that would explain how such a new paradigm arose and how the celibate practice can creatively adapt to it:
During the Victorian days, sex was taboo; today it is death that is taboo. Each age
has its own taboos. I think one of the reasons for sexual promiscuity today is the
absence of purpose in life. When we are driving a car and become lost, we generally drive faster; so when there is an absence of the full meaning of life there is a
Notes
241
tendency to compensate for it by speed, drugs and intensity of feeling. (Sheen,

Treasure in Clay, 2034)
Compare his version with that of a secular thinker. In 1920, the German sociologist
Max Weber wrote:
[Does] progress . . . have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and
technical? You will nd this question raised in the most principled form in the
works of Leo Tolstoy. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his
broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is
a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man, placed into an
innite progress, according to its own imminent meaning should never come to
an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands upon the peak
which lies in innity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died old and satiated with life because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life . . . had
given him what life had to offer . . . and therefore he could have had enough of life.
Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture
by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become tired of life but not satiated
with life. . . . What he seizes is always something provisional and not denitive, and
therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very progressiveness it gives
death the imprint of meaninglessness. (Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, 1946], 13940.)
Why does Webers analysis of this historical process, by which life and death,
sexuality and meaning, shift their signicance, suggest the continuing need and
value of religious questions so much more profoundly than Sheen? Sheen leaves these
troubling elements unintegrated, as if we could will away our history or our sexuality. Ironically, he seems to take the institution of religion, the Catholic Church, and
its increasing irrelevance for granted.
4. Fulton J. Sheen, Thinking Life Through (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955),
10411. Sheen often contrasts and compares celibacy with the vocation of marriage.
5. Sheen, Treasure in Clay, 212.
6. Ibid., 21011; Genesis 32:2432.
8. Ibid., 213.
9. Ibid., 210.
10. Ibid., 208.
11. Ibid., 109.
12. Ibid., 2012.
13. Jung, and Freud as well, had grown up and studied under the inuence of this
economistic rhetoric of harboring and squandering, the accountants calculation
of sums (cf. Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex [New York: Harper, 1977],
5962), the psychosexual analogue of what Karl Marx called the Abstinence Theory of Capital Accumulation (Karl Marx, Capital [New York: International, 1967],
59198).
242
Notes
CHAPTER 7
1. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (Chicago: Open Court, 1912;
originally published 1748).
2. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat marquis de Condorcet (174394); his
most important work was on probability and the philosophy of mathematics: Essay on
the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions (1785), which contains
Condorcets paradox.
3. Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son matre and Le Neveu de Rameau. The
French text is in the online edition. The online English translation of Le Neveu
de Rameau, the 1762 novel by Diderot, is by Ian Johnston and includes links to the
French text, http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/diderot/rameau_E.htm.
4. Immanuel Kant, The Antinomy of Pure Reason, in The Critique of Pure
Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins Press, 1929), 396484.
5. H. Frankfort and H. A. Frankfort, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of
Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Harmondsworth,
U.K.: Penguin, 1972), 53.
6. Ibid., 15.
7. E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998), 257.
8. Time, January 10, 1969.
9. Andrew M. Greeley, Uncertain Trumpet: The Priest in Modern America (New
York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 138.
10. Ibid., 158.
11. Andrew M. Greeley, Letters to Nancy (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963),
5354.
12. Andrew M. Greeley, Confessions (New York: Pocket Books, 1987), 248.
13. Ibid., 247.
14. David Tracy, Theology and the Symbolic Imagination: A Tribute to Andrew
Greeley, in Andrew Greeleys World: An Anthology of Critical Essays: 19861988, ed.
Ingrid Shafer (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 47. In contemporary sociology, the
nomothetic-ideographic debate takes the form of experimental statistical methodology as opposed to participant-observer or clinical methods . . . [the experimental
approachs] basic objective is to identify variables that behave in law-like regularities and then to codify these regularities into general theories; Robert H. Brown,
A Poetic for Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 11.
15. Ingrid Shafer, The Virgin and the Grail: Archetypes in Andrew Greeleys
Fiction, in Andrew Greeleys World: An Anthology of Critical Essays: 19861988, ed.
Ingrid Shafer (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 6376.
16. Andrew M. Greeley, The Cardinal Sins (New York: Warner, 1981), 1.
17. Ibid., 38.
18. Ibid., 82.
19. Ibid., 113; emphasis added.
20. Ibid., 48084.
21. Ibid., 483.
22. Greeley, Uncertain Trumpet, 42.
23. Ibid., 5162.
24. Ibid., 7990.
Notes
243
25. Michael T. Marsden, The Feminine Divine: A Search for Unity in Father Andrew Greeleys Passover Trilogy, in Andrew Greeleys World: An Anthology of Critical
Essays: 19861988, ed. Ingrid Shafer (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 175.
26. Greeley, Confessions, 490.
27. Andrew M. Greeley, Love Song (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 35.
29. G. K. Chesterton, The Eye of Apollo: The Penguin Complete Father Brown (New
York: Penguin, 1981), 130. Note that Greeley identies Father Brown with Father Blackie four times in Happy Are Those Who Thirst for Justice (New York: The
Mysterious Press, 1987), 65, 79, 101, and 265; twice in Happy Are the Meek (New
York: Warner Books, 1985), 2 and 4; and once in Happy Are the Clean of Heart (New
York: Warner Books, 1986), 8. He also makes the comparison explicitly in his
autobiography, Confessions, 496.
30. Chesterton, The Eye of Apollo, 255.
31. Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel (Boston: MIT Press, 1971), 88.
33. Ibid., 496.
34. Ibid., 48283.
35. Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American
Catholics (New York: Scribners, 1990), 183.
37. Ibid., 43.
38. Ibid., 86.
39. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth, U.K.:
Penguin, 1964), 158.
40. Andrew M. Greeley, Crisis in the Church: A Study of Religion in America (Chicago: Thomas More, 1979), 157.
41. Andrew M. Greeley, Ascent into Hell (New York: Warner Books, 1983), 492.
42. Greeley, Confessions, 108; emphasis added.
43. Greeley, Ascent into Hell, 492.
44. Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Harmondsworth,
U.K.: Penguin, 1973).
45. John N. Kotre, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Andrew Greeley and American Catholicism 19501975 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 79.
46. Ibid., 80.
47. Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1987.
48. Publishers Weekly, October 17, 1994.
50. Ibid., 505.
CHAPTER 8
1. Andrew M. Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest (New York: Pocket Books,
1987), 127.
2. Undoubtedly, in his ever-present sensitivity to popular culture, Greeley is
referring to a gure that is accessible to his readership via the 1964 musical My Fair
Lady or the 1912 George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion. The poet Ovid (born 43
B.C.E.) memorialized the original myth in Metamorphoses, in which the sculptor had to
244
Notes
remain single because he was so critical of the faults and imperfections inherent in
womens nature. He could only be satised with his own creation. In Virgils Aeneid
(circa 102 B.C.E.), Pygmalion is not represented as a loving sculptor but as the greedy
brother of Dido, who kills her husband, Sychaeus, to get his gold.
3. Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest, 131.
4. The accounts of all three of our celibate protagonists can be contrasted with
the autobiography of Abb Pierre, (2006) the famous priest ragpicker of Paris who
frankly admits of his sexual sins early in his priestly life. Of course, he is most similar
to Gandhi, who speaks of his falls before he took his vow.
6. Ibid., 125.
7. Ibid., 126.
8. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: New Directions,
1957).
9. Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1967).
11. Greeleys pronoun game gets almost self-incriminating at times: He can talk
about falling in love with your spouse? In addition his repeated reassurance from his
own experience has no basis in either research or broad pastoral experience. In fact,
repeatedly the history of sexual abuse of minors reects a close, trusting, and conding
relationship between the mother or both parents of a child who is ultimately abused.
12. Again, we are confronted with a slip in Greeleys syntax. Technically, the
sentence means that no married man would dare say anything about the risks that
the priest takes. Is this how Greeley keeps potential informants mum?
14. Ibid., 121.
15. Ibid., 109.
16. The subtly patronizing use of gender-neutral pronouns when clearly speaking of males is one of the most revealing of Greeleys gestures toward the feminism
he simultaneously attacks and appropriates.
18. Greeleys emphasis on physical attraction in human bonding ignores two other
key aspects of human love (Eros) that one would think a priest would nd more signicant: the bonding of personalities as the dominant pair-bonding aspect of humans, a
sublimation not unlike that of the celibate, and the context of collective cooperationof
the kinship network, the clan, the tribe, the villagein which human sexual relations
have always been thoroughly enmeshed. These are the real supports of human attachments over time, something secondary to Greeleys nods-and-winks sexuality.
20. Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).
21. Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
CHAPTER 9
1. James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan (a trilogy containing Young Lonigan, 1932;
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, 1934; and Judgment Day, 1935) (New York:
Notes
245
Modern Library, 1938); hereafter cited as YL, YMSL, and JD, respectively, from this
edition.
2. Alan Friedman, Afterword, Studs Lonigan (New York: Signet, 1965), 821.
3. Ibid., 824.
4. Margaret Zassenhaus, personal communication with author, 1990; Margaret
Zassenhaus, Walls: Resisting the Third Reich, One Womans Story (Boston: Beacon, 1976).
5. Andrew M. Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography (New
York: Pocket Books, 1987), 18.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. Ibid.
8. Farrell, YMSL, 213.
9. Farrell, JD, 42748.
10. Andrew M. Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American
Irish (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1972), 246.
11. John N. Kotre, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Andrew Greeley and American Catholicism, 19501975 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 172, quoting from Review
of Real Lace, The Critic (MarchApril 1974), 5960.
12. Kotre, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, 174, quoting from Confessions
of a Loud-Mouthed Irish Priest, Social Policy (MayJune 1974), 11.
13. Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation, 25051.
14. Ibid., 249.
16. Jimmy Breslin, World without End, Amen (New York: Viking, 1973), 97.
17. Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 85.
18. Farrell, YL, 27.
21. Farrell, YL, 27
22. Ibid., 3334.
23. Ibid., 3334.
25. Farrell, JD, 13058.
29. Farrell, YL, 16869.
31. Ibid., 29394.
32. Ibid., 292.
33. Ibid., 29394.
35. Farrell, YL, 7275.
36. Tim Unsworth, The Last Priests in America: Conversations with Remarkable Men
(New York: Crossroad, 1991), 119.
38. Andrew M. Greeley, Virgin and Martyr (New York: Warner, 1985), 463.
39. Andrew M. Greeley, Lord of the Dance (New York: Warner, 1985), 2634.
246
Notes
41. James T. Farrell, A World I Never Made (New York: Vanguard, 1934), 4448.
42. Andrew M. Greeley, The Search for Maggie Ward (New York: Warner,
1991), 359.
43. Kotre, Best of Times, 208.
45. Farrell, Introduction, Studs Lonigan (New York: Signet, 1958), vii.
47. Ibid., 496.
48. Ibid., 497.
50. Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation, 249.
51. Ibid., 246.
52. Ibid., 252.
53. Ibid., 248.
54. Lukcs, Theory of the Novel, 85.
55. Farrell, Introduction, Studs Lonigan, xv.
56. Ibid., xv.
57. Ibid., xii.
CHAPTER 10
1. Cf. A.W.R. Sipe, Clergy Abuse in Ireland, in Wolves within the Fold: Religious
Leadership and Abuses of Power, ed. Anson Shupe (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1998).
2. Associated Press, March 9, 2006.
3. Of course, Western authorities were concerned to suppress sexually explicit
content, whereas Soviet censors were watching for politically subversive as well
as sexually explicit material. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned the
distinction.
4. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 171.
5. Ibid., 22831.
6. A.W.R. Sipe, Sex, Priests, and Power: The Anatomy of a Crisis (New York:
Bruner/Mazel, 1995), 10, lists citations from the Didache, from the Council of Elvira, Saint John Cassian, the Council of Trent, and the Confessions of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau as well as clinical and statistical evidence gathered in the United States in
support of the position that priestly pedophilia is a systemic problem in the Catholic
Church.
7. John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley, James Joyces Dubliners: An Annotated Edition (London: Reed Consumer, 1993), 2.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Ibid., 8
14. Ibid., 8 n.
Notes
247
15. Ibid., 17.

16. Ibid., 9.
17. Ibid.
18. We are indebted to Philip Herring for the simile. See Philip Herring, Structure and Meaning in Joyces The Sisters, in James Joyces Dubliners, ed. Harold
Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 3950.
19. Jackson and McGinley, James Joyces Dubliners, 9.
20. Ibid., 15.
21. They still usually say it was the boysor girlsfault.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 5.
25. Ibid., 16.
26. Ibid., 17.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Ibid., 18.
31. In 1909, George Roberts of the rm of Maunsel and Co., which had expressed
an interest in Dubliners, apparently conated simony and sodomy: He asked me very
narrowly was there sodomy also in The Sisters and what was simony and if the
priest was suspended only for the breaking of the chalice; Letters, II, in Florence L. Walzl, Joyces The Sisters: A Development, James Joyce Quarterly 10, no. 4
(1973): 3056.
32. Lucia Boldrini, The Sisters and the Inferno: An Intertextual Network, Style
25, no. 3 (1991): 453.
33. Dante, Inferno, 3: 1012, in ibid., 454.
34. Ibid., 457.
36. Ibid., 18.
37. Ibid., 16.
38. Ibid., 17.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. Ellman, James Joyce, 216.
42. Ibid., 169.
CHAPTER 11
1. This issue is discussed in chapter 11, A. W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (New York: Brunner/Mazel), 22233, mainly from the
point of view of the children and women left behind. This is because of the statistical
tendency of the clinical data: The most common reported is that the pregnancy destroys the relationship, each party usually going his or her own way. The child is most
commonly given up for adoption (224). Both the novels in question here focus on the
effects of an ongoing relationship or later reunion between the priest and his child.
248
Notes
2. Et in Arcadia is Nicolas Poussins elegiac meditation on a Latin phrase

which translates literally as Even in Arcady, there I am or, more accurately in this
context, Death is even in Arcady.
3. Page numbers are cited from E. L. Voynich, The Gady, 15 (New York: Pyramid Books, 1961).
4. For a description of this type of relationship, see Sipe, A Secret World, 7679,
8183.
5. Ibid., 6265.
6. Page references correspond to Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962; originally published 1940).
7. We may wish to explore the extent to which Greene was inuenced by the
similar portrayal of lost innocence in Georges Bernanoss Diary of a Country Priest
and what role the repetition of such an image might play in the literary representation of the priesthood. The country priest encounters this girl-woman in the gure
of Seraphita, one of his catechism students:
[T]he poor childprobably egged on by the otherspursues me now with surreptitious oglings, grimacing, apeing a grown-up woman in a way that is very hard
to bear. She has a trick of deliberately lifting up her skirt to fasten the shoelace
which serves as her garter.
But her playacting is the sign of something more profound, more disturbing,
and quite difcult to explain:
Met Seraphita yesterday with M. Dumouchel. That childs face seems to alter day
by day: her quick-changing mobile expression has now become xed with a hardness far beyond her years. Whilst I was talking to her she kept watching me with
such embarrassing attention that I couldnt help blushing. Perhaps I ought to warn
her parents. . . . Only of what?
Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1954; originally published 1937), 2224.
CHAPTER 12
1. All unidentied page references are to J. F. Powers, Morte DUrban (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1990).
2. Quotations from Luke are taken from the King James Version (Chicago: Gideons International, 1958).
3. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977), 7.
4. Urban is a model of the tolerant and pragmatic business liberal:
Father Urban believed that there was a great deal to be said for the conservative
position, but he also believed . . . that Mr. Zimmerman and his sort werent the ones
to say it. (213)
5. The Pharisee and the shopkeeper interest us only because of their common
essence, the source of the difculties that both have with speech, particularly when it
comes to talking shop ; Lacan, Ecrits, 38.
Notes
249
6. At rst he sees none and asks boastfully of the angel escorting him, have
friars such a grace that none of them shall come into this place? But the angel
disabuses him:
Nay, said the angel millions here are thrown!
And unto Sathanas he led him down.
And now has Sathanas, said he, a tail
Broader than of a galleon is the sail.
Hold up thy tail, thou Sathanas! Said he.
Show forth thine arse and let the friar see
Where is the nest of friars in this place!
And ere one might go half a furlongs space,
Just as the bees come swarming from a hive,
Out of the devils arse-hole there did drive
Full twenty thousand friars in a rout,
And through all Hell they swarmed and ran about,
And came again, as fast as they could run,
And in his arse they crept back, every one.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, rendered into modern English by J. U. Nicolson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1934), 356; Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales,
16831698 (New York: Dutton, 1975), 203.
7. Lacan, Ecrits, 38.
8. Powers must have heard many such partisan political readings of biblical passages in the milieu of the Catholic Worker. Urban, of course, works the other side
of the fence in his sermons, and his exegetical tendencies are neatly parodied in his
proposed revision of the Robin Hood story:
Now in the case of Robin Hood, Mr. Thwaites plans to move the story up in time, to set
it in the so-called Reformation period, keeping it in England, of course. Its all legends,
you know, and so you have a pretty free hand. Robin Hood will still steal from the rich
and give to the pooryou cant very well get around thatbut hell only steal from
the rich whove stolen from the Church. So it really isnt stealing. (191)
9. Studley again repeats the lines of the old script reserved for the devil whenever he hears mention of a Pharisee; From Chaucer to Bunyan.
10. Carol Iannone, The Second Coming of J. F. Powers, Commentary 87, no. 1
(1989): 63.
11. Compare this theologicohistorical explanation of our apocalyptic century
with Mr. Studleys version of why we fought two major wars.
12. This comment nds a parallel in Greeleys Dont fuck with God.
13. Iannone, The Second Coming of J. F. Powers, 6264. I use universality
here in the qualied sense of a works reception within cultures that see the novel as
a major form of narrative. Georg Lukcs points out:
[T]he danger [is] a subjectivity which is not exemplary, which has not become a
symbol, and which is bound to destroy the epic form. The hero and his destiny then
have no more than personal interest and the work as a whole becomes a private
memoir of how a certain person succeeded in coming to terms with his world. The
250
Notes
social world must therefore be shown as a world of convention, which is partially

open to penetration by living meaning.
Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Ana Bostock (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971), 137.
14. See Terry Teachouts formulation of Urbans social context in Father
Babbitts Flock, The New Criterion 7, no. 5 (1989): 72.
15. Ibid., 71.
16. A similar dynamic may motivate Andrew Greeleys desire to combine the success ethic and charismatic mystery. Could an Urban have had Greeleys success in
the 1950s? If it had been possible, we probably would not have any novel called Morte
DUrban, for Fulton Sheen, the successful public priest of Urbans time (whom Urban
both disdains and envies), lacks the sophistication of Greeleys double appeal to a
modernized sexuality and druidic mystery through the person of the priest, a recipe
Urban may have found compelling. If the novel does have less than universal appeal,
it may have more to do with datedness than with its denominational specicity.
17. The social novel, whose rst great muse was the quasi-religious cause of
socialism, focused not on the irrevocable structures of a disenchanted bureaucraticadministrative society but on the highly dramatic and suggestively meaningful moments of class struggle. The idea shared by Marxian and utopian socialists that
the proletariat was a class inherently oriented to transcendence (i.e., with nothing
to lose but its chains) gave even the most gloomy naturalist works (Zolas Germinal, Hauptmanns The Weavers) a romantic and transcendent drive. The stabilizing growth of the middle class (especially in the United States) alongside a more
systems-oriented academic sociology had a sobering effect on the U.S. social novel.
Sinclair Lewis (Powerss rst serious writer; Teachout, Father Babbitts Flock,
70), the consummate novelist of the Babbitt class, displaced Frank Norris (who also
receives a cameo reference in Morte DUrban through Urbans fantasy of the death of
the wheat broker, 293) as the U.S. social novelist par excellence.
18. Don Quixotes favorite author of the books of chivalry that are blamed for
generating his illusions.
19. Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, in Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 134.
20. Ibid., 291.
21. Ibid., 303.
22. Ibid., 305.
23. Ibid., 306.
24. Exceptional often implies homosexual orientation among the Clementine
novices (why else join the order?). Brother Harold looked quite intelligent, Urban
thinks. Intelligent, yes . . . but perhaps a bit feminine (38).
25. Weber, Science as a Vocation, 96.
26. This is an experience from Powerss childhood, too. For a detailed analysis of
this social group, and one fairly contemporary with the writing of Morte DUrban, see
C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
27. Saint Tarcisius was a 12-year-old altar boy who was martyred in a thirdcentury Roman persecution for defending a consecrated host. Very little is actually
Notes
251
known about him, although devotion grew up around history in the sixth century. In
recent years, he has been venerated as a symbol of purity, a boy who overcame the
tortures of his passion. There is a skeleton, preserved in a reliquary in Saint Johns
Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, of a saint, Peregrin, with a similar hagiography.
This shrine was well known to Powers.
29. This ideal ts neither the monks nor the petty entrepreneurs, but rather that
of the salaried employee . . . in the capitalistic enterprise [who is] separated from
the material means of production (Weber, Science as a Vocation, 81). In a gesture
right out of Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which the gladiators
of bourgeois society ght their battles in Roman costume, Urban dreams of making
the Clementines into an efcient outt (second only to Standard Oil?), who could
come to serve as the bishops Praetorian Guard (173).
30. The gap in this logic emerges in Urbans celibacy, a discipline necessary to
maintaining his charismatic position at the margins even as it precludes a life of no
regrets.
32. Ibid., 14849.
33. Ibid., 153.
34. Erich Auerbach, The Knight Sets Forth, in Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 13637.
36. Ibid., 128.
37. Jacks fate is much like that of the Hills salvaged pickup truck: Billy and Paul
stared at the thing . . . it seemed to tremble under their gaze (255).
38. [T]here was no other word for it. He tooled toward the outskirts of town.
The little snub-nosed Barracuda was ve months old. Had wire wheels, leather upholstery . . . and it certainly made a man feel good to drive it. At a stoplight, though,
when a girl in a white MG paused alongside him, a girl wearing sunglasses and nothing elseso it appeared from where he was sittingand with a crisp blue dog beside
her, Father Urban experienced a heavy moment, a moment of regret and longing. . . .
When he hit open country, he threw away his cigar and gave the little thoroughbred
its head (2078).
39. Iannone, The Second Coming of J. F. Powers, 63.
40. A. W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (New
York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990), 3540.
42. Sipe, A Secret World, 4245.
43. As I pointed out in the introduction, this has been precisely the focus of my
ongoing research into religious celibacy. It has received a great deal of opposition
from churchmen who fear the destruction of the charism of celibacy (its inexplicability) or the denigration (exposure) of those who profess it.
44. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1959), 68.
45. A. W. Richard Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited (New York:
Brunner-Routledge, 2003), 81116.
252
Notes
46. The ironic medievalism of the golf joust implies a similar layering: Troubadours may have credited the valor of the champions to love, but historians would
be more inclined to ask what socioeconomic and political interests were backing
each man.
47. Women, here, are equated with alcoholism, insanity, and decay. Although
this may have some relevance to preserving ones celibacy, it is also ominously
misogynistic.
48. Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis, 30416.
49. In the aftermath of the revelation in the 2004 John Jay Report that 81 percent of the minors sexually abused by priests or bishops in the United States since
1950 were male, homosexuals have become the objects of blame. This clear confusion
among sexual orientation, desire, and behavior is another example of the churchs
inadequate understanding of sexuality.
50. Iannone, The Second Coming of J. F. Powers, 64. When irony is directed
solely at the protagonist, the genre is usually satire, the aim of which is criticism
or mockery of a particular social group (whether the cause is good or bad being a
matter of the readers partisanship) rather than the promotion of a more universal
understanding of the human condition.
51. I found this navet a fairly common factor in affairs between married women
and priests: It seems surprising that few of the husbands appear to be conscious
of the sexual dimension of their wives friendships with the priests; Sipe, A Secret
World, 79.
52. It is worth noting a comparison of this wish fulllment with Urbans earlier lighthearted satire on married life, in which he imagines that he and Wilf are
a couple of average guys . . . married to a couple of average gals who, at that very
moment, on another channel, were washing their husbands dirty work clothes with
the right brand of detergent (11516). Urban can only fantasize about workingclass lifethe world of Father Wilfridas a parody (of TV culture), whereas he
grants his personal dream, albeit a clich of afuence, as much dignity as possible. He
is thwarted at times only by the ironic perspective of the narrative itself.
53. Dr. Margaret Miles pointed out that Geoffrey Galt Harpham in The Ascetic
Imperative (1994) presents the thesis that the fourth-century celibate ascetics required
temptation, imagined if not actual, in order to develop religious/ascetic self by practicing the dialectic of temptation and resistance; Margaret Miles, personal communication
with author.
54. The vividly rendered yet symbolic gures in paintings from Bosch to Dal
on the theme of Saint Anthonys temptation in the desert provide an example. They
represent the visualization of the saints confrontation with his inner conicts in an
empty wasteland. See also Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis, 3067.
55. Compare this with Dantes relatively forgiving attitude toward Francesca,
the lustful, compared with Judas, the treacherous.
56. Now, this process of disenchantment, which has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia, and, in general, this progress, . . . do they have any
meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will nd this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise
the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the
Notes
253
problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was:
for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of
civilized man, placed into an innite progress, according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who
stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak
which lies in innity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died old and satiated
with life because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its
meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because
for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could
have had enough of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become tired of
life but not satiated with life ; Weber, Science as a Vocation, 13940.
57. Cf. the reading of Quixotes death by Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 29192. Graham Greenes rewriting of the Quixote story (Monsignor Quixote [London: Bodley Head, 1982]) is
also consistent with Girards understanding of its signicance.
58. Iannone, The Second Coming of J. F. Powers, 63. Her assertion here for the
obviousness of Powerss didactic intent would go further to support her argument
that the novel is lacking in universality than Powerss choice of subject matter or
protagonist.
59. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas
Carlyle (New York: Collier, 1962), 446.
60. The contrast between Powerss use of the Cervantean register and that of
Graham Greene in Monsignor Quixote could not be more striking. Greenes reference
to Quixote is romantically optimistic, whereas Powers unleashes the most acid satire
of the so-called rst novel.
61. Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, 137.
62. Ibid., 14142.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 13940.
65. When men reach the age of forty or fty they tend to observe a curious
change. They discover that most of the individuals with whom they grew up and
maintained contact now behave in a disturbed manner. One may stop working so that
his business fails; another may break his marriage; and yet another may embezzle
money. Even those individuals who show no such striking behavioral changes still
show signs of degeneration. Conversation with them becomes shallow, threadbare,
and boastful. Previously the aging individual found mental stimulus in others but
now he feels that he is almost the only one to present objective interest. . . . Men of
the world are not excluded from this general rule. It is as though people who betray
the hopes of their youth and come to terms with the world, suffer the penalty of
premature decay; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972; originally published
in 1944), 24041.
66. Iannone, The Second Coming of J. F. Powers, 63.
67. Garry Wills, The New York Times, April 9, 2006. See also Garry Wills, What
Jesus Meant (New York: Viking, 2006).
254
Notes
68. The tone is reminiscent of Leon Bloys The Woman Who Was Poor, trans. I. J.
Collins (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1947; originally published 1896). [T]here is
but one sadness, and that is not to be a saint.
CHAPTER 13
1. The status, the meaning, of death is, after all, the critical juncture at which
a society attempts to cement its relationship to the individual through an exchange
of meanings, the point at which personal sacrice (duty) and social remembrance
(reward) are supposed to resolve the rupture of death through the suture of a just and
equal exchange. Yet it is precisely at this point of irremediable rupture between social
and personal meaning that the spiritual per se (rather than the simply institutional
and ritualized codications of religion) emerges, the great mystery giving rise to
consciousness of the mysteriousness of existence.
2. The Berrigans Trial of the Catonsville Nine comes to mind. The Trial of the
Catonsville Nine was a 1971 movie based on a play written by Father Daniel Berrigan about the October 5, 1968 trial of nine war protestors who burned draft
records in Cantonsville, Maryland. I would not disparage such works (especially
because the above mentioned movie is appropriately cast in the genre of the docudrama), the novel as a literary form is more concerned with the unique life possible
within the social rule. Although conformity to Fascism may have appeared to be
that social rule to most Italians during the 1930s, we cannot as readers accept that
premise from our own context. Such a conclusion would not be justied beyond the
sociological levelafter all, we must be suspicious of our reexive rejection of literature from cultures very different from our ownif it were not corroborated by
the fact that Fascism could not produce such a novel internally. The closest attempt
may be Alberto Moravias The Conformist: A Novel (rst published in 1951 by Farrar,
Straus and Company), but this was the work of an anti-Fascist.
3. See Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990), 22. This is also the period the British writer Hanif Kureishi called
the Golden Age of Fucking.
4. Hereafter, all unidentied page references are to Ignazio Silone, Bread and
Wine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937). Page references to the second version
will be preceded by the notation 2nd ed. and are to Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine
(New York: Signet, 1986).
5. It is worth noting for the problem of gender in questions of spiritual vocation
that one cannot refer to Cristina simply by her family name, but one does so automatically for Spina. This problem of naming reects not only specic aspects of gender
in prewar Italy but also ongoing differences in the ways in which men and women are
expected to relate to the institutions of family and church. Silone, however, went a
long way toward overcoming such thinking within himself, and although he was still
limited by social norms of naming in his effort to write a novel capable of a socially
broad reception, he called Spina by his Christian name in the second version, thereby
putting his male and female characters on the same level.
6. For the importance of beauty in the achievement of celibacy, see Sipe, Celibacy
in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003), 31516. Kant
used the category of the beautiful as a major bridge in his own rationalist defense of
Notes
255
the ethical imperative: In our appreciation of beauty in the objective world, we perceive
a metaphor connecting the visible forms of nature with our yearning for the invisible
forms of the ethical and the transcendent. The enjoyment of beauty then becomes
the link between the truth of the observable world and the good of our spiritual aspirations. Kant left it an open question whether any of these realms existed beyond
our perception of them. Because we use the same perceptual apparatus (our senses) to
measure the objective world that we use to appreciate beauty, both could just as well
be projections of our desire for the good, the spiritual, as proofs of the latter.
7. This melodramatic event occurs only in the rst version. Silone seems to have
become more accepting of a peaceful spiritual vocation and the validity of withdrawal
under even dictatorship. This tolerance appears to be connected with a mellowing of
his anger and disappointment with the institution of the church, an issue explored in
the section Hopeful Revisions.
8. Don Paolo is Spinas alias in his cover as a priest. The narrator uses the false
name or simply refers to Spina as the priest whenever he is being perceived to actually be one by the other characters present in a scene. The use of these interchangeable
signiers for the protagonist would make a fascinating study in itself.
9. This glimpse inside the monastery bears a remarkable resemblance to the
world of Father Urban and the Order of Saint Clement.
10. The chapters on Gandhi, Sheen, and Greeley contain similar implications.
11. It is so fashionable in the contemporary United States to wear a cross that it
has become part of costume as well as religious custom. It is so ubiquitous that its
meaning has lost signicance.
12. Much has been written on this scene, and an interesting debate has arisen
between those who see Spinas lesson as a solid defense of the humanist value
systemdemocratic consensus building, freedom, labor as the source of wealth and
meaningand those who see it as a defense of the radical relativism of meaning in
language itself. The latter has been argued convincingly for the scene when viewed
only in relation to Spinas disillusionment with Stalinism. Cf. Gregory L. Lucente,
Signs and History in Silones Vino e pane: The Dilemma of Social Change, in Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 17793. Reading it as the positive assertion
of a value system, however, is more in keeping with Silones efforts to construct an
ethical practice that is ultimately independent from institutions; that is, an existential
vocation.
13. Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971), 92.
14. Much has been written on the role changing of Spina/Spada, but what is
most striking about Silones narrative strategy is the continuity, the unity of purpose
expressed in both roles. In Spinas person, Catholic and Communist combine more
smoothly than the roles of man and priest often do. The most noticeable difference is
a reversal of expectations. As a layman, Spina is much more constrained and serious
than he is as Don Paolo. Like those priests who vacation in mufti (see Sipe, A Secret
World, 9798), Spina is freed from his real priestly role, as priest of the party, when
he is disguised as Don Paolo.
15. Red and black are used here in their purely institutional senses. Of course,
the difference remains that the story could not be told from the black perspective un-
256
Notes
less it is understood to extend to the sincere Christian as well (e.g., Don Benedetto,
Cristina). Here the reference to Luke 16 is a focus for vocational struggle just as it is
in Powerss Morte DUrban.
16. Cf. the concluding chapter of Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
(Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1954), 21521.
17. The symbol of his implicit celibacy (at the stage of Like Me/Not Like Me;
cf. Sipe, Celibacy in Crisis, 29395).
18. Jrgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 314.
19. See Sipe, A Secret World, 4051, 19093.
20. In this way, Stalinism combined elements from the Orthodox churchs mores
and Western rationalism to create a sort of perverse parody of Spinas own synthesis of Christianity and Marxism (especially aspects of Henry Fordist ideology such
as work, discipline, productionism, and the spermatic economy notion; note Spinas
reference to energies).
21. This physical fact, which should be quite apparent to everyone who meets Spina
(we need only think of Philips clubfoot, a much less noticeable trait, in W. Somerset
Maughams novel Of Human Bondage), is never mentioned by the women with whom
Spina becomes intimate, a strange oversight on Silones part, one that suggests its
purely symbolic function in the text.
22. Sipe, A Secret World, 278.
23. See Giuliana Minghelli, In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the
Emergence of Modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). The author
writes about the irony of men playing the pedagogue with women and its perpetuation of the Pygmalion myth. Andrew Greeley embraces the same stance toward
women, freely accepting his resemblance to Pygmalion; cf. Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography (New York: Pocket Books, 1987), 127.
24. Heterogeneous elements are those that escape the aesthetic form of literary
classicism or the systems of philosophers. Their presence as an excluded remainder
or, in some art and philosophies, their absorption is one of the most troubling questions in the history of ideas. When accused of leaving such elements, such facts, out
of his system, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte responded, If the facts do
not conform to my ideas, so much the worse for the facts!
25. Encarta World English Dictionary.
26. Miasma is an apt word for culture of secrecy and dominance that has been
imposed on religion in the name of purity and sexual deprivation. The system of
clerical celibacy has perpetuated a sense of self-superiority and sinfulness of all sex.
This culture is a distortion of sexual human nature and has created an unwholesome
atmosphere.
I NDEX
Abortion, 90, 102

Adolescent sexuality, 9394
Alcoholism: Irish inuence on, 11920;
Sheen on, 5859
Anti-Semitism: of Catholic Church, 77;
of Coughlin, 3637, 39, 42, 4748
Antisocial personality,11
Anxiety: after clerical abuse, 78;
Sheen on, 58
Aquinas, Thomas (Saint), 76
Arthurian allusions, 18990, 19293
Asceticism, 9798
Ascent into Hell (Greeley), 85
Authority issues: celibacy and, 9495;
of Coughlin, 47; of Greeley, 99
Bartemeier, Leo H., 34, 44
Bean, Sylvia, 179, 185188. See also
Morte DUrban
Be a winner, 196
Benedetto, Don, 199203, 20910. See
also Bread and Wine
Benedict XVI (Pope), 7273
Bernanos, Georges, 229 n.7, 246 n.7
Birth control: Greeley on, 102; papal
encyclical on, 6667; Sheen on, 61, 66
Borderline personality, 10
Boys Town, 28
Bread and Wine (Silone): animal versus
human in, 216; costumes and names
in, 2067; death status in, 196, 251
n.1; rst draft of, 21221, 252 n.7;
politics of, 198; second draft of,
22126; setting for, 19697; sexuality and women and the church in,
21226; spiritual vocation in secular
world in, 19599; versions of, 199;
vocation ideal in, 199204; vocation
as struggle, 20412;
Brown (Father) (Chesterton), 9192
Canon law, 230 n.10
Cardinal Sins, The (Greeley), 8385,
8788, 116
Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic
Church
Catholic Hour, The (radio broadcast),
52, 54
Celibacy: achieving, 2324, 252 n.6; as
arrested adolescence, 9394; asceticism and, 9798; authority issues
and, 9495; beauty and, 252 n.6;
258
Index
canon law on, 230 n.10; Coughlin,

34, 4345; Ganhdi, 2126; idealism and, 94; inspirational, 3031; of
Jesus Christ, 29; male bonding in, 23,
233 n.5; misogyny in, 26; mythology
of, 1820; professional afliation
and, 97; sexual identity consolidation in, 9596; systematic, 1920;
urbane, 17890
Celibacy crisis, 320; in lms, 46
Cervantes, 157, 167, 17374, 19092,
251 n.60
Charism of celibacy, 24
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith: allegorical
work of, 101; Father Brown stories
by, 9192
Chicago: of Greeley, 117; of Studs
Lonigan, 11617
Child abuse. See Clerical abuse of
minors
Child rearing, 6364
Christian Front, 39
Cinema. See Films
Clementines, 166, 170, 172, 179, 18283
Clergy. See Priest(s)
Clerical abuse of minors: historical, 13,
137, 231 n.6; homosexuality blamed
for, 250 n.49; Joyce on, 13746;
litigation and reporting laws on,
1617; prevalence of, 5, 16, 231 n.6;
priest personality in, 1113; public
awareness of, 5; rationalizations of,
1213; Vatican attitude toward, 17;
victims of, 611
Communism: Coughlin on, 3639, 60;
Sheen on, 5960, 62
Con artist personality of priest predator, 1112
Confessions of a Parish Priest (Greeley),
115
Coughlin, Charles E. (Father), 18,
2829; anti-Semitism of, 3637,
39, 42, 4748; authority issues of,
47; celibacy of, 34, 4345; church
hierarchy and, 4143; on Communism, 3639, 60; early life of,
3435; economic program of, 3839;

enemies of, 3739, 4748; fantasies
and imagination of, 49150; Fascism
of, 42; historical setting of, 3334,
46; narcissism of, 5051; personality
of, 4651; personal turmoil of, 47;
political involvement of, 3637, 41;
radio broadcasts of, 3537, 235 n.12;
seminary years and priesthood of, 35;
and Social Justice, 3940; social program of, 3940, 236 n.16; tragedy of,
4546; violence elicited by, 77
Death: Sheen on, 237 n.30, 238 n.3; in
Silone versus Powers, 19697, 251
n.1; Weber on, 239 n.3
Death in April (Greeley), 83
Depression of abuse victim, 8
Diary of a Country Priest (Bernanos),
229 n.7, 246 n.7
Disenchantment: in Morte DUrban,
157, 16567; Weber on, 250 n.56
Doubling behavior, 12
Duffy, Francis P. (Father), 2729
Elmer Gantry (Lewis), 109
Encounter, An (Joyce), 140, 14345
Experiments with Truth (Gandhi), 22
Fahey, Denis, 42
Farrell, James T.: Coughlin portrayal
by, 40; early years of, 114; representational novels of, 101; writing style
of, 13132. See also Studs Lonigan
trilogy
Fascism, 42. See also Bread and Wine
Faust, 34
Fighting 69th, 28
Films: celibacy crisis in, 4-6; priest
portrayal in, 1416
Flanagan, Edward (Father), 2829
Flynn (Father). See Sisters, The
Freedom, 6162
Freud, Sigmund: on premature sexual
exposure and abuse, 67; Sheen on,
58, 6162
Index
Gady, The (Voynich): political and

psychological struggle in, 14748,
155; popularity of, 230 n.16; priest
and his son in, 14852, 231 n.8
Gandhi, Mohandas K., 2126; celibate
inuences on, 2223; Experiments
with Truth, 22; indifference to caste
system, 233 n.6; inexible sexual
attitudes of, 24-25; intolerance of
noncelibates, 2526, 30, 72; misogyny of, 26, 30; servant versus wife,
2223, 233 n.5
Gods gender, 1089
Goethe, 19293
Golden Hour of the Little Flower (radio
broadcast), 3537
Grandiosity: of Coughlin, 4849; of
Greeley, 99
Greeley, Andrew M. (Father), 1819,
2830; on abortion, 90, 102; on accepted Catholic doctrine, 102; Ascent
into Hell, 85; authority issues of,
99; Blackie Ryan novels by, 9093;
Cardinal Sins, 8385, 8788, 116;
on celibacy fascination, 103; celibate
development of, 9398; on celibate
relationship to women, 1067;
character types written by, 8889,
91; Chicago setting of, 117; Confessions of a Parish Priest, 115; Death in
April, 83; early years and priesthood,
7880, 115; ctional priests created
by, 12223; ctional voice of, 12,
12829, 13435, 242 n.11; on God's
gender, 1089; grandiosity and projection of blame by, 99; grudges and
enemies of, 100; on homosexuality,
87, 89, 104, 10910; hypersensitivity of, 99101; Irish inuence on,
11820; liberalism of, 74; Lord of the
Dance, 8586; on missionaries, 86;
on mythic structures in religion, 83;
narcissism of, 100101; on noncelibates, 104, 107; as novelist, 8288,
101; personality of, 98101; popularity of, 7475; on priest inuence
259
over parishioners, 86; on sacraments,

93; sadomasochism in novels, 84,
127; self-identication with Studs
Lonigan, 11516, 135; sex and
society views of, 13031; sexual
behavior in novels, 8990; sexual
fantasies of, 82, 1046; sexual identication with characters, 12628;
sexual identity consolidation in
novels, 9596; on sexual revolution,
82; sexual stereotyping by, 65, 81,
242 n.16; sexual themes in novels,
9697; similarities to Coughlin and
Sheen, 45; as sociologist, 66, 8082;
spiritual poverty and, 134; success
ethic and charismatic mystery in,
248 n.16; Thy Brothers Wife, 85, 96;
Ulysses myth and, 88; Virgin and
Martyr, 96, 122, 128; whore/madonna and, 66, 97; on women, 6566,
81, 8990, 97, 1078, 242 n.18;
writing style of, 10410, 13132
Greene, Graham, 147, 15255
Guilt, 9, 11
Hammer of God, The (Chesterton), 91
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, 230 n.14
Homosexuality: blamed for clerical
abuse of children, 250; Greeley on,
87, 89, 104, 10910
Hoover, J. Edgar, 4445
Humanae Vitae (papal encyclical),
6667; reactions to, 67, 81
Hypersensitivity of Greeley, 99101
Idealism of youth, 94
Irish Catholic priests, 2731. See also
specic priests
Irish inuence: alcoholism and,
11920; on Greeley, 11820; in
Studs Lonigan trilogy, 11718, 120
Jesus Christ as celibate model, 29
Joyce, James: An Encounter, 140,
14345; censorship of, 13839;
260
Index
ctional sadomasochism by, 13739;

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, 13738, 14446, 232 n.16;
on priest pedophilia, 139; on special
powers of priests, 94; "The Sisters,"
13843
Judgment Day (Farrell). See Studs Lonigan trilogy
Lewis, Sinclair, 109
Life Is Worth Living (television show), 52
Litigation, 1617
Lonigan, Studs, 84
Lord of the Dance (Greeley), 8586,
12829
Male bonding, 23, 233 n.5
Marriage, 6266
Maugham, W. Somerset, 230 n.15
Misogyny: in Bread and Wine, 212; celibate, 26; in Morte DUrban, 18284,
186; of Sheen, 6970; of Tolkien, 23
Missionaries, 86
Montanelli (Father). See Gady, The
Morte DArthur, Le (Malory), 18990,
19293
Morte DUrban (Powers): Arthurian allusions in, 18990, 19293;
celibacy psychodynamics in, 198;
Cervantean style and allegory in,
157, 167, 17374, 19092, 251 n.60;
Clementines in, 166, 170, 172, 179,
18283; conversion in, 19094;
death status in, 19697; disenchantment in, 157, 16567; enchanted
tower in, 19193; failure as vocation
in, 17578; fantasies in, 250 n.52;
medievalism in, 174; misogyny in,
18284, 186; motto of, 196; paradox
in, 167; puritanism in, 180; setting
of, 19798; sociological insight in,
172; storyline of, 15865; urbane
celibacy in, 17890; vocational
choice in, 167, 174; vocation found
in, 19394; white collar values in,
16775
Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern

World (Fahey), 42
Mythic discourse, 7778. See also specic author or book
Narcissism: of Coughlin, 5051; of
Greeley, 100101; idealism and, 94;
of priest predator, 12
Novalis, 192
Old Cotter. See Sisters, The
Optimistic thesis, 72
Orwell, George, 24, 26
Paradigm, 78
Perfection states, 69
Personality disorder: after clerical
abuse, 10; of priest predator, 1113
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A
(Joyce), 13738, 14446, 232 n.16
Post-traumatic stress disorder, 78
Power and the Glory, The (Greene), 147;
politics of, 152; priest and his daughter in, 15255
Powers, J. F., 132, 156, 166, 184, 194;
Silone versus, 195, 225, 227. See also
Morte DUrban
Powers, Sally, 187189. See also Morte
DUrban
Priest(s): as biological fathers, 14755,
245 n.1; celibate mythology and,
1820; lm portrayals of, 46,
1416; in Greeley novels, 12223;
inuence over parishioners, 86; as
organization man, 41; power of, 94;
in Studs Lonigan trilogy, 12023
Priest predator personality traits,
1113
Projection of blame, 99
Psychology in Sheen's messages, 5759
Pygmalion, 103, 241 n.2
Rain (Maugham), 230 n.15
Rape in Greeley novels, 84, 90, 12728
Rationalizations of priest predator,
1213
Index
Raychandbhai, 22, 24, 233 n.4

Reason/logic: historical: 75-78; Sheen
on, 6162
Relationship formation after clerical
abuse, 89
Reporting laws on child abuse, 1617
Roman Catholic Church: Fascist support of, 42; reformation needed in,
1618, 31; on sexual activity, 1920;
sexual crisis (See Celibacy crisis)
Roman feuilleton, 87
Ryan, Blackie (Greeley): Father Brown
versus, 9192; personality of, 9093
Sacraments, 93
Sade, Donatien (Marquis de), 231 n.7,
232 n.10
Sadie Thompson (Maugham), 230
n.15
Sadomasochism: in Greeley novels,
84, 127; in Joyce works, 13739; of
Sheen, 70
Scanlan, Lucy, 12426. See also Studs
Lonigan trilogy
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 230 n.14
Scrupulosity, 7
Secrecy: of clerical abuse victim, 9; of
priest predator, 12
Self-destructive behavior after clerical
abuse, 1011
Self-esteem after clerical abuse, 8
Self-hatred and love of Christ, 7071
Sex, Sheen on, 6266
Sex and society in Greeley versus Farrell novels, 13031
Sexual abuse of minors. See Clerical
abuse of minors
Sexual dysfunction after clerical abuse,
67
Sexual fantasies of Greeley, 82, 1046
Sexual identication: in Greeley novels,
12628; in Studs Lonigan trilogy,
12326
Sexual identity consolidation, 9596
Sexuality, Catholic Church on,
1920, 81
261
Sexual stereotyping: by Greeley, 81; by

Sheen, 65
Sheen, Fulton J. (Bishop), 18, 2830;
on ages of society, 237 n.30; on
alcoholism, 5859; on anxiety, 58; on
birth control, 61, 66; Catholic Hour
(radio broadcast), 52, 54; on child
rearing, 6364; church hierarchy
and, 54; on Communism, 5960,
62; on death as taboo, 237 n.30,
238 n.3; on decline of chastity, 237
n.30, 238 n.3; education and parish years, 5355; on freedom and
reason, 6162; on Freud, 58, 6162;
on intellectual exploration, 62; on
lapsed celibate, 71; Life Is Worth Living (television show), 52; on love of
Christ based on self-hatred, 7071;
on marriage versus celibacy, 7172;
message of, 57; misogyny of, 6970;
mixed message on celibacy, 6873;
personality of, 5455; psychological focus of, 5759; sadomasochism
of, 70; on sex and marriage, 6266;
sexual stereotypes of, 6566; television success of, 5257; on transcendent, 64; Treasures in Clay, 69; violent
rhetoric of, 6970
Silone, Ignazio, Powers versus, 227. See
also Bread and Wine
Sisters, The (Joyce), 13843
Social Justice (Coughlin), 3940, 45,
4849
Social novel, 248 n.17
Sociopathic behavior of priest predator, 11
Soul murder, 13
Spada, Paolo. See Spina, Pietro/Paolo
Spada
Spermatic economy, 72
Spina, Pietro/Paolo Spada, 197, 199,
253 n.8.; charism of, 205; conict
resolution in, 21112; Cristina
Colamartini and, 200202, 252 n.5;
on ethics of intimacy, 2034; politics of, 2012; secular theology of
262
Index
progress, 2089; sexuality and views

of women, 21226; transcendent in,
20910; vocation of, 20412
Spiritual poverty: in Greeley versus
Farrell novels, 13234. See also
Bread and Wine
States of perfection, 69
Studs Lonigan trilogy (Farrell): adolescent sex in, 114; Chicago setting of,
11617; Greeley self-identication
with, 11516, 135; importance in
literature, 114; Irish in, 11718, 120;
priests in, 12023; as religious novels, 120; sex and society in, 13031;
sexual identication in, 12326;
spiritual poverty in, 13234; writing
style in, 13132. See also Farrell,
James T.
Sublimation, 72
Tarcisius (Saint), 248 n.27
Thy Brothers Wife (Greeley), 85, 96
Transcendent, 64
Treasures in Clay (Sheen), 69
Trust betrayal in clerical abuse victims, 8
Ulysses myth, 88
Urban (Father). See Morte DUrban
Vatican view of clerical abuse of minors, 17

Violence: Coughlin and, 77; in Sheen
rhetoric, 6970
Virgin and Martyr (Greeley), 96, 122,
128
Vocation: failure as, 17578; idealized,
199204; in secular world, 19599;
as struggle, 20412
Voice of author/characters: in Farrell's
work, 12930, 136; in Greeley's
work, 12829, 13435
Voynich, Ethel, The Gady, 14752,
230 n.16, 231 n.8
Weber, Max, 239 n.3, 250 n.56
White collar values in Protestantism
versus Catholicism, 16775
Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship
(Goethe), 19293
Women: Greeley and, 6566, 81,
8990, 97, 1078; Sheen and,
6566. See also Misogyny
Young Lonigan (Farrell). See Studs
Lonigan trilogy
Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, The
(Farrell). See Studs Lonigan trilogy
About the Author

A. W. RICHARD SIPE is a Certied Clinical Mental Health Counselor who
earlier spent 18 years as a Benedictine monk and priest. He was trained specically to deal with the mental health problems of Roman Catholic Priests.
In the process of training and therapy, he conducted a 25-year ethnographic
study of the celibate/sexual behavior of that population. His study, published
in 1990, in now considered a classic. Sipe is known internationally and has
participated in 12 documentaries on celibacy and priest sexual abuse aired
by HBO, BBC, and other networks in the United States, United Kingdom,
and France. He has been widely interviewed by media including CNN, ABC,
NBC, CNBC, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People magazine,
Newsweek and USA Today.
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T HE S ERPENT AND

Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

Dedicated to Marianne, My Bridge over Troubled Water

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The paper used in this book complies with the

Series Foreword by J. Harold Ellens

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

Gandhi and Friends: The Sexual/Celibate

Irish American Priests: The Road from

The Radio Priest: Charles E. Coughlin

The Television Priest: Fulton J. Sheen

A Mixed Message: Fulton J. Sheen

The Paperback Priest: Andrew M. Greeley

Double Exposure: Andrew M. Greeley

P ART II F ICTION , C ELIBACY , AND

A Bridge from Autobiography to

Child Abuse in the Old Sod: James Joyce

Father and Fatherhood: Ethel Voynich

Vocation, Lost and Found: J. F. Powers

Will the Real Priest Please Stand Up:

ways that spirituality is shaped and expressed by religion. The interest is

We do not apply the scientic method to faith nor faith to science,

THE MEANING OF MYSTERY

THE TRUTH OF THE NOVEL

reviewed texts about Protestant ministers, by Hawthorne,12 Sinclair Lewis,

ORGANIZATION OF THE CHAPTERS

THE SPIRITUAL VOCATION IN

J. F. POWERS: THE COMEDY OF THE GOSPEL

War II because of his principles. He believed in voluntary poverty in the

IGNAZIO SILONE: THE ESSENCE

PROCESS OF THIS STUDY

B IOGRAPHY , C ELIBACY , AND

The Serpent and the Dove

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

Thousands of Roman Catholic priests in the United States aloneve

The Serpent and the Dove

It is abhorrent to many unbiased people to think that priests and bishops

THE VICTIMS OF CELIBATE VIOLATION

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

The Serpent and the Dove

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

The Serpent and the Dove

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

PERSONALITY OF THE PRIEST PREDATOR

The Serpent and the Dove

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING SEX,

The Serpent and the Dove

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

vignettes of less ideal clergy. Movies touched, however deftly, on problems of

The Serpent and the Dove

DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

required health professionals, teachers, and others to report suspected child

The Serpent and the Dove

THE EXPOSURE OF A PROBLEMATIC EQUATION

Foundations of a Celibacy Crisis

The Serpent and the Dove

ordination to the priesthood, a married priesthood, ordination of women,