THE PAPERBACK PRIEST

Andrew M. Greeley

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

 V.S. Naipaul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REASON AND MYTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PRIEST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOD’S SOCIOLOGIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MYTHMAKER

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

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

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

Theologian David Tracy notes:

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

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

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

Thus, Greeley passed from sociologist to mythmaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEX AND THE FAITHFUL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GREELEY AND THE CELIBATE MIND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GREELEY AND CELIBATE DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idealism

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

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

Authority

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

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

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

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

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

Consolidation of Sexual Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sexual Themes

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

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

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

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

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

Professional Affiliation

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

Asceticism

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

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

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

THE CELIBATE AUTHOR AND PERSONALITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authority

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

Grandiosity and Projection

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

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

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

Hypersensitivity

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

Grudges and Enemies

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

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

Narcissism

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

Greeley 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 believer’s (or in the parish’s) eye rather than on the mote in the world’s eye. In all these areas, Greeley is very close to the observed and quantifiable social reality of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

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

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

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

CELIBATES ON CELIBACY

The goods that a writer produces can never be impersonal; his character gets into them as certainly as it gets into the work of any other creative artist, and he must be prepared to endure investigation of it, and speculation upon it, and even gossip about it.

H. L. Mencken

Every writer writes about himself, no matter the subject matter. But the writer of autobiography faces special challenges to self disclosure—how much to reveal and what to conceal? A further complication is that the process of self disclosure is not entirely under conscious control; this is especially true when the focus of revelation is one’s sexual/celibate development.

A brief review of select celibate self disclosures over the two millennia of the Christian era can help a reader sort out the essence of the practice from the limitations of historical, scientific and personal myopia that effect every age when it comes to matters sexual.

PAUL: Celibate Prototype

Paul, the apostle, is the sole autobiographical witness to celibacy in Scripture. The significance of his prototypical declarations, validated by his life, can hardly be exaggerated for an understanding of the essence of religious celibacy in the Christian tradition.

Paul came to his celibate intention and the awareness of his personal capacity in the process of a profound religious conversion. His earlier life most likely involved a wife since an unmarried man could not have risen as high as he had in the Jewish community of his day. Was he widowed? Could his wife have left him after he abandoned Judaism? Or could he have divorced her? The simplest argument is that his wife died. He certainly knew what sex and marriage was all about.

At any rate, his dedication to celibacy was a free choice, imposed by no agency or power, either earthly or celestial. In that sense it was “natural” for him. He recognized that he was just as entitled to a wife, as were the other apostles. And although he did not require the discipline of celibacy from anyone else, he could, from experience, recommend it to others, even for brief periods, to facilitate prayer and reflection on spiritual realities. His determination to be a celibate, like Gandhi’s, was not institutionally bound—or necessary for his status as an apostle—but, nonetheless, it is clear that he bound himself in a vow-like commitment.

Paul concluded that celibate existence allowed him great latitude to serve others for his spiritual motives—love, personal love, for Christ and neighbor—“on account of the kingdom.”

A realist, he had no illusions that life was static or easy—he could name the difficulties he endured. He preached, wrote, traveled, and suffered in his service to others. He proved the purity of his intent by work—he supported himself at the same time that he did not deny that others could be worthy of support for their similar service. There was an intentional ethical integration to the dynamic of his life. 

Celibacy was proven in Paul’s community building—his loves, if you will. Those loves were all inclusive. The experience of universal love seems to be part and parcel of the integrated and achieved celibate of Eastern—Buddhist—as well as Western religious traditions. Paul expressed it as a lived experience. In his great love, Jesus Christ, there was no distinction between male and female, Jew or Greek, slave or free—all are one. 

Repeatedly in his personal revelations, scattered throughout his letters to his beloved “churches,” Paul revealed a radical honesty about himself. He could, and did, number his faults. He could desire to do “good” and fail to do it. He tells of his own inner conflicts. He also reprimanded unrepentant sexual sinners, justifying, over the centuries, sermons of fire and brimstone from less integrated and more self-serving spiritual leaders than Paul.

Paul has been credited with fostering male domination of women. Some modern scholars have debunked those accusations by showing that part of his texts were altered by later revisionists who used their own additions to keep in place traditions that they felt were imperiled by Paul’s teaching of essential “oneness” and equality—all belonging to the royal priesthood.

Paul reveals that he suffered a “thorn in his flesh”—an angel of Satan—to tempt him lest he become “proud.” Almost all scripture commentaries conclude that the meaning of the thorn is “unknown.” When, however, one scholar or another ventures a guess, the conclusion is inevitably some physical infirmity like epilepsy, malaria, stammering, or Carl Jung’s favorite, psychosomatic blindness. All agree that the bothersome affliction was physical and humbling. Paul prayed repeatedly that the temptation be taken from him only to be reassured that divine grace was sufficient for him to overcome his “weakness.”

Why would Paul have been free from occasional sexual temptations, even after years of celibate practice? Would not sexual temptations have been humbling to Paul? Understanding the thorn as sexual is so logical if one considers the persistence of the sexual impulse and Paul’s courage and honesty. We favor Paul’s radical honesty in disclosing the “thorn” for whatever he meant it to be. Malaria would be trite for a man of such stature and realism to disclose as such a humbling weakness.

ORIGEN: Celibate Martyrdom

Early Christian celibate writers were not susceptible to edifying others by accounts of their own lives; at the same time, they could be staunch defenders of celibacy as a way of life. Origen, born less than a century and one half after the death of Christ, was among the most brilliant early Christian theologians. His father was martyred and only his mother’s intervention kept him from running to beg the same fate.

Although Paul and the earliest Christian writers used the metaphor of “dying with Christ” as a means of spiritual identification, it was left to Origen to indelibly stamp celibacy as an equivalent, and substitute for physical martyrdom. More research needs to be done on this link between the sufferings of Christ and the strong streak of sado-masochism that has persisted in the sexual/celibate history of Christianity.

His testimony to the excellence of virginity took the extreme and concrete form of self-castration. He credited Christ with bringing virginity into the world, and saw virginity, modesty, and chastity as the very models of perfection. Yet he freely used sexual imagery—kisses, mystical marriage—to describe the interaction between the “soul” and the “Word of God.” The knowledge bestowed was “the truer, closer, holier kiss, which is said to be given by the lover, the Word of God, to His beloved, the pure and perfect soul.”

Origen’s theology had a deep and lasting influence on the monastic movement—where celibate practice was an essential element—which became the primary repository of celibate theory, life and propagation in the Catholic Church. The practice of celibacy was not essential to the priesthood, but that was a secondary repository of the tradition. The relationship of celibacy to the priesthood has remained a hotly contested issue throughout the centuries. Legislation has not quelled the controversy that swirls around that connection. [FL. Quasten, vol. II (Pp.37-100)]

ANTHONY: The Desert and Radical Honesty

Anthony was a layman—as were the majority of early practitioners of celibacy—who lived for one hundred and six years. Most of his life was spent in the Egyptian desert as a celibate hermit dedicated to prayer and asceticism. One year after his death—357—Athanasius, a bishop, composed a Life of Anthony in response to the immense and wide-spread fascination and curiosity about this astounding individual who had amassed a reputation of being the ideal Christian ascetic and a model of for a life consecrated to God. The story of Anthony’s experience came to be considered a rule of life in the form of a narrative, and had tremendous influence on celibate spirituality, especially in the fifth and sixth centuries. Augustine credited it with a profound effect on his conversion.

Accounts of Anthony’s struggles against devils and demons under multifarious forms are legendary and have been recorded time and again over the centuries in art and literature. ++++[FL. Flaubert, ANTHONY, check.] This element of Anthony’s experience can be off putting to some modern readers, but the descriptions of perceptual distortions are consonant with current understanding of the effects of sensory deprivation. The progress of sexual/celibate understanding can be traced in the development of psychological awareness of inner stress from externalized sources of conflict—demons—to inherent psychic ambivalence. As successive generations of celibates digested the experience of celibacy the various elements of sexual striving tended to be recognized as internal forces.

Although Anthony was the prototype of a monk, he left a legacy that exists even today in a variety of spiritual movements beyond the monastic and the celibate traditions. First, he insisted that the serious seeker of spiritual reality and self-honesty have an “elder” or spiritual guide. The guide was not merely the source of advice about the aspirant’s progress or absolution from his faults, but the recipient of the full truth—manifestation of conscience—from the seeker. Second, the celibate seeker should examine his own state of mind every morning and evening, even recording in writing, the reactions of his mind and heart to the innermost movements of life. ++++[FL. Quasten, vol. III, (P.39-44)]

The account of Anthony’s experience was not biography in the modern sense of the word, a personal history. Its thrust was new, and ushered in a new literary genre that focused on the “sayings” of wise men. The narrative was extracted from their experiences and captured in anecdotes and stories they told or were put in their mouths. ++++[FL. Ward (P. xi)]

The core of desert wisdom and the goal of the celibate ascetic experience were “radical honesty”—first and foremost about one’s own person—no deception, no illusions. This was the foundation for the encounter with every person and all Reality. [FL. Stewart. Sobornost.1990 (P.25-39), (P.143-156)] The new literature of this genre reflected the dedication to honesty. They are realistic.

The attention paid to the problems of sex and celibacy often surpass the space allotted to the subject of prayer in the sayings of these wise men. There are frank and direct accounts of the struggles for purity, chastity, and, celibacy. Sexuality, its powerful and persistent draw, is acknowledged over and over in examples of temptation in thought, desire, and deeds, along with advice on how to counter the pull of instinct by working, fasting, praying, and a rededication to the ascetic commune. Although the majority of examples are temptations occasioned by women, there are also instances of sexual desires for other men.

The struggles for chastity often resulted in defeat and repentance. The accounts of desert celibacy do not cover up stumbling, reversal, and outright failure, nor do they pretend that celibacy is simply a superior state of life; they are fully aware of the dynamism between desire and control. They tell tales of monks who indulge in fornication, and sexual intercourse leading to a pregnancy, even after years of ascetical practice and self-denial. Some of the men who came to the desert life were previously married, for they longed for their former wives and were sexually tempted by the memory of their experiences. Others brought with them, sons “scarcely weaned.” Some left their celibate practice and married, only to return to the desert to do penance for having left the “angelic order and coming to impurity.” ++++[FL. Ward (P.17)]

There is even an anecdote that anticipates, in foreshadowing the predicament of public figures like Popes and Cardinals. An anchorite who gained great fame and was universally admired, sinned with a woman. Overwhelmed with guilt he returned to his cell and locked himself in refusing to see anyone, doing severe penance for a year. Even the brothers who came to him for spiritual advice were turned away. When anyone came to his door he simply asked for prayers. He did not know “how else to reply so as not to shock his listeners, for he was of great repute amongst them and considered as a great monk.” This body of literature is unique in the history of celibacy, making it all the more a profound witness to an essential element of celibate practice—personal honesty. ++++[FL. Ward (P. 11-12)]

CASSIAN: The Celibate Process

John Cassian was formed in the desert tradition of radical honesty and translated that experience into a description of the process of celibate development and achievement for all of Western monasticism and Religious life. He employed the literary genre of the desert tradition by presenting his ideas using the revered hermits of Egyptian monasticism as speakers. Not that Cassian was lacking in personal experience of celibacy and monastic life.

He and a boyhood friend, Germanus some years his elder, began their search for monastic life in Bethlehem around the year 380, when Cassian was about eighteen years old. The association of the two friends lasted twenty-five years and took them on a journey of exploration through the famous monastic sites of Egypt, and the religious capitals or Constantinople and Rome. Presumably, Germanus died before Cassian founded a monastery and settled in Marseilles.

Cassian is best remembered for his writings—Conferences and Institutes—that deal with prayer, grace, ascetic discipline, rules for communal living, but most especially with the process of celibacy—the most prominent and unique part of his legacy. In Cassian’s analysis of celibate experience he discerned six stages that led from continence through chastity to purity of heart. The process begins with the cessation of all deliberate sexual activity, then the control of thoughts and desires, next the toleration of inevitable physical arousal without any mental—memory or fantasy—participation. The further development of celibacy leads to complete inner calm in the face of any external sexual stimulation and finally chaste integrity even controls sexual fantasies during sleep. ++++[FL. Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 75-76.]

The significance of the observation that celibacy is a process has frequently been lost and obscured by legalistic formulations that ignore the dynamic nature of physical, psychological and spiritual realities involved in the pursuit of celibate discipline. The loss of the simple awareness of celibate process has hindered the development of religious celibacy throughout the centuries and at times doomed the practice to a charade. 

Few, if any, spiritual writers have ever been more forthright and realistic about discussing the nature and functions of male sexuality. He, like other monastic commentators, was conscious of the dangers to celibacy that women, boys and other monks—and one’s own body—could pose to the aspiring celibate. Cassian’s realism and directness does not mean that the modern reader can easily distill the heady essence of Cassian’s insights from the mash of fourth and fifth century conceptions of human sexuality. Puzzling and tiresome are the elaborate mental gyrations and discussions of the meaning and morality of nocturnal emissions in a man pursuing celibacy. Most off-putting to the twenty-first century observer are the anti-woman, anti-sex, and dietary presumptions that pervade the work.

Later ascetics, like Gandhi, were not free from similar biases, but by experience came to observe the same connection between gluttony and lust made by Cassian. The Indian celibate said that if one could control his appetite for food, he could control all his bodily urges. Both men fasted and restricted their hours for sleep. Each, however, sought truth and integrity, not merely deprivation by means of his celibate dedication. Cassian defined the goal of the celibate person to be a condition where he is constant and transparent: the same night and day, in bed or at prayer, alone or surrounded by a crowd. “He sees nothing in himself in private that he would be embarrassed for others to see, nor wants anything detected by [the Eye of God] to be concealed from human sight.” ++++[FL. Stewart, Cassian p.62.] Spiritual motivation was crucial to the success of the celibate process as was prayer and grace.

AUGUSTINE: Conversion and Confession

A contemporary of John Cassian, Augustine of Hippo, left a witness of his inner life and celibacy that contrasts starkly with the genre of the desert where the author concealed himself behind the identity and narratives of others. Augustine is not afraid of direct self-revelation; he speaks for himself and about himself. Honesty and humanity make his autobiography timeless good reading. The “therapeutic” unfolding of the text—the reader participates in the author’s ongoing process of uncovering the layers of an inner-self—make it classic and fascinating. The author makes no attempt to cover up or revise past mistakes or imperfections in the light of later insights. He does not reject his past as if it were not part of him Augustine confides his ongoing suffering, loneliness, and sexual temptations as to a friend.

This witness of Augustine represents a psychological quantum leap toward an integration of celibate striving into more customary psychosexual development and life style—it no longer had to cordon itself off in isolated desert caves—and opened broad intellectual vistas—not merely biblical scholarship—for exploration. He embraced his humanity and did not project his dark side to demons and devils, but accepted concupiscence as his humanity struggling against it self.

Some contemporary scholars interpret Augustine’s self-accusation, “I was a slave of lust,” literally as if he were a sex addict. ++++[FL. Margaret Miles, Practicing Christianity: Critical Perspectives for an Embodied Spirituality, New York: Crossroad, 1990, p. 98.] Most modern observers, however, would judge Augustine’s psychosexual development to be “normal.” He began an active sexual life in his mid-teens; fell in love with a woman with whom he lived for thirteen years and fathered a son by her. That relationship was broken off to conform to the social convention of entering a “suitable marriage.” He described the break up of that relationship as a rupture of his heart—“a deep cut leaving a trail of blood.” In the wake of that separation he took a mistress, without love, for about a year. His prayer, “Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet,” is proverbial.

Two additional losses would also wound Augustine deeply—the deaths of his mother and his son. Bereaved of the loves forged or sustained by sexuality Augustine was converted to celibacy. Certainly doctrinal elements were involved in his change of allegiance from his Manachean views to those of his mother’s orthodoxy, but the affective conversion was to a celibate way of loving.

Conversion for Augustine was integral to his celibacy—an ongoing process of incorporating past experiences with the reality of one’s existence, and the ever-new unfolding of divine grace. Confession for Augustine was the lived witness—the actual practice of celibacy. Augustine had a unique capacity for friendship. This talent for love enabled him to gather a group of like-minded men around him to support each other in their service to the community and their celibate striving. He also maintained contact with some of his youthful friends, like Alypius who eventually became bishop of Augustine’s hometown. By the way, Alypius had experienced sex with a woman, but was never intrigued by it.

Without doubt Augustine’s ideas of human sexuality were distorted by the state of biological knowledge of his time, and the mode of discussing sin and virtue. But, like Paul, he has been mischaracterized as an unrepentant misogynist and unalloyed champion of patriarchy. Augustine could not have reached his status as a scholar and saint without the experience of sexual love and fatherhood he enjoyed. He devoted time to counseling married couples and clearly states in his City of God that marriage should be marked by “perfect mutual companionship.” In extrapolating the essential elements of celibacy from all its early exponents one must sift through accidental conditions and put statements in the broad context of their thought and practice. One thing is clear: Augustine insisted in the Confessions, if only near the end, that men and women are entirely equal in mind and soul.

MERTON: Prayer and Perseverance 

Thomas Merton converted to Catholicism and entered one of the Church’s strictest monastic orders—the Trappists—in 1942. His autobiography that recorded that process skyrocketed him and his monastery—Gethsemani, Kentucky—into international prominence. Later he repudiated this best seller as immature pap, however, as he developed spiritual depth over his twenty-seven years in the monastery his subsequent writings entered into the modern canon of spiritual classics. The seven volumes of his published journals reveal his humanity, inner struggles, and spiritual growth more directly and accessibly than any other celibate writer since Augustine. 

Young Merton, prior to his religious conversion, fathered an out-of-wedlock child, but unlike Augustine he did not have the experience of a long-term love relationship with the mother or the joys of fatherhood. The strict discipline and twenty-five year confinement in the monastery, however, did not prevent Merton from falling in love with a young woman he met while he was hospitalized for back surgery. He manipulated monastic rules, his friends, physicians, and the system in general, conniving to rendezvous with her at various sites including a doctor’s office, restaurants, and his hermitage. During the same period he contacted her on the telephone and they exchanged love letters. He was conscious while receiving Communion at the community Mass that he was “a priest who has a woman” in spite of the fact that their “lovemaking,” at that point had stopped short of intercourse. ++++[FL. Thomas Merton, Ed Christine M. Bochen, Learning to Love: the Journals of Thomas Merton, volume six 1966-1967, New York: Harper San Francisco, 1997. (P. 79) ]

The intimate moments they shared are preserved in his letters to her—he burnt hers when the affair ended—and in his journals that record the excitement and conflicts surrounding clandestine calls, meetings, and letters. The memory of the love affair—a picnic they celebrated on the grounds of the monastery one Kentucky Derby day was central to the experience—had a profound and lasting effect on Merton’s psychological and spiritual attitude.

His illicit—from the vantage of monastic discipline—phone calls, were reported to the abbot who threatened to take Merton’s hermitage away from him if he did not put an end to the relationship. This pressure was a major factor in the termination of the friendship. The break-up was not accomplished without sadness and soul searching by both parties. Merton had many moments, and for various reasons, during his celibate striving when he had considered leaving the monastery. He and his friend had several serious discussions about the possibilities of marriage and a future together.

This monk’s affair is best understood within the total context of his celibate striving, personality development, and spiritual growth. Few priests have ever exposed the broad range of their humanity in their celibate striving as did Merton. Even he does not record his struggles with masturbation. But he did not want his non-celibate emotional escapade to be hidden. He wanted to be “completely open, both about my mistakes and about my effort to make sense out of my life.” ++++[FL. Thomas Merton, ibid., p. xxii.]

Merton explored his love while never abandoning his life of prayer, duties or intellectual pursuits and was successful in incorporating his experience into the richness of his spiritual struggle for integrity and love. The love Merton experienced with this young woman led him to a renewal of his celibate commitment and rededication to his life as a monk. This, of course, does not eliminate the fact that the experience demonstrates a period of “splitting” his behavior from the reality of his moral convictions and social reality. He did not try to justify his lapse. He could with sincerity write: “What a fool I have been, in the literal and biblical sense of the word: thoughtless, impulsive, lazy, self-interested, yet alien to myself, untrue to myself, following the most stupid fantasies, guided by the most idiotic emotions and needs.” ++++[FL. Thomas Merton, Ed Patrick Hart, The Other Side of the Mountain, The Journals of Thomas Merton, volume seven 1967-1968, New York: Harper San Francisco, 1998.]

The radical honesty and on-going conversion of the committed celibate is united in its integration with all the human endowments—and limitations—of an individual personality. Serious seekers of religious celibacy maintain that its practice and achievement are possible only if sustained by perseverance and prayer.

NOUWEN: Celibate Loneliness

Henri J.M. Neuwen has been one of the most popular spiritual writers—with priests, religious and lay people—of the last decades of the twentieth century. His stature and readership has increased steadily since his death in 1996. Among his forty books there are journals, but not an autobiography as such; yet the corpus of his work and each book is personal and self-revelatory. They are records of his spiritual development and progress in the form of essays for others. The intimate quality of his prose, free from self-absorption, renders his thinking accessible, classic, and profoundly appealing to a wide audience. He is the wounded healer, reaching out as a companion to others on the lonely journey to freedom and peace. ++++[FL. Jurjen Beumer, Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God, New York: Crossroad, 1998.]

Born and educated in the Netherlands, Nouwen’s professional career as a priest was spent primarily in the United States and finally in Canada. Trained in psychology as well as theology, Nouwen blended his expertise into models of pastoral care filtered through his unique experiences and profound, psychologically sensitive spirituality. After a post-doctoral year of study in Religion and Psychology at the Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas he began a series of teaching assignments at Notre Dame, Utrecht, Yale and Harvard divinity schools. His lectures inevitably led to a refinement of his thinking that resulted in the publication of the most current integration of his spiritual/emotional Weltanschauung.

In spite of his success and security as a university professor, Nouwen remained spiritually restless in the deepest recess of his being. He interspersed his academic tenures with lecturing world wide, and extended excursions—to a Trappist monastery, ecumenical research center, Latin America, and France. Nouwen had wanted to be a priest from the time he was six years old. At age fifty-four, he could say with a tinge of sadness: “I am still struggling with the same problems I had on the day of my ordination twenty-nine years ago. Notwithstanding my many prayers, my periods of retreat, and the advice from many friends, counselors, and confessors, very little, if anything, has changed with regard to my search for inner unity and peace. I am still the restless, nervous, intense, distracted, and impulse-driven person I was when I set out on this spiritual Journey.” ++++[FL. Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey, New York: Doubleday, 1988. (P.127).]

Finally, during the last ten years of his life, he was to find his “home” and true vocation in Canada as a chaplain with L’Arche—a community of handicapped people and their assistants. It was, however, precisely at this juncture—when his restless search could claim its true spiritual geography—he was to undergo, in spiritual terms, his “dark night of the soul,” and in psychic terms, a “break.”

In the security of the unqualified acceptance and loving atmosphere of his new community Nouwen opened himself up to a friendship as never before in his life. He described the experience as a gift of immense joy and peace that revealed a new part of himself, “as if a door of my interior life had been opened [one that had been] locked during my youth and most of my adult life.” ++++[FL. Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, New York: Doubleday, 1996. (p. xv.)] He actually confronted his sexual being for the first time. The preservation of celibacy necessitated a rupture in the relationship. But the experience of the separation of the friendship was the most profound and painful of Nouwen’s celibate career.

Nouwen often wrote about loneliness. At last he could define the essence of celibate loneliness from anguished experience. Men—and women—who willingly chose to live without sexual gratification for a spiritual motive, cannot thereby simply forever avoid confrontation with their sexual being and emotions. Early sexual experimentation and experience does not insure sexual maturity or integration of sexual identity. But sexual deprivation—celibacy—requires that a person develop alternate ways of refining the inevitable questions about his sexual orientation and identity. The proverbial dark night of the soul—crisis of loneliness—is an essential element in the process of celibate achievement. A spiritual and emotional crisis involved in the pursuit of celibacy is only a dramatic expression of a reality expressed by Augustine as the “restless heart” or by Dorothy Day as “the long loneliness.” Religious celibacy—or profound spirituality—is not possible without confronting deep loneliness to find the peace of aloneness beyond it.

++++[FL. Additional Bibliography: Nouwen, Henri J.M., The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Nouwen, Henri J.M., Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Nouwen, Henri J.M., Clowning in Rome: Reflections on Solitude, Celibacy, Prayer and Contemplation. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Nouwen, Henri J.M., The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Modern Autobiography: GANDHI, SHEEN, and GREELEY:

Three popular twentieth century, male, religious figures—Mohandas K. Gandhi (*) Fulton J. Sheen (*) and Andrew M. Greeley (*)—have each written an autobiographical account of his celibacy.

These three “witnesses” to the celibate calling shared a significant commonality; they have been highly visible public figures. The widely-read testimony of three openly avowed celibates, and the fascination they generate, places special demands on any method of enquiry. The criteria outlined in the introductory remarks will be applied to each author.

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

Fulton Sheen, Greeley’s fellow Catholic, was constrained by his social position to employ “the prophetic voice” to express a predictable coda. Gandhi has the disadvantage—or fascination—of being from another culture, time—he was born a quarter of a century before Coughlin and Sheen—and had a unique popular reception horizon. He remains intriguing because he was an unapologetically eccentric thinker—infuriating, unpredictable, and most powerfully—unromantically honest. Each teaches something unique, and all expose some common underpinnings of celibate life.

GANDHI The Sexual Twain Meet

Not surprisingly, Gandhi’s “Experiments with Truth” expresses most clearly of the three 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 pandering to the prejudices of an expected readership. He was also free from the need to uphold the authority of any mundane institution.

[FL. Add to the bibliography: Eknath Easwaran GANDHI THE MAN, Nilgiri Press, Petaluma CA,1978.          Erik H. Erikson, GANDHI’S TRUTH, W.W.NORTON, NEW YORK,1969.         Krishna Kripalani {Ed.} ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS, Navajivan, Ahmedabad,1960.] 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This master-servant motif is linked to a world of male-male bonding in literature where anti-sex and anti-woman biases persist. Consider, for instance, the sexless, misogynist, and avuncular world of the Hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS; it is dominated by the sentimental master-servant relationship of Frodo and Sam. (*) Erich Auerback in his essay “The Knight Sets Forth” observed the significance of the connection of male-male bonding, master-servant fidelity, and avuncular kinship in adventure genre on the one hand, and male celibacy in the “Grail Quest” romantic literature and real spiritual vocation, on the other. (*)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be sure, an archaic view of sexuality is at least as culturally and historically influenced as it is psychologically generated. Nevertheless, Gandhi was aware of alternatives; he had read about contraceptives and, considering Rev. Mr. Hill’s opposition, simply chose to reject them in favor of self-control. The necessity of using abstinence as the only form of birth control led Gandhi to his years of “unsuccessful strivings.” He rectified the process only by shifting to a commitment to 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. The focus, however, is not merely the subjection of the senses but rather the life system and productivity that reinforce the celibacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++++[FL. George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi” A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1954. (177-186)

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

It is precisely this link between celibacy and, by extension, spirituality, on the one hand, and an archaic anthropology, with its puritanism and misogyny, on the other, that threatens the continuing relevance of the Church and religion itself today. Hope lies in reconciling the Orwells—those who follow their ethical and humanitarian vocation according to non-celibate or secular models—and the Gandhis, who define theirs in spiritual and celibate terms. They are each enhanced by the achievement of the other as they seek to penetrate and master the common reality that generated and nurtures them both—human sexuality

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

SHEEN: A Mixed Message

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

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

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

The failure of Sheen’s witness reveals itself in his descriptions of his relationships with his inmost self, his God, and others, celibate and non-celibate alike. Sheen is caught in a religious culture where spiritual relationships rely on vertical hierarchies called “states of perfection.” That stance is contrary of the sense that “all are one” witnessed in celibate maturity, when the sense of having transcended the self to a level beyond sexuality, where the distinctions between male and female, Black and White, slave and free, no longer have meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crowning achievement of Sheen’s struggle appears to be a love of Christ based on self-hatred: “It is because of His love that I loathe myself. It is His mercy which makes me remorseful.

The physical and sensual imagery of smeared images, fouled raiment, and groping in darkness accompanying the obsession with shame, wounds, and pain are psychologically provocative.

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

Sheen reserves sharp criticism for the lapsed celibate—those who reach a spiritual crisis when young in the priesthood and others who fail at a late age either from weakness or defects in their own character.42  But Sheen does not demonstrate either empathy or understanding of the developmental struggles involved in the various stages of celibate practice in spite of the personal implications raised by his reflections on the “dark night.” He gives no clue to the developmental history of his own practice, but his use of the first person plural voice does not completely take away the impression that the voice of personal experience speaks through his analogy of a struggle.

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

The reader cannot ascertain what constitutes a celibate transgression, or slip, and what is a betrayal. The reader is simply told is that the author is one of “we priests who have never broken our vow.”44 Sheen’s aggressive tone toward the “imperfect” celibate seems to be directed to those who abandon the priesthood rather than those who exist in some compromising situation still within the celibate caste. Is it a mechanism, whereby he can pillory an isolated other while dissolving his own shame into the common pool of Original Sin?

The most disturbing mixed message of all, however, is the elaborate rhetorical ruse by which Sheen attempted to fool his presumably non-celibate, though committed, Catholic reader. Initially he flattered their choice of mundane love. Sheen’s essay on celibacy began with the express goal of dispelling the assumption that marriage is less holy in the divine plan than celibacy. He boldly proclaims that both are good, complementary, not competitive. Celibacy is not higher; marriage is not lower. But all of Sheen’s metaphors only reestablish a relationship of condescending superiority. Marriage belongs to the secular world, uses alternating current, travels by roadway, labors with hand tools, and reason, etc. Celibacy deals with the spiritual world, uses direct current, travels by air, and jumps with intuition, poetry and dreams. The legitimate source of authority is clear. The attributes of marriage and celibacy are aligned along a vertical axis, not horizontally. 

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

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

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

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

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

In his concluding  paragraphs Sheen’s mixed message becomes clear. The argument, with which he first wooed the reader, that nether form of love is higher dissolves before his witness “I never felt I gave up love in taking the vow of celibacy; I just chose a higher love.”51 How can an observer square this statement with his “celibacy is not higher; marriage is not lower”? The reader is left with the sense that he has been following a shell game with human sexuality while Sheen slowly tilted the table from the horizontal to the vertical, attempting to disguise a spiritual hierarchy behind a veneer of equality.

The force of Eros is too big and the facets of celibacy too complex to be so easily manipulated. When analyzing Sheen’s relation to his own sexuality, one wonders who is playing with whom. How much is a designed defense of a religious state and how much is an unconsciously determined avoidance of personal revelation of celibate struggle and achievement?

GREELEY: Double Exposure

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

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

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

Although this myth is precisely the one Andrew Greeley embraces for himself, some readers find the metaphor pejorative for the sexuality of a proclaimed celibate for whom celibacy is meant as a symbol of service to the needs of others.

There is a strong temptation when reading Greeley within the often stultifying confines of traditional Catholic treatises on celibacy to feel that he is refreshingly honest, contemporary and direct. The writings of Gandhi and Sheen reveal a celibate tradition burdened by anti-sexual and misogynist prejudices. The components of Greeley’s celebration of sexuality and women are neither so direct or simple.

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

Greeley’s sexual/celibate world, like his rhetoric, is complex and difficult to measure because 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 life style,” between his own heterosexuality and the “orientation” of his Cardinal superior—which although he does not question—uninformed others “have their doubts.” ++++[Fl. CPP (p131) Even the eroticized parts of women’s bodies become distinct, almost religious icons in Greeley’s hymns to “Lady Wisdom.” Adolescents might more irreverently and directly call Greeley’s icons “T and A”—tits and ass

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

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

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

Knowing how to use adjectives effectively, Greeley employs the full range of their repertoires. For instance a “Nightline” discussion of celibacy following the airing of Thornbirds becomes “transcontinental.” He becomes the “notorious sociologist from Tucson” who joins the panel. Father Hesberg, president of Notre Dame, becomes a man answering questions from a “confused, conservative alumnus.” Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia becomes a third string sub for Cardinal Bernardin, “who would not go on with me.” A married couple are summarily dismissed—either party— as unsuitable marriage partners for Greeley. In the end, he grants himself, generically, to be sure, the potential of being the most “fascinating” man in the world. ++++[FL. CPP (p. 107-108)] 

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

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

“So have there been women in my life…about whom I awake in the middle of the night with powerful hunger?… With whom I can quickly imagine wonderful actions and fantastic pleasures?…

For that delightful delirium I am grateful, not ashamed…thus far the delights have led to no shattered promises or commitments.…”

If masturbation is his adjustment to the celibate practice—as can be logically speculated from the revelation of his repeated night-time fantasies—why must it be denied and still remain an unspeakable word?

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

“All abstract, you say?

Anything less abstract than that, at this stage of the proceedings, you are not going to get, however much it might increase sales of the book.

It would be telling, now, wouldn’t it?”

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

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

Hermann Hesse wrote insightfully about celibacy in Siddhartha. [++++(*)] In his novel Steppenwolf, the protagonist has a dream in which “All the Girls of the World Are Yours,” a kind of mental theater in which the infinite potential love affairs with acquaintances and chance encounters are played out. +++++[ (*)] Greeley has made his vocations, as priest and writer, similar theaters for safe sex. What is lacking in this understandable accommodation to celibacy is the sublimation of the erotic impulse into service, resolution of negativity, and a manifest sense that all are one—essential elements in the model of achieved celibacy. Greeley’s psychic investment transferred from the literary women “characters,” he created, knew and loved, to the breasts and thighs of a passerby, is no more a sublimation of the libido than are the mental maneuvers  of an immature non-celibate.

From the start, Greeley uses a highly overstated comparison to distinguish himself, and celibates in general, from all other men. His definition: the celibate is the witness to the possibility of living in the world as a person powerfully attracted to women without being compelled to jump into bed with them. This definition is strikingly distorted. The measure of the celibate ‘s relationship to women is measured against a behavior which, if understood literally—the only way that gives the comparison meaning—would be pathological.

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

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

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

And this bit of advice from his personal experience:

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

It is hard to accept Greeley’s ingenuousness at face value when he makes such a recommendation—particularly in light of research that finds considerable potential for these confidant relationships to become sexual. His exaltation in his celibate freedom runs the risk of mocking the confines of other commitments:

There is 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.

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

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

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

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

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

++++[FL. (*)]

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

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

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

 “The celibate and the married person64 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 ourself and the other person and our other promises too much to permit our response to go beyond minor delight.”

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

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

A kind of rhetorical double-play reaches dizzying proportions in his absorption of feminist concerns into what is in essence an anti-feminist 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 woman’s defender in a misogynist institution, this has less to do with the emancipation of women than the aggrandizement of their “champion.” The alternating use of “He” and “She” for God remains fundamentally locked in strict gender roles. True egalitarians have urged non-gender specific language for the liturgy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greeley’s final fierce attack on homosexuality does not cast him in a particularly flattering light, because it is confused. He identifies a scapegoat that can serve simultaneously as marginalized victim—the gay priest (and gay life-style). He confuses the evil victimizer (the pedophile), that is, with the gay. Sexual orientation is not identical with the object of desire. There is no evidence that gay oriented priests violate their promise of celibacy any more or less than other priests. From his literary pulpit he can pour coals on the heads of sinners and light fires 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 remarkably similar narrative to the concluding chapters of Elmer Gantry. [++++(*)]

Greeley courts women to join him in his campaign through a seemingly plausible, but actually tenuous argument: “.. one of the reasons for the continuation of Neoplatonic disgust for women in the Church is that some high-level leaders really dislike and fear women. They do not find them either attractive or tempting but repellent.”86

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

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

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

Typical of the head-in-the-sand response of the Church leadership to its gay life-style/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.90

Thus, the reader is led without explicit comment from the failure of the Church’s current leadership to the endangered future to the right man for the job. By this point the reader knows of only one celibate whose hands are clean, whose frankness is his sword and shield. And “God help those who are responsible.”91

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

Conclusion

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

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

Sheen avoids both a radically honest self-analysis and projects an intolerance and superiority common in “moral leaders.” Greeley seems inadvertently self revelatory in his ogling of women and teasing of his readers, which covers a deficiency—an intolerance verging on scapegoating. Even Gandhi, whose honesty and service to humanity outshine Sheen and Greeley, still fosters an intolerance of the “lustful” and lacks an equal respect for women. Yet all three persisted in the pursuit of the ideal.

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

NOTES

[FL. The following are references you need to record for the end of the chapter-book: Giles Bartscherer, {Vincent Huber, translator} TYROCINIUM RELIGIOSUM, St. Vincent Archabbey Print. Latrobe, PA, 1896.

Columba Stewart, CASSIAN THE MONK, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.           Johannes Quasten, PATROLOGY vol., Spectrum Publishers, Utrecht Antwerp, 1953.

Garry Wills, SAINT AUGUSTINE, Viking, New York, 1999.

Peter Brown, AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, Faber and Faber, London, 1967.

Benedicta Ward, THE WISDOM OF THE DESERT FATHERS, SLG Press, Oxford, 1975.

Norman Russell {translator} THE LIVES OF THE DESERT FATHERS, Mowbray, Oxford, 1981.]

1. Gandhi, Mohandas K. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. Boston: Beacon.

2. Sheen, Fulton J. Treasure in Clay. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.

3. Greeley, Andrew M. Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography. New York: Pocket Books, 1987.

4. Sipe, A. W. Richard. A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990.

8. One is tempted to associate Gandhi’s apparent indifference to the class difference between master and servant, describing it with the same enthusiasm one would expect to be reserved for friendship between unconstrained individuals, to his Hindu culture (what the anthropologist Louis Dumont calls “Homo Hierarchicus”), but we should not forget the importance of this relationship as a sentimental motif of British literature (especially when compared with the ironic handling of the theme in Continental literature; cf. Don Quixote and Jacques and His Master). This motif is also linked to a world of male-male bonding and the “avuncular genealogies” that Ariel Dorfman detected in the anti-feminist and anti-sex biases of much Anglo-American children’s literature—cf. his How to Read Donald Duck and the sexless, misogynist, and avuncular world of the hobbits in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which likewise is dominated by the sentimental master-servant relationship of Frodo and Sam (Tolkien, like Gandhi, was educated in South Africa!). The significance of male-male bonding, master-servant fidelity, and avuncular kinship in the adventure genre, on the one hand, and male celibacy in the “Grail Quest” of literary and real spiritual vocation, on the other—a connection observed by Erich Auerback in his essay “The Knight Sets Forth”—deserves further study in relation to the celibate ideal, and resistance to democratization and feminism in Western Culture and the Church.

13. Orwell, George. “Reflections on Gandhi” [1949]. A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. 177–186. [This note number was the 1st occurrence of Orwell’s name in the text, so I put this un-numbered note text with this note number]

31. In fact, it may be in this area of sexuality that a reconciliation 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, the elimination of poverty, etc. We can note the perception of this contrast in the comparison made by the secular Jewish philosopher Georg Simmel, in his essay “The Poor,” between charity and economic rights:

…new forms appear…when the point of departure is the obligation of the giver rather than the right of the recipient. In the extreme case, he poor disappear completely as legitimate subjects and central foci of the interests involved. The motive for alms then resides exclusively in the significance of giving for the giver. When Jesus told he wealthy young man, “Give you 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 sacrifice 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 concession—a motive which concerns only the giver but not the recipient. 153–154

Clearly, this question of ends is also one of Orwell’s concerns in his “for God or Man” credo.

Again, literary reflection offers the best vehicle for reconciliation. Italo Calvino’s story, “The Watcher,” which narrates a Communist Party election observer’s 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.

50. Jung, and Freud as well, had grown up and studied under the influence of this economistic rhetoric of “harboring” and “squandering,” the accountant’s calculation of “sums” (cf. Robinson 59–62)—the psycho-sexual analogue of what Karl Marx called “the Abstinence Theory of Capital Accumulation” (Marx 591–598). [This is the note text that corresponds with the 1st occurrence of note #50]

50. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. [This second occurrence of note #50 corresponds to the 1st occurrence of Lacan’s name in the text, so I put this un-numbered note text here]

52. Even his most significant insight—that his anti-sexual form of celibacy is best supported by an earlier conception of human sexuality and a pre-modern life-cycle, in which death is more omnipresent than the duration of human desire and relationships—lacks the pathos and insight that would explain how such a new paradigm arose and how the celibate practice can creatively adapt to it. Let us compare his version with that of a secular thinker. Sheen writes that:

The reason why chastity is on he 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.

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 tendency to compensate for it by speed, drugs and intensity of feeling. (203–204)

In 1920, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote:

[Does] “progress”…have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will find 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 problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man, placed into an infinite “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 infinity. 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 definitive, 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. (139–140)

Why does Weber’s analysis of this historical process, by which life and death, sexuality and meaning, shift their significance, 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 both the institution of religion, the Catholic Church, and its increasing irrelevance for granted.