Andrew Greeley Replies to His Critics

Abstract

Far be it from me to disappoint those readers who are eagerly awaiting my reaction to the hatchet job on my life and work by the four men of the symposium of the last issue of The Journalfor the Scientific Study of Religion. I will confess to being somewhat surprised by the animus of the four writers. Each in his own way and with his own style was bent on tearing apart, debunking, cutting down to size, hurting, and destroying-perhaps without even knowing it. It is not merely that the elementary canons of scholarly discourse were discarded (and I'm not sure such canons are worth very much given the incurable nastiness of most scholars). The writers were so intent on punishing me for the quantity of my output that they engaged in distortion, omission, quoting out of context, and just plain foolishness of the sort that exceeds the limits of common honesty. I must indeed be a fierce and terrible inkblot to stir up such a reaction. Let us begin with Professor Hadden. One would think from the tone of his introduction-only moderately patronizing-that he would like to be a (After all, only a friend would bother to mention my mother's first name-even if it might not be so friendly to suggest that she influenced me into the priesthood, which, incidentally, she did not.) Yet perceive two of the tricks of my would-be good friend. Professor Hadden quotes a reviewer in the Washington Post (inaccurately described as a Vatican priest) as saying, Either he did not know what he was talking about, and being celibate shouldn't, or he did and should shut up. What Professor Hadden does not tell the reader is that in the following sentences the author of the review rejects that position and goes on to write an extremely favorable review of the book. Professor Hadden's quoting reviewers is like the Devil's quoting Scripture. And he also quotes the Hyde Park Kenwood Voices on my battle with the nativists in the University of Chicago's sociology department; but he has not bothered to tell the reader that authors Siegel and Rose concluded by making it quite clear that the main reason why I am not a professor at Chicago is that I am a Catholic priest. With that kind of selective quotation out of context from a friend, one scarcely needs enemies. My fellow Aquarian Dean Martin Marty, who is surely a friend and the most benign of the symposiasts, engages in an ever so small omission which makes me look like a naive and innocent clerical Pollyanna with a view of religiondespite the long passages in Unsecular Man which are anything but reassuring to the traditional churches. He repeats the hoary cliche of many reviewers that my definition of religion is too broad, and, like the reviewers, he does not note the fact that it is not my definition but Clifford Geertz's. Also, like the reviewers, he does