Rev. Andrew Greeley, S.T.L., Ph.D.
Loyola University Chapel Series

Looking back on the "changes of my mind" on religion and on my own religion through the decades of my life, I see that I am traveled a path something like that which Paul Ricoeur described as the journey from the first naivet頴o the second naivet鮠However, I'm not sure that I would describe that pilgrimage as a "change" or a "change of mind." Rather it seems to be more like a drift from insight to insight and a gradual integration of various insights - or from story to story --which brought me back to where I had started only to recognize it for the first time. I began my religious life listening to stories. Now I realize that religion is story before it is anything else and after it's everything else. In my sociological study of religion I do my best to pry out stories with the terribly inadequate tools that are available to sociology and I tell religious stories in my novels. In the process I learned a lot of catechism, a lot of doctrine, a lot of theology, and a lot of sociology which could not have cared less about stories. All of this learning was necessary and even useful perhaps, but it often got in the way.

When I was growing up on the West Side of Chicago during the Great Depression I absorbed the charm of the Catholic stories I learned from my parents and from St. Angela parish, its parochial school, and the liturgical cycle, though in those days we hardly new what liturgy meant. It was an utterly unselfconscious experience. I heard the stories of God and Jesus and Mary and the angels and especially my own guardian angel, , of Christmas and shepherds and the Wise Men and Easter and Ash Wednesday and Advent and Lent and the Souls in Purgatory and the Spirit on Pentecost and the End of the World (in the scary apocalyptic gospels of November and December) and of Holy Water sprinkled around the house during thunders storms. My throat was blessed on the Feast of St. Blaise, I prepared for my First Holy Communion, I prayed for the Holy Souls on All Souls Day, I marched in the Holy Thursday procession while my girl classmates sprinkled flower petals on the church floor between stanzas of the glorious Pange Lingua. I sang "Bring Flowers of the Rarest" at May Crownings. I kissed the wood of the Cross on good Friday. I sang (badly) Christmas carols. I became an altar boy. I watched the colors change with the seasons of the church year - green, red, white, purple, black. I said the rosary, wore religious medals, lighted votive candles (not very often because we didn't have much money), attended novenas, blessed myself with Holy Water, made the nine First Fridays, offered up the pain of the dentist's drill for the souls in purgatory. Didn't everyone?

Above all I became part of the parish, something which was as natural as breathing the air. To live where I lived and to be Catholic meant that I was part of St. Angela parish (with one of the few wooden church buildings left in Chicago). I was fascinated by the priests whose job it seemed to be to help people and to stand between us and God. I marveled at the nuns who seemed so kind and gentle and happy (some of them we would later learn not yet out of their teens). I would marvel as a sociologist over the extraordinary genius behind the neighborhood immigrant parish (though our parents were mostly children of immigrants) and its parochial school. Some of the false prophets who were loosed in the confusion of the unchanging church which changed would loudly proclaim the need to "create community" and were unable to see the enormous community power of the American parish. (Nor did they perceive that community is not as much created as recognized.)

After absorbing the stories and the parish which told the stories and reinforced them, there was no way I could ever be anything else but Catholic. No idiocy of Church leadership could possibly drive me out of the Church - and there have been more than a few idiots on the loose during the decades of my life. The remarkable durability of Catholic loyalty during the turbulent years at the end of the 20th Century is in great part I am convinced the result of similar experiences, of the sense that once a Catholic always a Catholic. Even in what theologian Robert Barron has called the "beige Catholicism" which the false prophets tried to impose on everyone, the imaginative wonders of Catholicism somehow persisted. Those who are not Catholic, especially the militantly anti-Catholic secularists who ridicule us today, cannot understand the extraordinary appeal of the imaginative experiences of Catholic childhood (however, flawed and imperfect they might have been). We are Catholic because we like being Catholic. We like being Catholic because of our memories of Catholic childhood.

I don't think much if any of this was superstitious for me. My parents were not superstitious. Neither as I remember where the parents of my classmates. The nuns warned us of superstition. We didn't think that the saints were in the statues in front of which we prayed. Nor did we confuse the Mother of Jesus with God, though we thought she had enormous influence with God. The Holy Water sprinkled during thunder storms was not an attempt to control God but to reassure us, as it now seems to me, of God's love. Others may have experienced such a childhood differently (one thinks of the writer Mary McCarthy). Yet the remarkable durability of Catholicism suggests that for most of us it was a benign and enchanting experience, despite its sometimes unattractive aspects.

Perhaps some of the splendor was overdone - and some underdone too. Perhaps the rationale behind it required more explanation even when we were young. Perhaps some of the ceremonies had become obsolete. However, as I would understand later, the St. Angela parish of my childhood was based on the twin Catholic insights of sacramentality and community, of a God who was close to us and disclosed himself to us through his creation and of a group of human beings gathered together, particularly at Mass, to respond to that disclosure.

I still thrill to the sound of the hymn Pange Lingua on Holy Thursday, a mighty clash of cymbals as G.K. Chesterton called the opening verse. Strong supporter of the vernacular liturgy that I am, I see no reason why we cannot continue to sing it in Latin.

Some of that splendor of a Catholic childhood has been lost and some of it perhaps improved, depending on where one happens to be. In the parishes I know it still flourishes, changed perhaps, but stronger than ever. I suspect that the false prophets of beige Catholicism (well intentioned folk that they surely are) in the final analysis cannot crush it out.

St. Angela 1934 to 1942 was thus the substratum of my Catholicism which would never go away and my model for understanding religion. However as my education went on in grammar school and in the high school seminary, I encountered another stratum, one which was different from my childhood experience though not necessarily contradictory to it. Instead of saying that it was intellectual rather than narrative (though that might be one way of putting it), I would suggest that it was systematic rather than impressionistic. Or perhaps prose instead of poetry.

Surely one needed a version of one's religion on which one could reflect as one grew up, one that, to use Ricoeur's word, one could unpack an analyze in the search for deeper and richer understand and more mature faith. Unfortunately, it seems to me in retrospect, that the catechisms and the subsequent theology were shaped by several forces which were less than benign. Our reflective religion was designed to be apologetic, that is to respond to the questions and objections that Americans who were not Catholic might propose - and perhaps to our own difficulties and problems. Moreover it was legalistic, it was organized around a long list of doctrines that Catholics had to accept "under pain of mortal sin." They mysteries of faith were not dazzling and overwhelming truths which might bring us closer to God's love, they were a moral obstacle course which demanded that we abandon reason.

Since most of us didn't encounter all that many Protestants, much less those who wanted to argue with us, our apologetic catechism answers were not much good. When we did encounter such (as we do today, particularly in Fundamentalist territory) we find that our answers are useless because they have already made up their minds. Try to explain even to a relatively enlightened and open minded Protestant our devotion to Mary the Mother of Jesus (which is as strong as it ever was despite the efforts of beige Catholicism) and you realize that most simply do not want to hear our version of it, a reaction to which, one supposes they are entitled. Surely the maturing Catholic needs to be able to describe to herself who and what Mary is, though she probably knew that all along. Systematic religious understanding and explanation does not require an adversarial style.

Nor are all items of the Catholic faith of similar value. God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Church, the Eucharist, the Sacraments, the Resurrection, God's forgiving love, the hierarchically organized community are more important than, let us say, the validity of Anglican Orders or the existence of angels. When someone tells me that they have left the church because they cannot accept the existence of angels, I am reduced to stuttering incoherence. There are so many better reasons to leave.

As I acquired systematic Catholicism (heavily influenced by neo-Scholasticism) in high school and college and the theologate, I had no quarrel with its substance. Yet - and I find it hard to recall the nature of this reaction because it was mostly preconscious - I realized that it would be mostly useless save as background information in my ministry as a priest. People did not think and behave and believe in the systematic fashion that the authors of the manuals did. Even today most Catholics (and most people) have a very different "take" on religion than do even the most brilliant modern theologians. To use a word that I would not have known in the late forties and the early fifties the systematic Catholicism of my years of training was utterly orthogonal to the religious needs, feelings, convictions, and perceptions of even the well educated lay person. The two didn't fit.

The Gospel stories, while heavily theological as we would later learn, were not systematic formulations of Christian belief and the creeds were far too short to enable us to answer all the objections which we were supposed to be prepared to answer.

(I should add that I have no idea how an organized and systematic presentation of Catholicism might appear today. I do know that The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a little long. Fortunately in my novels, which are patently theological novels, there is no need to be systematic.) I sortied forth into parish ministry with all my seminary manuals in a box, though I never had to open them again. I even began telling stories about a Martian who visited my window in a flying saucer and a mad monk in the bell tower until the pastor banned such nonsense at the insistence of some of the parishioners. In fact, however, looking back on it my St. Angela Catholicism was intact. I no longer liked votive candles (perhaps because of the Pastor's insistence that the money from the candle safe be collected immediately after the last Mass on Sunday) or novenas or Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. I've been won back to the candles, though I can resist the attractions of the latter two. I did not reflect on the persistence of the St. Angela experience, perhaps because it was the ground on which I had always walked.

Then I went to the University and became a sociologist. Subtle attempts on part of some of the faculty to win me away were a waste of time, which they soon realized and one of them dismissed me as a loud mouth Irish priest. Sociology, to the extent that it was interested in religion at all, had two goals - to establish the truth of "secularization" (which was as much a normative dogma as testable hypothesis, arguably more) and to prove that Catholics couldn't think for themselves and couldn't succeed in American society for that reason. I spent a lot of time demolishing both "theories" though perhaps I wasted my time because they are still dominant in a profession which remains anti-religious and especially anti-Catholic. In my first book on this subject - Unsecular Man I cited the emerging survey data which shot holes in secularization. Soon the data reached tidal proportions. At least in the sociology of religion, despite frantic efforts to rescues secularization by redefining it again and again, the data made some impact.

In retrospect I was playing the old apologetic game, defending religion and defending Catholicism, using the measures that the adversaries had developed - graduate school attendance, belief in God and life after death, persistence in religious affiliation, frequency of prayer (an item I had introduced into the survey field with little influence on anyone because everyone knew that it was impossible that half the American public prayed every day.)

Religiously I had developed far enough as the Second Vatican Council began to realize that the core of Catholicism was the conviction that God was implacably forgiving love, the "privileged" story as I would later call it.

In the meantime, however, I became dissatisfied, especially since I was winning the battles and losing the war because the other side dismissed their lost battles (and I began to realize that secular academics could be as dogmatic as believers). A turning point came one autumn afternoon in graduate school when a young anthropology professor named Clifford Geertz, substituting for our regular professor, presented his theory of "Religion as a Culture System." It was a luminous and defining experience for me. Religion, Professor Geertz argued was a set of symbols which purported uniquely to explain the Real and to account for death suffering and injustice. Even then I realized that the symbols could just as well explain joy, happiness, love, and life. Later I would understand that the symbols were usually if not always narrative symbols.

That's what my St. Angela experience had been, a contact with a system of symbols which purported to explain the really real. Some of the symbols were doubtless better than others but they all pointed in the same direction - as I would say now of a God disclosing himself in the objects, events and people of daily life.

As I reflected on Geertz's work I understood that there are various kinds of belief systems. A theological system was logically and deductively organized. The images in a symbol system were linked by some central and overarching story. Both were good and necessary in their own way. Most Americans possessed both. But the symbol system, the stories, provided the raw power which sustained faith. In the next two decades I would fall in with William James, David Tracy and John Shea. From James I learned the importance of religious experience, and from Tracy and Shea the importance of religion as story. I slowly evolved a paradigm of experience, symbol, story, and ritual to describe religion sociologically, with each phase of the paradigm influencing the other three. We encounter moments of grace, we keep these moments as symbols in our imagination and we share them with one another in stories which we celebrate and reconfirm ("represent" as Durkheim would have said)together in rituals. From Tracy, I also learned about the differences between the Catholic and Protestant imaginations. In his study of the "classics" of the two traditions, Tracy discovered that the former emphasized the presence of God in the world through sacraments (small s) and community while the latter emphasized the absence of God from the world for fear (valid enough) of folk religion and superstition. Neither the Analogical imagination (the title of one of Tracy's books) nor the Dialectical imagination were better than the other. Both were necessary, but they were different. Catholics were different, worse luck for them perhaps.

I thereupon set out to try to validate Tracy empirically. Did the difference persist from the theological classics to the attitudes and behavior of Catholics today. Were Catholics still different, not completely different but somewhat so? The answer was that they were and there didn't seem to any trend away from that difference.

I then understood that the childhood sacramentality that I had experienced at St. Angela was sharply different from that which my Protestant neighbors had experienced. If we would develop catechetical and theological differences later, the reason was that our imaginations had been shaped differently early on in life.

Moreover young Catholics today continue to share in the analogical imagination despite the teachings of beige Catholicism. In a study done by a team based at the Catholic University of America, it developed that the four strongest sources of religious identification for young Catholics were service to the poor, the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the presence of God in the Sacraments and devotion to Mary the Mother of Jesus. The customs and ceremonies one encounters growing up Catholic may be different than they were in 1936, but the impact seems to be the same.

I do not advocate a fundamentalist return to St. Angela in those days. A woman wrote me once and said she did not want or need holy water, the rosary, and votive candles, as if I were trying to impose them on her. My point rather, I would have thought, that they were merely resources which had once been available and often were still available, not obligations everyone had to embrace. You don't do that with metaphors. Moreover, my more basic argument was that Catholicism involves Sacraments and the so called "sacramentals" are essential to it. If some are discarded, then others will appear. Some, no matter how much effort is expended on the project, apparently cannot be discarded. Catholicism is in effect a rain forest of stories.

I then had two tools for further sociological development - religion as story and Catholicism as a different story. I was able to use these tools in my more recent work, Religion: a Secular Theory, The Catholic Myth, Religion as Poetry, and The Catholic Imagination. I was less successful in developing survey items which would measure various religious imaginations, though some of my measures seem to have some predictive power. I was completely unsuccessful in my efforts to persuade my colleagues in the International Social Survey Program to take these perspectives seriously when they were designing questionnaires in the sociology of religion. Yet Michael Hout and myself were able in a number of articles able to refute some of the more persistent myths about American religion.

In the late nineteen seventies I began to wonder if religion could still be transmitted by stories for adults. Might the popular novel play today a role like the stained glass windows did in the middle ages.At least it was a hypothesis which could be tested - and one, it turned out, that could not be rejected.

My fellow priests and many secular reviewers missed the point of these books which were patently theological novels. Fortunately for me the readers understood. Curiously enough many of the settings of my stories, explicitly or implicitly, were in St. Angela, now recalled from times lost.

Shea pointed out to me that the purpose of story was not to educate or indoctrinate but to illuminate, to invite one's listeners into the world of the story, to heighten for them certain possibilities in life which might point out choices that could be made when they left the story behind. Cardinal George got it right when he said that my project was to "re-evangelize the imagination."

Finally in the early nineteen eighties I pushed my notion of religion as story to the next level. Perhaps the Sunday homily should be a story too, one that correlated with and illuminated the story of the Gospel. I tried this innovation one Sunday at Mass in Grand Beach Michigan. A couple of teenagers would later tell me that I had finally caught up with Jesus. I learned that there could be no return from the story homily.

A recent example that illustrates the point. The Gospel is the story of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman:

Once upon a time a certain family moved into a neighborhood. They were dark skinned and mysterious. They had four or five children, no one was sure how many, and they kept to themselves. The spoke English some of the time but more often people heard them speaking a strange foreign language with a lot of breathing sounds tossed in. The word spread around the neighborhood that they Saddam Hussein. They obviously had not of money because one of their cars was a Mercedes and the other a Lexus and the mother and the daughters dressed in chic current fashions, over-dressed the other women in the neighborhood said. Sometimes they had parties at which a lot of very suspicious characters appeared, many of them looking like they might be carrying bombs in their suit cases, except they didn't have suitcases. The rumor spread in the neighborhood that they were either oil millionaires or terrorists and maybe both. Finally someone called the FBI and reported them. We know about them said the FBI and we're watching them. The neighborhood set up a watch. Cars patrolled the street outside their house every night. Finally when school began, didn't three of their dark-skinned kids show up at the door of the Catholic school in uniforms and weren't they admitted just like everyone else. A delegation waited on the parish priest and said how come you're letting those Iraqi Arabs into our school. It's not for Muslims or anyone else, only for Catholics. Oh, they're Catholics all right. Their family has been Catholic for maybe fifteen hundred years, longer than the Irish. They were Nestorians or Melkites or something like that but now they're Catholic. They go to mass at one of their own churches, but they don't have a school down there. Their pastor called and asked me if we could make room for them, so of course we did. The people left the rectory grumbling, who ever heard of Arab Catholics.

Have I changed my mind since St. Angela in 1935? I don't know. The reader must judge.