The Catholic Imagination by Andrew Greeley

Author:Andrew Greeley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

[Should] women . . . take care of their homes and leave the running of the country to men[?]

Do you approve or disapprove of a married woman in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her?

If your party nominated a woman for president, would you vote for her if she were qualified for the job?

The three items, not surprisingly, fit into a scale on which Catholics had a higher score than Protestants, even when Southern Baptists were separated from other Protestants. (Jewish women had the highest scores of all; Jewish men and Irish Catholic men and women tied for second place; liberal Protestants had higher scores than the Catholic average.) These differences were not reduced by controls for educational achievement and region of the country, but they were reduced to statistical insignificance when a control for the religious imagination (via the Grace Scale) was introduced. Once again, the interaction between Catholic background, religious imagery (God as mother, spouse, friend, and lover), and feminism was important. Catholics with low scores on the Grace Scale were less likely to be “pro woman” than their Protestant counterparts, but there was no correlation between grace and feminism for Protestants and a strong correlation for Catholics: the Protestant line was flat and the Catholic line went up sharply. The greatest difference between Catholics and Protestants was at the high end of the Grace Scale.

The leadership of the Church is still of mixed mind about the equality of women. In theory, it now celebrates their equality, but in practice it refuses to share top-level power with women. Moreover, it excludes women from priestly ordination, often with the thoroughly tasteless remark that a woman’s body is not a suitable vessel for the sacrament of Holy Orders. Yet almost two-thirds of American Catholics support the ordination of women (men more likely than women, priests more likely than laypeople).

The sacramental imagination, when working properly, apparently does sense a correlation between a lurking God and equality of women. It does perceive, however dimly, that a woman’s body is as much a sacrament of God’s love as a man’s body.

Even in an era with no great churches or paintings or music, in which the sacramentality of erotic love is scarcely defended and little attention paid to Mary, the sacramental imagination, passed on implicitly by popular tradition, clearly has enormous residual power.

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