Confessions of a parish priest.

Confessions of a Parish Priest,

by Andrew M. Greeley (Simon & Schuster, 438 pp., $18.95)

EVEN PARANOIDS have real enemies, we are reminded, and perhaps that is the main thing to bear in mind when reading Volume I of the memoirs of the priest-sociologist-novelist-journalist Andrew Greeley. (The story is here brought up all the way to the present, but we are promised further installments anyway.)

It is hard to imagine that even the most fanatical Greeley-lover could actually enjoy wading through the more than four hundred pages of this often vitriolic exercise in settling old scores, even if some of his enemies deserve the treatment. Although Father Greeley's claim is that he speaks for a Catholicism of love and hope, the world he inhabits has apparently been largely one of malice and treachery.

Indeed, he seems to have the misfortune of living in a world largely populated by people with a personal animus against him. Bishops know Greeley is right but are too cowardly to admit it, or else they are "lunatics.' His fellow priests are envious and spiteful, not scrupling to strike at the author through his family. Erstwhile friends turn out to be betrayers. Subordinates are treacherous. The secular academic world is anti-Catholic, the Catholic intellectual world pretentious and shallow. Paranoia could scarcely be carried further.

In places, a reviewer faces the odd dilemma of whether charity requires that he refrain from quoting the author's own words, as when Greeley acknowledges "flaws' in his potboiler novels, which, as it turns out, mainly involve not sufficiently acknowledging his own virtues; or when he allows a friend to compare his sufferings to those of Christ. (Both were persecuted, you see, by ignorant and malevolent people.)

The memoirist describes the courage and love of a family with a severely retarded boy. But, when the boy dies, this "sensitive' pastor reports that "the family mourned him just as though he were another child in the family . . .' What does Father Greeley think the boy was? (The phrase goes a long way toward explaining the author's habitual insouciance about abortion and other of the "life issues.')

But a memoir does serve to bring a man's life into focus, and, despite his tireless self-promotion, Greeley's life has a significance that even he has not discerned.

As a sociologist he has mainly charted "liberated' Catholics of the post-Kennedy, post-Vatican II era. He finds people who have "made it' economically and socially, have penetrated the secular educational world, and in the process have jettisoned certain traditional Catholic beliefs, such as that concerning birth control. (Indeed, although Greeley does not note the point, the practice of birth control has historically been precisely a condition for people "making it' in middle-class society.)

In many ways, these Catholics, if we can believe the priest-sociologist's own data, have ceased to believe most of the teachings of the Church and are scarcely distinguishable from, say, suburban Episcopalians (or even Unitarians, if the truth be told). Here is a melancholy story, one might think--a group of people who, without fully realizing it, have traded their religious heritage for worldly success. But, fortunately for them, Greeley is on the scene not only as their chronicler but as their celebrator. Besides charting their religious trajectory, he is its interpreter and justifier.

Greeley's "communal Catholic,' it turns out, is nothing other than that familiar figure of the 1980s, the individual who "wants to have it all.' Has worldly success compromised religious principle? Not at all, Greeley tells us. In the process of becoming rich and influential, Catholics have actually managed to deepen their faith, breaking through to a more authentic level of belief. Fortunately for them, it is a breakthrough that in no way requires orthodoxy, especially on anything having to do with sexual behavior. The upwardly mobile Catholic turns out to have an increasingly rich "religious imagination' and to understand Christianity in profound ways having little to do with the way it has been traditionally understood. (It is not clear that it even requires belief in God.)

Here as elsewhere, Greeley takes a valid point--that religion has to do with symbol and myth as well as with doctrine--and distorts it. The faith of his "subjects,' many of whom he tells us are also his friends, is simply an ink blot on which anyone is free to impose any kind of "significance' he might want. All this is no doubt extremely flattering to people who might at least occasionally wonder if they have been unfaithful.

The interpreter offers himself as the prime example of the phenomenon he interprets--an Irish Catholic now more at home in secular academia, a priest who "longs' simply to work in a parish but somehow ends up living in a luxury apartment, a probable millionaire one of whose chief problems is where to donate his money, a celibate who writes novels with large doses of puerile sex but also demands to be taken seriously as an "artist.'

Greeley's sociology is a systematic venture in self-flattery, assuring himself and his subjects that they have "risen above their immigrant backgrounds' and are now truly enlightened and free. It is fitting that his career has culminated in novels which the author insists attain the level of "mythology.' He is now busy trying to turn his suburban-Chicago Catholics themselves into gods, to replace whatever divinities they have lost along the way.