The Senator and the Priest
By Andrew M. Greeley
Published by Forge

By Tom Deignan

Say what you will about Father Andrew M. Greeley. You can accuse him of being an unreconstructed Catholic liberal. You can assume (certainly based on his new book) that he was not exactly sad to see the Republicans lose the House of Representatives as they did last week. And you can certainly argue that he’s not exactly interested in writing subtle literary fiction. But one thing you can’t call this priest/novelist/sociologist/gadfly is lazy.

Greeley’s latest book is called The Senator and the Priest, a not-very-subtle exploration of two Irish Catholic brothers, one a noble liberal, the other a rather devious conservative.

By now, Greeley’s got some 30 books under his belt, and is juggling no less than three fictional series: the Nuala Ann McGrail novels (with titles such as Irish Gold, Irish Lace, Irish Whiskey etc.), the Bishop Blackie Ryan mysteries, and finally, the O’Malley chronicles.

The Senator and the Priest is technically an O’Malley novel, but this time around that storied clan plays only a peripheral role.

Out just in time for the ideological fallout from the mid-term 2006 elections, The Senator and the Priest is about the relationship between the battling Moran brothers.

Indeed, Irish American brothers on some kind of a collision course has become almost a cliché these days, from the real life Bulger brothers of Boston to their fictional counterparts in the acclaimed Showtime series Brotherhood.

In The Senator and the Priest, we meet Thomas Patrick Moran, the politician, and Tony Moran, the man of God.

Given that Greeley himself is a priest, it might seem easy to predict the good guy and the bad guy here. If so, then you don’t know Andrew Greeley.

He has had so many run-ins with established church authorities on a wide range of issues that some wonder why he remains in the church. (For an answer to that question read Greeley’s interesting memoir from a few years back, Furthermore! Memoirs of a Parish Priest.)

Anyway, Greeley is not afraid to paint church authorities in a bad light, and so the hero of The Senator and the Priest is Thomas, who bursts onto the Illinois political scene promising to run a clean campaign for a local seat, but is then talked into running for the U.S. Senate.

From the first page, Greeley makes it clear where he stands. It’s not to say that some of Greeley’s fans won’t enjoy watching Tommy justify his selfless ways while Tony all but twirls his mustache, questioning, if not outright mocking, Tommy’s virtue.

But if you are looking for a nuanced, complex look at politics and brotherhood, this isn’t it.

Tommy’s nobility is so powerful that his insidious enemies eventually attempt assassination, lending to this character an almost Bobby Kennedy kind of air.

Despite all of this, however, Tommy cannot win over his priest brother, who ends up supporting his opponents, when push comes to shove as The Senator and the Priest draws to a wildly improbable conclusion.

The best sections of this book are when Tony and Tommy are simply chatting, with Tony’s cynical view of the world doing battle with Tommy’s idealism. This almost makes up for Greeley’s unintentionally comic obsession with Tommy’s sex life.

True, Greeley is a known expert on American Catholics, and one of his special areas of interest is their complex take on sexuality. That itself, however, does not make for great erotic fiction writing.

In a broader sense, though Greeley has many fans, some could be forgiven for wishing he brought some of the subtlety of his non-fiction work to his novels. After all, some of his journalism and research on Irish American Catholics have shattered long-standing stereotypes on topics ranging from assimilation to, well, sex.

Greeley continues to research these areas, and is currently studying hot-button topics such as celibacy and the ordination of women.

Toss in his notable public outrage during the recent Catholic American sex scandals and Greeley is a maverick Catholic thinker in the best sense.

Along with all that, he remains a professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona, a research associate at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and an honorary senior fellow at the University of Ireland in Dublin.

In short, any serious assessment of American Catholicism must take Greeley into account.

As for his fiction, well, it’s not unlike Senator Thomas Patrick Moran. They both have their virtues, but it’s not always easy to take them seriously.