Portier, William L.

English

University of Dayton

University of DaytoneCommonsReligious Studies Faculty Publications Department of Religious Studies4-2004Review: 'Goodbye Father: The Celibate MalePriesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church'William L. PortierUniversity of Dayton, wportier1@udayton.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pubPart of the Religion CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Religious Studies at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusionin Religious Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact frice1@udayton.edu,mschlangen1@udayton.edu.eCommons CitationPortier, William L., "Review: 'Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church'" (2004).Religious Studies Faculty Publications. 19.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub/19Book Reviews287dreas Tabarroni, Roberto Lambertini, Giacomo Todeschini, Raoul Manselli,and Giovanni Miccoli. Jacques Le Goff, summarizing a lifetime of acclaimedmedieval scholarship, makes the following observation about Francis in his lat-est book: “[For his era] Francis rose up against what some contemporariestoday refer to as the ‘economic horror of our time’ with a rigor and an intel-ligence which has no equal among contemporary adversaries of globalization”(A la recherche du moyen age [Paris, 2003], p. 86). Later, Le Goff Writes, “Theearly Franciscans served as a ferment in contraposition to the rising new wealthof the times, a permanent witness questioning and recalling the social respon-sibilities of the wealthy and the scholarly” (Le Goff, p. 88). In response tocriticism of her involvement with the poor quite similar to that which Wolfeaddresses to Francis, Dorothy Day, very likely the most prominent inheritor ofFrancis’s tradition in our time, writes tellingly, “Yes, it is true according to thecandlelight of common sense, but not according to the flaming heat of the Sunof justice. . . . The natural man does not perceive the things of the spirit. Weneed to be fools for Christ” (quoted from “On Pilgrimage,” St. Anthony Messen-ger [April 2003], p. 27).PAUL LACHANCE, O.F.M., Chicago Theological Union.SCHOENHERR, RICHARD A. Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and theFuture of the Catholic Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.xlii274 pp. $29.95 (cloth).Richard Schoenherr died in 1996, three years after publishing Full Pews andEmpty Altars (Madison, Wis., 1993). This book, the final report of a demo-graphic study sponsored by the United States Catholic Conference, docu-mented the Catholic priest shortage in the United States. His obituary in theNew York Times dubbed Schoenherr the “sociologist who counted priests.” Athis death, Schoenherr left an unpublished manuscript of twelve hundred pages.His editor, David Yamane, cut it to four hundred pages. Goodbye Father is theresult. As a sociological reading of the signs of the times, it does much morethan count priests.Between 1966 and 1984, as the Catholic population in the United Statesincreased, priests declined by 19 percent, with a projected decline of 40 percentby 2005. Schoenherr attributes this to widespread rejection of mandatory cel-ibacy. Far from a narrowly Catholic issue, the priest shortage, as he sees it, is apowerful force for social change.The heart of the book (chaps. 3–9) explains the theories of social changeand religion that allow Schoenherr to give world-historical significance to theCatholic priest shortage. To explain social change, he combines classical andrational choice theory. In modern society, social change occurs when large-scaleorganizations change. As one of the largest organizations on earth, the CatholicChurch is potentially an agent of change. However, Schoenherr argues thatsocial change theory has underestimated the role of organized religion. Be-cause they provide access to the highest levels of human development, authen-tic religious organizations have a special character, and any complete accountof social change must include them. The way that religious organizationschange is through the resolution of conflicts between charismatic coalitionsand officeholders, but the priest shortage makes it impossible for the churchto reproduce the officeholders it needs. The Catholic ministry combines hier-The Journal of Religion288ophanic (sacramental) and hierarchic (sacerdotal) powers. Although thechurch will always need sacramental/sacerdotal officeholders, it will not nec-essarily need them to be male and celibate. The priest shortage is a crucialforce for change because it is the most unstable in a constellation of dialecticaltrends in Western society moving from male domination to gender equality.The direction of social change depends on rational agents who control orga-nizations; in the Catholic Church, a coalition of prophetic insurgents has arisenagainst the priestly coalition. Soon the priest shortage will force the hierarchicofficeholders to yield to the charismatic coalition or risk the “Catholic tragedy”of sacrificing the Eucharist on the altar of male celibate exclusivity (pp.127–29). Limited permission to ordain married men will come in this decade.Contemporary Catholics will see the routinization of married priests. Celibacyas the sacred legitimation for patriarchy will be no more. The subsequent or-dination of women will strike a blow against patriarchy that will reverberatethroughout society.This is a brilliantly idiosyncratic book. Dean Hoge’s brief foreword tries todeflect three obvious lines of criticism. The first line of criticism is the intimateconnection between Schoenherr’s biography and his sociology. He is not thefirst scholar to produce a grand narrative that repeats his own life journey.Before he married, Schoenherr spent nearly a decade as a celibate priest. Sep-arating the author’s deepest hopes from his theory is not as easy as Hoge sug-gests. And then there is the sheer scope of Schoenherr’s theorizing; he movesfrom a specific demographic question to the end of patriarchy. The furtheraway Schoenherr gets from the data on the priest shortage, the more he mustbecome an advocate and prophet. The end of the male celibate priesthood willbring on the end of patriarchy, he argues. But if celibacy were abolished today,other social engines would continue to define women in subordination to men.People would still watch television and have access to pornography. Grantingsuch leverage to Catholicism as an agent of social change recalls Schoenherr’sown biography and depends conceptually on his theory of religion. This leadsto the third line of criticism that Hoge foresees. The special character of reli-gious organizations in Schoenherr’s social change theory depends on his un-critical acceptance of the sui generis character of religious experience, an issuehotly debated in the contemporary academic study of religion. Anticipatingobjections that the book is out-of-date, Hoge tells us that the manuscript wascompleted in 1995. But some sections, notably the description of the charis-matic coalition in chapter 12, show evidence of having been completed muchearlier—say, in 1989. Two bishops from the prophetic coalition have died, andits charismatic leader retired in disgrace.This book reveals the wide-ranging spirit of a true scholar. But as theory andprophecy, it is more of a period piece that will appeal mainly to Schoenherr’sgenerational cohort.WILLIAM L. PORTIER, University of Dayton.BROWN, STEWART J. The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland,1801–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. x459 pp. $95.00(cloth).It may be platitudinous to observe that theology is often a neater, tidier businessthan history, but Stewart Brown’s vast and multidimensional study on the na-

Review: \u27Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church\u27

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Review: \u27Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church\u27

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