"It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed"
About this Quote
A quiet demolition job disguised as memoir: Greeley starts by quoting a prejudice with the flat, bureaucratic chill of something that once passed for common sense. “It was generally believed” is doing heavy lifting here. No names, no villains, just the smooth anonymity of a consensus that doesn’t have to defend itself. Catholics, in that story, belong to the pews and the precincts, not the lab, the seminar room, the archive.
Greeley’s intent is less to complain than to reverse the burden of proof. He doesn’t argue Catholics are intellectual; he treats the stereotype as a testable hypothesis. That’s the subtextual flex: the cleric speaking in the idiom of social science, using the tools of the very institutions that were presumed to exclude his people. When he says he “put the theses to the test,” he’s also hinting at who gets to define what counts as intelligence in the first place - and how “graduate school” can be a gatekeeping machine dressed up as meritocracy.
Context matters: mid-century American Catholicism was still shedding its immigrant, working-class stigma while trying to be taken seriously in elite academia and cultural life. Greeley, both priest and sociologist, stands at that junction. “And they all collapsed” lands with satisfied restraint. It’s not triumphalism; it’s the pleasure of watching a tidy narrative fail under contact with evidence. The line makes a broader claim, too: the most enduring biases aren’t shouted. They’re “generally believed,” until someone insists on measurement.
Greeley’s intent is less to complain than to reverse the burden of proof. He doesn’t argue Catholics are intellectual; he treats the stereotype as a testable hypothesis. That’s the subtextual flex: the cleric speaking in the idiom of social science, using the tools of the very institutions that were presumed to exclude his people. When he says he “put the theses to the test,” he’s also hinting at who gets to define what counts as intelligence in the first place - and how “graduate school” can be a gatekeeping machine dressed up as meritocracy.
Context matters: mid-century American Catholicism was still shedding its immigrant, working-class stigma while trying to be taken seriously in elite academia and cultural life. Greeley, both priest and sociologist, stands at that junction. “And they all collapsed” lands with satisfied restraint. It’s not triumphalism; it’s the pleasure of watching a tidy narrative fail under contact with evidence. The line makes a broader claim, too: the most enduring biases aren’t shouted. They’re “generally believed,” until someone insists on measurement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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