Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Greeley

A sociologist-priest’s most potent move is to let the numbers puncture the pieties. Greeley’s line doesn’t sermonize; it coolly reports an embarrassment: Catholics, at least in those 2000-era studies, judge their priests more harshly than Protestants judge their ministers, and not just on one sore point but "across the board". That phrase is the tell. It frames the dissatisfaction as systemic rather than episodic, pushing the reader away from scapegoats (a few bad pastors, a few cranky parishes) and toward institutional expectations and institutional failure.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s comparative religious sociology. Underneath, it’s a gentle indictment of Catholic clerical culture: a centralized, sacramental, authority-heavy model that can inflate expectations while limiting feedback and local responsiveness. Protestants, shaped by congregational choice and a more market-like ecology of churches, may rate their clergy higher because the relationship is more explicitly reciprocal: pastors are selected, evaluated, and replaced with fewer theological speed bumps. Catholic parishioners, by contrast, are often “assigned” a priest and asked to treat obedience as a virtue; disappointment has fewer outlets, so it curdles into lower ratings.

The timing matters. Studies “from the year 2000” sit on the lip of the Catholic Church’s credibility crisis, just before the abuse scandal erupted into mainstream visibility in 2002. Read now, the sentence has an eerie prescience: a baseline of mistrust and frustration already present before the public learned what it would soon learn. Greeley’s subtext is not that Catholics are uniquely ungrateful, but that the institution has trained them to expect holiness and delivered bureaucracy.