Devastating review of Andrew Greeley’s Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women in Sun-Times:
Was Jesus eye candy? A dreamy Messiah who could walk on water and make women swoon? Does it matter?
Andrew Greeley caves to appearance-obsessed Americans in Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships With Women. This Jesus heals hearts and melts them, too.
The reviewer, Susan Hogan/Albach [sic] is billed as a veteran religion writer in Dallas and Minneapolis. She gives Greeley credit for writing “many distinguished books,adding, “but this isn’t one of them.” She praises him for “extolling [she means exhorting!] Catholics to rediscover the religious imagination that distinguishes and anchors their faith.”
But she skewers this book, which she says
reads like an adolescent fantasy about manhood and priesthood (priests represent Jesus). It’s salvation through titillation. Women are portrayed as shallow — a mindless mass of bodily desires who fall all over Jesus like Brad Pitt groupies.
She quotes the book to make the point:
“Because he represented the Father-in-Heaven … Jesus had to be the most charming man who ever lived,” Greeley writes. “His eyes, his expressions, his smiles, his posture, his laughter, must have melted human hearts, male and female.”
. . . . Greeley’s Jesus is a handsome, heavenly and happy celibate.
“Handsome people charm,” writes Greeley . . .
This is Greeley the romance novelist, letting his imagination run away with him. The man needs an editor but probably wouldn’t put up with one.
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From Reader Cynthia:
Clearly, Greeley didn’t bother reading the part of the Bible that states that “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” It was all spiritual. Or, as Jesus said, the people who came to him are those whom God drew to him.
From Reader D:
This review, if accurate, makes the book repulsive to me. (Well, like most of Greeley’s books.)
If we know St. Paul was a runt of a man with a hook nose and maybe a receding hairline — and he mesmerized everyone — why did Jesus have to be a super stud to have the same effect?
We have the shroud of Turin as a guide — they figure Jesus was taller than the average man of his day — if he had arresting eyes and a muscular build (as Fr. Corapi points out, a carpenter-before-power-tools) and a voice that made the message indelible — why would he stoop to tempting women to see him as a sex object? Why would he set it up so that women would be so distracted by their hormones they wouldn’t grasp his wisdom?
Boy, I hate thinking Jesus was a self-centered metro-sexual who would have blow-dried his hair if he could have. It goes without saying, in Greeley’s Gospel, the Women of Jerusalem on the Via Dolorosa, were groupies, eh?
I’m reminded of that poem Sheen used to quote about If Jesus Went to Birmingham — at the end “He cried for Calvary…”
Blithe Spirit 