As David Hacker so aptly stated in his Detroit Free Press review of the novel: "The value of Fall From Grace is in surfacing the dreadful, and forcing the Church to realize that it is perched on a social and political San Andreas fault."

In its efforts to expose the weaknesses of an institution, Fall From Grace is similar to the works of Sinclair Lewis and other American writers whose purpose it has been to expose the follies and corruption in American society, a particularly democratic mode of literary pursuit. Greeley has maintained that the Church in the United States has been highly influenced by the democratic environment in which it exists, and that therefore the Catholic Church in the United States has always been fundamentally different from the one envisioned by Rome, which places heavy emphasis on hierarchy. Whereas the Church in Rome sees itself...