Andrew M Greeley
Controversial priest, social researcher, advocate of Catholic education and pulp novelist
n andrew Moran Greeley, Catholic cleric, sociologist and prolific author. Born: 5 February, 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois. died: 30 May, 2013, in Chicago, aged 85.
ANDREW Greeley was a Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about Catholicism.
In a time when the word “maverick” is often used indiscriminately, Greeley – priest, scholar, preacher, social critic, storyteller and scold – was the real thing. One could identify a Left and a Right in Catholicism, and then there was Greeley, occupying an area all his own.
Fiercely combative, he could be scathing about America’s bishops; at one point he described them as “morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt”. If the church wanted “to salvage American Catholicism”, he wrote, it would be well advised to retire “a considerable number of mitred birdbrains”.
But he could be equally critical of secular intellectuals, whom he accused of being prejudiced against religion, and reform-minded Catholics, who he said had a weakness for political or cultural fads.
He wrote more than 120 books, and countless articles about Catholic theology in both sociological journals and general-interest magazines, often incorporating the latest scholarship. He wrote op-ed pieces and syndicated columns in both religious and secular publications.
His greatest readership certainly stemmed from his scores of novels, many of them rife with Vatican intrigue, straying priests and explicit sex. His first, The Cardinal Sins (1981), is a tale of two Irish-American boys from Chicago’s West Side who enter the priesthood together, one of whom contrives to become cardinal of Chicago, takes a mistress and fathers a child.
“Sometimes I suspect that my obituary”, Greeley once wrote, “will read, ‘Andrew Greeley, Priest; Wrote Steamy Novels’.”
Were they steamy? The question would probably not have even been raised if the author had not been a priest and if some of the steam had not been produced by fictional priests, in one case a cardinal, breaking their vows.
In fact, most of the priests in his novels were virtuous, wise and hard-working. The big sex scenes were reserved for married couples rediscovering the redemptive healing of passion after trials and estrangement.
“I have an Irish weakness for words gone wild,” Greeley once said. “Besides, if you’re celibate,
Myou have to do something.” The books made him rich, though he gave his first million to charity and continued to give to various causes, including a donation, decades ago, to the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP.
If there was anything tying Greeley’s torrent of printed words together, it was a respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics.
It was a thread that ran though his sociological research documenting the gap between what Catholics thought about sex and marriage – their more relaxed stance concerning artificial birth control, for example – and the more proscriptive positions of the church.
His work with sociologist Peter H Rossi in the early 1960s revealed the strengths of parochial schools, then being viewed by secular educators as secondrate and authoritarian and by liberal Catholics as a questionable use of church resources. The failure of many public schools soon provoked a fresh appreciation for the Catholic educational tradition.
In a 1972 book, Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion, Greeley marshalled evidence against the widespread intellectual assumption that religion was a fading force in the world. Developments in Latin America, eastern Europe, the US and the Middle East later altered
“I have an Irish weakness for words gone wild. If you’re celibate, you have to do something” Andrew Greeley 1928-2013
that perception, too. Religion, he argued, “is the result of two incurable diseases from which humankind suffers, life from which we die and hope, which hints that there might be more meaning to life than a termination in death”.
Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience shared and enacted in communal rituals. This same concern for the religious experience of ordinary Catholics tied his sociological work to the fiction that he churned out with such energy. It was mostly about middleclass Irish-Americans from the same upwardly mobile milieu as the author’s, with an occasional foray into science fiction and thrillers about Vatican skulduggery.
He was criticised for never having had an unpublished thought – or fantasy, some added, faulting his fiction.
Andrew Moran Greeley was born in 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois, son of a businessman. His grandparents were Irish immigrants. From boyhood, Greeley wanted to become a priest. He attended a seminary in Chicago and then in Mundelein, Illinois. He was ordained in 1952. For almost a decade he worked as assistant pastor of Christ the King Church in an affluent area of Chicago, writing his first books on young Catholics and church life there.
In 1962, he earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, adding it to earlier degrees in theology, and joined the staff of the National Opinion Research Centre in Chicago, serving as senior study director until 1968. The group surveys American attitudes about religious, cultural and other issues.
He never quite got over a string of setbacks. One was his failure to be granted tenure at the University of Chicago in 1973, though he had taught there for a decade and been widely published. He attributed the rejection to prejudice; others said it had more to do with his cantankerous nature.
Another blow came when US bishops repudiated a sociological study of Catholic priests they had commissioned from him. A two-year project completed in 1972, the study found priests were widely dissatisfied with church leadership.
Then there was the resistance among liberal Catholics to his positive findings about Catholic schools, both in attainment and progress in college education, at a time of public-school ascendancy.
Finally came the unwillingness of successive bishops to give him a parish of his own.
Greeley later felt that he had readers everywhere and allies nowhere. Sensitive to accusations that he was getting rich from peddling stories of Catholic failings in his novels, he gave large sums to charity.
The pugnacious style, sweeping generalisations and ad hominem attacks often found in his writing made him an alienating figure. “Andy Greeley shoots from the hip at practically everyone with whom he has some grievances,” Rabbi Marc H Tanenbaum, a leading advocate of improving relations between Judaism and the Catholic Church, complained in 1976.
Greeley’s chip-on-the-shoulder attitude may have stemmed from a belief that he had been misunderstood and marginalised. This was particularly true when his fiction received poor reviews. He would never forget a bad one and would continue to denounce the offending reviewer for decades.
It was easy for Greeley to dismiss critics of his novels as prudes, because some were. Other critics, however, found the sex not prurient but preposterous. Some feminists complained that it was too often brutal and his treatment of women was condescending. The criticism stung Greeley, whose advocacy of women’s advancement in the church had earned him feminist defenders as well.
Greeley knew he was writing genre novels, but saw them as much more. They were theological parables and, for Greeley, something approaching sacramental ministrations. .
For critics, the novels were merely publishing successes or even wasteful diversions from sociological scholarship. For Greeley, they were “the most priestly thing I have ever done.”
And priesthood was what held his life together. “I always wanted to be a priest,” he once wrote. “My core identity is priest. I will always be a priest.” l Copyright New York Times 2013. Distributed by NYT syndication service.