Andrew Greeley

Andrew M. Greeley (February 5, 1928 – May 29, 2013) was an American Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist.

He was a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a research associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).

For many years, Greeley wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.

Greeley was born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago) in 1928.

He grew up during the Great Depression in Chicago's Austin neighborhood, where he attended St. Angela Elementary School, and by the second grade, he knew that he wanted to be a priest.

After studying at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago, Greeley received an AB degree from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago in 1950, a Bachelor of Sacred Theology (STB) in 1952, and a Licentiate of Sacred Theology (STL) in 1954, when he was ordained for the Archdiocese of Chicago.

From 1954 to 1964, Greeley served as an assistant pastor at Christ the King parish in Chicago, during which time he studied sociology at the University of Chicago.

His first book, The Church in the Suburbs (1958), was drawn from notes a sociology professor had encouraged him to take describing his experiences.

As a sociologist, he published a large number of influential academic works during the 1960s and 1970s, including Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (1972) and The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (1977).

Over the course of his career, he authored more than 70 scholarly books, largely focusing on the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

His early work challenged the widespread assumption that Catholics had low college attendance rates, showing that white Catholics were in fact more successful than other whites in obtaining college undergraduate and graduate degrees, which he attributed to what he called the high-quality education Catholics received in parochial schools.

He also studied how religion influenced the political behavior of ethnic Catholics, and he was one of the first scholars to document the sociological effects of the Second Vatican Council's reforms on American Catholics.

He received a Master of Arts in 1961 and a PhD in 1962.

His doctoral dissertation dealt with the influence of religion on the career plans of 1961 college graduates.

At various times, Greeley was a professor at the University of Arizona, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago.

"He argued for the continued salience of ethnicity in American life and the distinctiveness of the Catholic religious imagination. Catholics differed from other Americans, he explained in a variety of publications, by their tendency to think in 'sacramental' terms, imagining God as present in a world that was revelatory rather than bleak. The poetic elements in the Catholic tradition--its stories, imagery, and rituals--kept most Catholics in the fold, according to Greeley, whatever their disagreements with particular aspects of church discipline or doctrine. But Greeley also insisted on the disastrous impact of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical upholding the Catholic ban on contraception, holding it almost solely responsible for a sharp decline in weekly Mass attendance between 1968 and 1975. He believed that lay Catholics understood far better than their bishops that sex in marriage was intended by God to be joyous and playful, a true means of grace."

As described by John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter, Greeley became fascinated with what has been called the Catholic "analogical imagination", the idea that "visible, tangible things in the created order serve as metaphors for the divine, as opposed to the more textual and literal religious sensibility of Protestants and others."

Greeley believed that it was this viewpoint that had led the church to be a pre-eminent patron of the arts through the centuries, allowing it to communicate through artistic imagery spiritual concepts that doctrinal texts alone could not.

Greeley's appreciation for the spiritual power of art inspired him to begin writing works of fiction.

Greeley's literary output was such it was said that he "never had an unpublished thought".

He said, "The only way I can write fiction is to keep those hours from 6:00 to 9:00 A.M. sacred."

In the early 1970s, the U.S. bishops commissioned him to write a profile of the American priesthood.

He completed a two-year survey in 1972, reporting that dissatisfaction among the priests was widespread; but the bishops rejected his findings.

Greeley said, "Honesty compels me to say that I believe the present leadership in the church to be morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt."

Greeley's sociological work was also viewed with suspicion by some of his fellow clerics, and his archbishop (later cardinal), John Cody, denied Greeley's request for a parish ministry.

Greeley criticized Cody, calling him a "madcap tyrant" when Cody closed a number of inner-city schools.

Greeley's biographer summarizes his interpretation:

He was denied tenure by the University of Chicago in 1973, despite having been a faculty member there for a decade and having published dozens of books; he attributed the denial to anti-Catholic prejudice, although a colleague said his cantankerous temperament was more to blame.

He published his first novel, The Magic Cup, in 1975, a fantasy tale about a young king who would lead Ireland from paganism to Christianity.

A second novel, Death in April, followed in 1980.

His third novel, The Cardinal Sins (1981), was his first work of fiction to become a major commercial success.

As one reviewer put it, The Cardinal Sins "did for the Catholic Church what The Godfather did for the mafia".

The novel's principal characters were both priests—one a writer-sociologist (like Greeley), and the other a Cardinal who had broken the vow of celibacy.

At the time of the book's release, Chicago's cardinal, John Cody, was the subject of allegations of having diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Church to a mistress.

Church officials accused Greeley of using the novel to attack Cardinal Cody, although Greeley denied the charges and told the New York Times that Cody was "a much better bishop ... and a much better human being" than the character in the novel.

The Cardinal Sins was followed by the Passover trilogy: Thy Brother's Wife (1982), Ascent into Hell (1983), and Lord of the Dance (1984).

Thereafter, he wrote a minimum of two novels per year, on average.

In 1987 alone, he produced four novels and two works of non-fiction.

He once said that he wrote an average of 5,000 words per day, and was known to quip, "Why should I practice contraception on my ideas?"

In 1991, he was granted a professorship in social science at the University.