Andrew Greeley
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The Rev. Dr. Andrew M. Greeley (born February 5, 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois to Andrew T. Greeley and Grace Anne Greeley) is an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, and bestselling author.
He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and is a Research Associate with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
He received an AB from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago in 1950, an STB in 1952, and an STL in 1954, when he was ordained. From 1954 to 1964 he served as an assistant pastor at Christ the King parish in Chicago, during which time he studied sociology at the University of Chicago, receiving first an MA in 1961 and then a PhD in 1962. His dissertation dealt with the influence of religion on the career plans of 1961 college graduates.
Greeley is the author of over 50 novels and 100 works of non-fiction. His novels have been both popular and controversial, often containing forbidden romances with lurid details of sexual encounters, but typically with a theological underpinning. Greeley's major characters tend to be Irish-American Catholics from Chicago, including a mystery-solving clergyman (first priest, then bishop) named Blackie Ryan who appears in many of Greeley's novels. Bishop Ryan, apparently one of Greeley's alter-egos, is sometimes compared, not always favorably, with G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown.
Greeley's first work of fiction to become a major commercial success was the Cardinal Sins (1981). He then put out the Passover Trilogy, Thy Brother's Wife (1982), Ascent into Hell (1983), and Lord of the Dance (1984). After that, he started putting out 2 or more novels a year. In 1987 alone he produced 4 novels and 2 works of non-fiction. Ostensibly because of the exent of his writing, some of Greeley's critics have accused him of "never having had an unpublished thought."
At the height of the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, Greeley wrote The Priestly Sins (2004), a novel about a young priest from the Plains States who is exiled to an insane asylum and then to an academic life because he reports abuse that he has witnessed.
Greeley wrote The Making of the Pope (2005), intended as a follow-up to his The Making of the Pope of 1978, intended as a first hand account of the coalition building process by which Joseph Ratzinger ascended to the papacy as Benedict XVI In 1996, a Greeley's novel, White Smoke, had described the scenario of the election of a new Pope.
Greeley has been an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War. He was also critical of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.
Selected academic books
- The Social Effects of Catholic Education (1961)
- The Education of Catholic Americans (1966)
- The Catholic Experience: An Interpretation of the History of American Catholicism (1967)
- From Backwater to Mainstream: A Profile of Catholic Higher Education (1969)
- Religious Change in America (1989)
- The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (1990)
- The Catholic Imagination (2000) ISBN 0520232046
- The Great Mysteries: Experiencing Catholic Faith from the inside Out (2003)
- The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council (2004) ISBN 0520244818
Other work
His column on political, church and social issues appears each Friday in the Chicago Sun-Times and each Sunday in the [Daily Southtown], a Chicago newspaper.Sources
Andrew M. Greeley. "On Studying Religion." Pp. 197-212 in The Craft of Religious Studies, edited by Jon R. Stone. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.External links
- [Official website] Includes homilies for every Sunday.
- [1984 Audio Interview] by Don Swaim
- [Greely/Bernardin/Kennedy controversy] A description of the conflict between Greeley, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin and Eugene Kennedy by a partisan of Greeley's.
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