Andrew Greeley 1928–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Nothing could stop Father Andrew Greeley from preaching. Denied a parish by the Catholic hierarchy, the self-described “loud-mouthed Irish priest” built his own pulpit as a groundbreaking sociologist and author of scores of novels filled with straying priests and explicit sex. In syndicated newspaper columns and frequent TV appearances, he railed against the church’s opposition to birth control and divorce and its denial of clerical sex abuse, blasting American bishops as “mitered pinheads.” But Greeley always insisted that his novels, columns, and research “are just my way of being a priest.”

Born in Oak Park, Ill., Greeley knew he was called to the priesthood by the time he was in second grade, said The Wall Street Journal. Ordained in 1954, he was assigned as an assistant pastor to a church in suburban Chicago, where he observed that the mostly college-educated parishioners chafed at being told to blindly follow bishops’ commands. Greeley realized, he said, that “all issues, major or minor, must be brought into the open and discussed,” and in 1959 he published the first of more than 100 nonfiction books, The Church and the Suburbs.

“Convinced that he wanted to serve his church as a sociologist, he enrolled at the University of Chicago,” said the Los Angeles Times. Greeley studied the schism between the church’s hierarchy and the laity, noting how it widened following a 1968 papal order banning artificial birth control. That research made Greeley suspect in the eyes of fellow priests, and he was denied a parish by Chicago Archbishop John Cody. But “Greeley found freedom in his alienation.” He began to write novels, and 1981’s The Cardinal Sins—which featured a cardinal with a mistress, supposedly based on Cody—topped the best-seller lists. In reference to including sex scenes in his novels, he said, “If you’re celibate, you have to do something.”