WASHINGTON – You wanted Father Andrew Greeley as your friend and not your enemy. You got the sense he was born with his fists up and his loyalties fully formed. He was ready to do battle at the first signs of disrespect toward those he cared about.
Understanding Greeley, the priest, sociologist and novelist who died last week at 85, is essential to understanding the last half-century of American Catholic history and the glorious contradictions of politics.
He was a liberal whose impatience with actual liberals was legendary. This applied especially to reformers who disparaged his beloved Daley machine in Chicago. Yet this resolute Irishman who once used the phrase “marginal but not alienated” as an apt sociological description of himself was bolder than so many others in the positions he staked out. Not one for understatement, Greeley titled one of his last books: “A Stupid, Unjust and Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007.”
Did I mention books? Greeley wrote so many that his obituary writers couldn’t agree on a count. In a lovely New York Times article on Greeley, Peter Steinfels pegged the number at “more than 120.” Joe Holley wrote in The Washington Post of “more than 100 nonfiction works and 50 novels.” John Allen risked precision in the National Catholic Reporter: 72 nonfiction books and 66 novels.
“I suppose I have the Irish weakness for words gone wild,” Greeley told The New York Times in 1981. “Besides, if you’re celibate, you have to do something.”
Oh, yes, and he had a fine gift for revenge recast as generosity. He always harbored a grudge against the University of Chicago, which granted him a Ph.D. in 1962 but denied him tenure 11 years later. He believed he was the victim of a classic form of academic prejudice: against Catholic priests. Continue reading
Sources
- E J Dionne Jnr in The Seattle Times
- Image: National Catholic Reporter
E J Dionne Jnr is a syndicated columnist whose column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Seattle Times.
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