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Quotes by Andrew Greeley

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.
– Andrew Greeley
As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course.
– Andrew Greeley
By 1975, all this had happened: birth control wasn't wrong, premarital sex wasn't wrong, priests leaving the priesthood wasn't wrong, nuns leaving the religious life wasn't wrong. You didn't really have to go to mass every Sunday. You didn't have to go to confession before receiving communion every time. All of these things, which they never really understood and they didn't like, were just swept away.
– Andrew Greeley
European Catholics tend to be somewhat grim and dour and straightlaced. We shouldn't have been, but we are. We can learn from the Latinos that Catholicism is a religion of festivity and celebration.
– Andrew Greeley
Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.
– Andrew Greeley
God lurks everywhere. That's the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level-that God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there's God.
– Andrew Greeley
However, during my 48 years as a priest, I have learned that in times of crisis, the dodos always charge in to make matters worse.
– Andrew Greeley
I don't know what the next Pope is going to be like. I do know this, the Catholic laity all over the world have made up their minds-we have data from 37 countries-have made up their minds the Church is not going to interfere in their sex lives. That may be wrong, but that's the way it is.
– Andrew Greeley
I don't think Jesus was an exclusivist. He said, and we believe, that He is the unique representation of God in the world. But that doesn't mean this is the only way God can work.
– Andrew Greeley
I guess I'm a good story teller. What makes me a prolific writer is two factors at work. Celibacy; I don't have a family to distract me. And I'm glib. I reached facility with words.
– Andrew Greeley
I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.
– Andrew Greeley
I have to say that I have no regrets about my decision to become a priest or about the major directions my ministry has taken me... I have been and am happy as a priest, and I have never been lonely... I could have used a bit more solitude.
– Andrew Greeley
I mean, I'm a Chicago Irishman, I know how to finesse things. So at least, working with the young people I was able to accomplish pretty much what I wanted to.
– Andrew Greeley
I think Catholic Americans had better believe there's truth in all religions, because the Second Vatican Council said that. We don't believe that we have a monopoly on truth. We believe what we have is true, but it's not the whole truth. And we can learn a lot from the other religions if we listen to them respectfully.
– Andrew Greeley
I think one of the conclusions that many Catholics drew from the Second Vatican Council is there're just a lot fewer mortal sins than there used to be. So we don't really have to confess them, and we can make a good act of contrition, as we used to say, and receive communion, and it's fine.
– Andrew Greeley
I think that the core doctrines of Christianity-the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.
– Andrew Greeley
I think the only kind of acceptable evangelization is the evangelization of good example.
– Andrew Greeley
I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.
– Andrew Greeley
I was never a teenager. I became a teenager in Christ the King and I never grew out of it. More seriously... as I'm always serious as you know, there weren't teenagers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There were adolescents. But by the time I was ordained and was dumped into Beverly, there were teenagers.
– Andrew Greeley
I wouldn't say the world is my parish, but my readers are my parish. And especially the readers that write to me. They're my parish. And it's a responsibility that I enjoy.
– Andrew Greeley
I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.
– Andrew Greeley
I'd say that Catholicism in the United States has the distinct advantage of being in a pluralistic society, where your religion contributes something to your identity. So you tend to define yourself as a Catholic. I'm Irish, Catholic, a Democrat from the West Side of Chicago, and that's pretty much my identity.
– Andrew Greeley
If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it's very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic.
– Andrew Greeley
In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That's been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites.
– Andrew Greeley
In the days long ago when I was in the seminary, we were told that we would be respected by our people, and we took it for granted that we would be. I learned very quickly in my first assignment that respect was no longer given, save in a superficial way. It had to be earned by the display of professional competence. That is all the more true today.
– Andrew Greeley
Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?
– Andrew Greeley
It is also asserted that the election settled the matters of the war and the torture of prisoners. These are dead issues that no longer need be addressed.
– Andrew Greeley
It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.
– Andrew Greeley
Most people who are born Catholic are still Catholic, unless they've had a divorce and remarriage problem. I think the Church is just ham-handed in dealing with those people.
– Andrew Greeley
Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn't like it.
– Andrew Greeley
Note the three most important Cabinet positions. Rice said that it was better to find the weapons of mass destruction than to see a mushroom cloud.
– Andrew Greeley
One cannot escape the harsh fact that as a ministerial profession, the priesthood has very serious problems. They are not new. They did not develop yesterday or last year.
– Andrew Greeley
One could say at a dinner party that most Americans are faithful to their spouses, and a loud mouth, semi-inebriated jerk can respond that the conclusion cannot be true because look at all the academics who sleep around at professional meetings.
– Andrew Greeley
One Hispanic woman... was telling me about her religion, and all she was talking about were the parties, the festivals.
– Andrew Greeley
People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good-Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice.
– Andrew Greeley
Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.
– Andrew Greeley
Priest organizations around the country, both local and national, should realize that their membership has a serious image problem and undertake programs to improve it.
– Andrew Greeley
St. Mary of the Woods Parish in Edgebrook is my regular place of working. Our Mother of Sorrows in Tucson and then some Sundays I go out to Christ the King in Beverly.
– Andrew Greeley
Survey data suggest that war has become more unpopular. The majority of the American people now think it was a mistake, in a shift away from the 51 percent that endorsed it on Election Day. Admittedly this is only a small change in the population, from a majority to a minority. Nor do the changers earn grace for their new opinions. They still endorsed the war on Election Day and are still responsible for it.
– Andrew Greeley
The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that.
– Andrew Greeley
The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.
– Andrew Greeley
The Catholics we lose-it's almost always over divorce and remarriage, of which problem we have made a real mess.
– Andrew Greeley
The Church just has not been able to cope with the demands for fairness and equality from women, so they're very angry.
– Andrew Greeley
The kernel is the belief that God is love and, in Catholicism, God's love is present in the world. It is in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in our families, in our friends, in our neighborhood, and forgiveness in the touch of a friendly hand, in a rediscovered love God is there.
– Andrew Greeley
The laity, who pay the bills, have a right to high quality priestly service, in strict commutative justice with the obligation of restitution. So too does the Lord Jesus, whom we purport to represent.
– Andrew Greeley
The leadership blighted the hopes of my generation of priests, a small fact doubtless from their viewpoint. What right did we have to hope anyway? But in their rigidity, they created the climate of insensitivity... God forgive them for losing their nerve.
– Andrew Greeley
The leadership lost its nerve. Instead of taking the lead in the reform movement... they pulled the plug on it. They tried and are still trying to return the church to the dry ice of the previous century and a half.
– Andrew Greeley
The men who were running the church in the late '60s and '70s panicked when they saw the chaos, which developed after the council. The relatively modest changes of those years thawed the ice in which Catholicism had been frozen since the French Revolution.
– Andrew Greeley
The radical feminists include their sisters and their nieces and their mothers and all the women in their lives. They just don't like the way the Church treats them. And this includes lots of parish priests. They are just awfully sloppy in their respect and sensitivity toward women.
– Andrew Greeley
The role of Mary the Mother of Jesus is to reflect the woman and the love of God.
– Andrew Greeley
The seminaries must face the fact that they are not turning out well-trained professional clergy. They must realize that preaching is creative work and that some element of creativity should be required as a condition for ordination.
– Andrew Greeley
The storyteller is like God, the storyteller creates these characters. Falls in love with them, and then they won't act right.
– Andrew Greeley
There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn't changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.
– Andrew Greeley
There is good news in the data the strongest support for priests is to be found among the younger generation.
– Andrew Greeley
Thirty years ago, before the Vatican Council, Catholics didn't know what liturgy was.
– Andrew Greeley
Two studies from the year 2000, however, indicate that Catholics give lower ratings to their clergy's ministerial activities across the board than do Protestants.
– Andrew Greeley
We are told that the Iraqi election confirms the Bush administration policy in Iraq. The president's supporters must be in deep trouble to reach so far for that one. All the election proves is that the Iraqis want to run their own country. It also raises the possibility that Shia clerics will deliver Iraq into the hands of the Iranians. Some kind of victory!
– Andrew Greeley
Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits.
– Andrew Greeley
Well, the Irish aren't much into showing affection. There was crisis when we were wiped out in the Depression and my father went into the gloom. But surely in the years when I was an adolescent during the war years, there was, I would say, a rebirth of affection there.
– Andrew Greeley
What's more important? Life after death or birth control? What is more important? God's forgiving love or premarital sex?
– Andrew Greeley
Why does God permit us whom he loves to die? And you know what I say, where was God at the World Trade Center? He was there weeping for his fractured children. That's not a direct answer to the question but it's the best I could do. God suffers with us.
– Andrew Greeley
Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?
– Andrew Greeley
Yet, if the most frequent sex and apparently the best sex is that between married partners who are faithful to one another, is there not a hint that affection might be an important aspect of sex? Even love?
– Andrew Greeley
You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.
– Andrew Greeley