UNITED STATES
Washington Post
Andrew M. Greeley, iconoclastic priest and author, dies at 85
By Joe Holley, Thursday, May 30, 11:41 AM E-mail the writer
The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, an iconoclastic priest and sociologist who irked the Catholic hierarchy by writing best-selling novels that featured churchly misdeeds and graphic sex, died May 29 at his home in Chicago. He was 85.
His publicist, June Rosner, confirmed his death to the Associated Press. Father Greeley had reportedly sustained a traumatic brain injury and skull fracture in 2008 after his jacket was caught in the door of a taxicab.
Ordained in 1954, Father Greeley served for a decade as a parish priest in Chicago before being assigned by the church to work full time as a writer, researcher and teacher. …
He outraged defenders of conventional Catholic doctrine with his outspoken belief that sex is a sacrament and an expression of God’s love rather than a sin, when it is not a means of procreation.
In his 1986 memoir, “Confessions of a Parish Priest,” Father Greeley wrote: “I suspect Catholic historians of the future will describe the Church’s obsession with sex and particularly with an attempt to deny the pleasures of sex to married men and women as a chapter in our history comparable to the Inquisition and the Crusades.”
Father Greeley began writing about the sexual abuse of minors in the mid-1980s and repeatedly castigated bishops for failing to stop abuse by the clergy and covering up for pedophile priests. Fellow priests told him the rumors were untrue and, even if they were, he shouldn’t be airing dirty laundry. …
He kept writing about the burgeoning scandal for the next two decades, both in his long-running syndicated newspaper column and in such books as “The Priestly Sins” (2004), a novel that tells the story of a young cleric whose career is nearly destroyed when he witnesses and reports the sexual abuse of a boy by a fellow priest.
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