Fr. Andrew Greeley, sociologist and priest-novelist, dies at 85

UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

John L. Allen Jr. | May. 30, 2013

APPRECIATION

Fr. Andrew Greeley, an eminent sociologist of religion who also happened to be probably the best-selling priest-novelist of all time and the Catholic church’s most prominent in-house critic, died Wednesday in Chicago. He was 85.

Over the course of a career that generated a staggering 72 nonfiction books and 66 novels, Greeley became the voice of the liberal American Catholicism of his generation — critical, but deeply loyal. Greeley could be too Catholic for both some on the secular left and the most embittered of the church’s dissidents, as well as too outspokenly liberal for the Catholic establishment, but he was always a compelling and commercially successful player on the American stage.

Born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Ill., in 1928, Greeley was ordained a priest of the Chicago archdiocese in 1954. He earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1962. Buoyed by both the Kennedy-era New Frontier and the reforming spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Greeley’s early sociological work focused on the emancipation of American Catholics into the country’s political and cultural mainstream.

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