UNITED STATES
America
Jason Berry
Father Andrew M. Greeley’s prolific career halted in Chicago on a chilly November day in 2008. His overcoat snagged as he stepped out of a taxi, throwing him down to a fractured skull. Vibrant at 80, Greeley underwent brain surgery. He returned to his apartment high above Chicago in the John Hancock building, and in-care nursing.
For a mind so alive, the last four-and-half years of silence must have been like purgatory. He died on May 30 at age 85.
I was one in the constellation of Andy’s far-flung friends. We shared letters, emails, phone calls, some delightful meals when I visited Chicago and once at my home in New Orleans. We dedicated books to each other. After the injury, as I kept in touch with people clsoe to him, I felt a hollow sadness. I missed his optimism, wit and eye for hubris.
The obituaries called him a “maverick,” echoed the riff that he never had an unpublished thought and praised his output. We have yet to take his measure as a writer, to appreciate the tension in his melding roles as priest, social scientist, novelist, critic, memoirist and journalist. He delivered his story, the Catholic Church since Vatican II, with an industrial-strength output of 138 books, including 66 novels (the data courtesy of John Allen in National Catholic Reporter, who actually counted the titles.) …
“The church is sitting on a time bomb to which the leadership tries to pay no attention,” he wrote in a 1986 Sun-Times op-ed. “Who is left to be shocked after pederast priests become the subject for feature articles in the national media?”
In 1989, I did a long piece in The Chicago Reader exposing clergy abuse cases the state’s attorney did not prosecute and how archdiocesan lawyers stiff-armed victims’ families. I called upon Greeley at his office at National Opinion Research Center, seeking leads. We talked for an hour. He was helpful, a gritty realist, with a disarmingly calm pastoral tone.
I was writing a book that branched out from my 1985 coverage of a cover-up in the Lafayette, La. diocese, investigating similar situations in other parts of the country. Chicago loomed as the last chapter. Greeley asked to read the manuscript. To my relief, he praised the work with minor suggestions on points to revise. I began sending chapters as I finished them. When he offered to write a foreword, I was delighted. He referred to “the greatest scandal in the history of religion in America and perhaps the most serious crisis Catholicism has faced since the Reformation.” Lead Us Not Into Temptation was done when he called one spring day in 1991, telling me to send it to Thomas Cahill, the head of religious books at Doubleday. I told him Doubleday had already passed (among thirty houses by then.) Andy said Cahill had autonomy for his division. Cahill read it quickly and offered the contract.
Andy, meanwhile, was prodding Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to form a review board and weed out clerics with records of abuse. Greeley’s novels had caused a rift with Bernardin. Andy was championing victims’ rights when my book was published in fall 1992 amid media attention of the burgeoning crisis. When he appeared with me on “Donahue,” defending Bernardin’s review board (despite his own differences with the cardinal over a case in litigation), Greeley the priest was vying with his inner detective. The priest wanted a reform mechanism for “scandals” that the writer knew were entangled with bishops’ reliance on ham-fisted lawyers and church-run treatment centers that kept offending clerics from being prosecuted. And, on a human level, Andy wanted to rebuild the friendship with “Joe,” his bishop. Their reconciliation is a leitmotif in his prayer journals.
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