Background
Andrew M. Greeley was born in Oak Park, Illinois, February 5, 1928.
( Almost all of America's private colleges and universiti...)
Almost all of America's private colleges and universities started out as denominational schools, but connections with sponsoring churches gradually attenuated over the last century. Only fundamentalist Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church still maintain colleges and universities closely tied to the spirit of their denominations. Catholic higher education is the largest of these systems, producing a significant proportion of America's college graduates, trained professionals, and doctorates. Andrew M. Greeley argues that Catholic schools are no better and no worse than the vast majority of American higher educational institutions. He chooses a sample of schools varying in the degree to which changes are evident, without revealing this key to his investigator team. Greeley and his field team then visit the schools, interviewing significant segments of each, and characterize each in terms of recent growth and elements which are critical in fostering and supporting such changes. Greeley briefly summarizes information on the history of Catholic higher education. He then furnishes descriptions of three rapid-improvement, three medium-improvement, and three low-improvement schools. In a summary, he provides evidence that the quality of administrative leadership predicts academic improvement in a Catholic college or university. In the final sections, Greeley reviews the administrations, faculties, and student bodies at Catholic colleges and universities, and offers general observations about the outlook for Catholic higher education in the United States.
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journalist novelist priest sociologist
Andrew M. Greeley was born in Oak Park, Illinois, February 5, 1928.
From an early age he determined to become a priest, attending a seminary high school and college. He received an A. B. from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago in 1950, an S. T. B. in 1952, and an S. T. L. in 1954, when he was ordained. From 1954 to 1964 he served as an assistant pastor at Christ the King parish in Chicago, during which time he studied sociology at the University of Chicago, receiving a Ph. D. in 1962. His dissertation dealt with the influence of religion on the career plans of 1961 college graduates.
Greeley was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Arizona, Bard College (New York State) and the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Sociology, an interest in Catholic education, and a ministry to Catholic youth dominated Greeley's early career and writings. From 1961 to 1968 he was a program director at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, and in 1973 he became the director of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism. He taught sociology at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1972, and beginning in 1978 he taught intermittently at the University of Arizona.
Greeley's first writings included such titles as The Church and the Suburbs (1959) and Religion and Career (1963), works in which he put empirical sociology to use. At the same time, he was drawing on his ministerial work with young Catholics in books such as Strangers in the House (1961), which described the problems of Catholic teenagers. In the late 1960s he did several studies of Catholic education, concluding that the religious impact of parochial schooling seemed negligible. He was also intent on explaining the Christian faith to lay people, producing readable books such as The Jesus Myth (1971) and The Moses Myth (1971). In 1972 he published the results of a two-year study of American priests, reporting widespread dissatisfaction. Although this work had been underwritten by the American Catholic bishops, they repudiated its findings, leading Greeley to comment: "Honesty compels me to say that I believe the present leadership in the church to be morally, intellectually, and religiously bankrupt. " A significant aspect of Greeley's profile after 1972 was alienation from the American Catholic bishops.
Joining his interest in sociology to a strong sense of his Irish-Catholic heritage, Greeley ventured into the area of ethnicity in 1974, studying the impact of ethnic background and lamenting the assimilation of Irish-Catholics to American Protestant models. In his assessments of American Catholic faith after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), he focused on the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul IV that reaffirmed the ban on artificial birth control. In Greeley's view, this encyclical greatly lowered the credibility of church leaders in the eyes of American Catholics and accounted for a significant drop in church attendance. Another reason for the drop was Vatican II's shift from a God of law to a God of love, who might be presumed to look more to the heart than such externals as attendance at Sunday Mass.
Greeley had always written for newspapers and magazines, as well as giving radio and television interviews, but he advanced the popular thrust of his work in 1979 with reports on the elections of Popes John Paul I and John Paul II, for which he traveled to Rome. In 1981 he launched what proved to be a hugely successful career as a novelist with The Cardinal Sins, a potboiler depicting the sordid, all-too-human inside of clerical and upper-class Chicago Catholic culture. After that beginning he poured forth a stream of best-sellers (Thy Brother's Wife (1982), Ascent into Hell (1984), Virgin and Martyr (1985), The Final Planet (1987), and Angel Fire (1988)). From the handsome royalties these novels earned, Greeley endowed a chair at the University of Chicago Divinity School in memory of his parents.
Few literary critics spoke well of Greeley's novels, but obviously they struck a chord in the lay population. Readers of newspapers, secular and Catholic, were familiar with Greeley's syndicated columns and occasional pieces, which were remarkable for their cantankerous ability to spotlight troubling issues (for example, homosexuality among the Catholic clergy). Greeley had a great gift for clear prose and a courageous desire to speak frankly about the actual experience of faith, both personal and social. He continued to draw on data of the National Opinion Research Institute to illuminate religious, ethnic, educational, and other trends in American culture. His own theological positions were moderate to slightly conservative, but he championed a reworking of the Church's attitudes toward sexuality and made a strong case for the importance of the religious imagination (so as to express theology through stories). Steadily he urged the Church to attend to the findings of empirical social science, so as to make its ministry more realistic and credible. His feuds with the late Cardinal Cody, and with many other personages with whom he disagreed, enlivened church life in Chicago and intrigued readers of his columns.
Greeley suffered skull fractures in a fall in 2008 when his clothing got caught on the door of a taxi as it pulled away; he was hospitalized in critical condition. He remained in poor health for the rest of his life and died on May 29, 2013 at his Chicago home. He was 85.
( Almost all of America's private colleges and universiti...)
(PRIESTHOOD IN MODERN AMERICA.)
(HARDCOVER w/DUST JACKET)
Reflecting on his life's work, Greeley told the Chicago Tribune in 1992, "I'm a priest, pure and simple. .. . The other things I do β sociological research, my newspaper columns, the novels I writ βare just my way of being a priest. I decided I wanted to be one when I was a kid growing up on the West Side. I've never wavered or wanted to be anything but. "
Politically, Greeley was an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, and a strong supporter of weak immigration enforcement. His book entitled A Stupid, Unjust, and Criminal War: Iraq 2001β2007 (2007) was critical of the rush by the Bush administration to start the Iraq War and the consequences of that war for the United States. Garry Wills wrote, "Andrew Greeley shows that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, not a Captain of War. "
In 2008, he donated several thousand dollars to the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who was then serving as a U. S. Senator representing Illinois, although Greeley predicted that racism would lead to Obama's defeat.
Quotations:
"Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort. "
"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. "
"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. "
"Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn't like it. "