CHICAGO (IL)
Los Angeles Times
By Elaine Woo
May 30, 2013
The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, the irrepressible Roman Catholic priest whose broad talents drove him to prominence as a sociologist, novelist, newspaper columnist and voluble church critic, has died. He was 85.
The controversial cleric died in his sleep early Thursday at his Chicago home, said his niece, Laura Durkin.
“He was first and foremost a priest,” Durkin said. “His parish was his readers and his fans. That’s how he looked at it. He wrote books expressing God’s love for us.”
Greeley was a self-styled maverick whose Renaissance impulses defied a conventional definition of the priestly vocation. A sociology professor at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, he wrote nearly 100 scholarly books, most of which were based on his groundbreaking research on the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. He turned his sociological and theological reflections into fiction and, starting with “The Cardinal Sins” in 1981, became a bestselling novelist with more than 60 titles to his credit.
A self-described “loud-mouthed Irish priest” (“And may they carve it on my gravestone!” he quipped), he was outspoken in his criticism of church policies that he considered out of step with the times, including the Vatican’s stances on birth control, divorce and the ordination of women. He had harsh words about the U.S. church’s mishandling of sexual abuse by priests. He once tarred American bishops as “mitred pinheads.”
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