Chicago: A best-selling novelist, renowned sociologist and outspoken commentator on all things Roman Catholic, the Rev. Andrew Greeley lived many lives. But above all, the Irish Catholic with a mischievous twinkle always remained a Chicago parish priest.
"He redefined it for himself," his niece Laura Durkin said. "His parish was his readers. He wasn't confined to only preaching in a parish church."
Several years after suffering a near fatal brain injury when he fell getting out of a cab, Greeley, 85, was found dead in his home Thursday morning in the John Hancock Center, his niece said.
A longtime columnist for the Sun-Times and author of more than 50 best-selling novels and more than 100 works of nonfiction, Greeley's pen regularly skewered the Catholic Church's treatment of women, the hypocrisy of the clerical culture and his church's opposition to ordaining married priests.
But he also remained a staunch champion of the church, celebrating its contribution to the arts, suggesting ways it could strengthen its ministry and denouncing anti-Catholicism.
"His love was the University of Chicago and the Archdiocese of Chicago. That's where he lived. That's where he studied," said the Rev. John Cusick, who met Greeley in 1970 shortly after Cusick was ordained. An ardent fan of the Bulls and Bears and committed to praying for the Cubs to one day improve, Greeley was a "Chicagophile," Cusick said.
"We remember his columns, and remember his authentic Chicago voice, as somebody who spoke to the city and spoke about the city with such love and passion," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Thursday.
But his influence extended well past the city's borders.
The world has "probably lost the most significant Catholic man in America," Cusick said.
Greeley clashed with a number of Chicago's archbishops, but he admired Cardinal Francis George, a fellow opera fan, and came to his defense on a number of occasions. The cardinal had celebrated Mass with Greeley in his home several times since his accident.
"Father Greeley was an often controversial priest, with deep convictions and a ready wit," George said. "He dedicated his life to research, writing and speaking. In his last years, the words he could still respond to were prayers, especially the Eucharist. We should keep him in our prayers now.
"He opened up things that I wasn't so aware of, and I maybe did the same for him."
Born in Oak Park in 1928, Greeley declared he wanted to become a priest as a second-grader at St. Angela Catholic School on Chicago's West Side. After attending Quigley Preparatory Seminary and the University of Saint Mary of the Lake, also called Mundelein Seminary, he was ordained in 1954.
He was released from his duties as assistant pastor of Christ the King Parish on the Southwest Side by Cardinal Albert Meyer to study sociology and then study the archdiocese. He earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1962 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship between 1962 and 1963. By 1965, he had become a lecturer in sociology of religion and senior study director of the National Opinion Research Center, now known as independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.
Inspired by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Greeley plunged himself into research about American Catholics and public life. In the 1970s, the U.S. bishops conference tapped him to study the nation's priests.
Greeley always resented being denied tenure by the University of Chicago. He cited anti-Catholicism, but others say he was a renaissance man with no singular specialty and the antithesis of a company man — both of which worked against him.
He eventually took a job as a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, splitting his time between Chicago during the Bears season and Tucson for the spring semester.
Unable to stay quiet when he saw wrongdoing, in 1986 Greeley exposed a clergy sex abuse crisis in the church and clerics' efforts to cover it up.
"My uncle was one of the first priests who wrote about the sexual abuse scandal in the church," Durkin said. "Many people within the hierarchy were not happy he was doing it. But in the end he was the one who had it right."
While Greeley was a noted sociologist, columnist and priest, contemporary audiences knew him best as a novelist, a lucrative career he launched later in life.
Source: chicago tribune reporter