Flamboyant Priest Doesn’t Mince Words in His Novels or in Real Life

Ah, he’s a charmin’ Irishman, this Chicagoan who can fake a brogue that would surely fool them in Dublin.

But he’s a controversial one, indeed, a Catholic priest devoted to his church and undoubtedly given special talents by the God he sometimes calls She to needle it.

Father Andrew M. Greeley, a best-selling author, is a handsome man with brilliant blue eyes, dark, thinning hair and a brow that furrows perfectly and appropriately for a 59-year-old deep in thought.

Ah, one of his characters might say, how he could have eclipsed the movie priest careers of Bing Crosby and Pat O’Brien. Actually, Greeley did turn down a possibility of playing a priest in the movie “The Mission.” Not that he thought it inappropriate. He just didn’t have time.

He’s tilted with the Archdiocese of Chicago over policies for inner-city schools; he’s criticized the Vatican for what he considered an almost, but not quite, brilliant statement on surrogate motherhood; he’s screamed foul to those who claim he wrote books involving sex to make money, folks he says for the most part didn’t read the books.

Middle of the Road

He sees himself as a middle-of-the-road, mainstream parish priest in good standing and says the real radicals call him a conservative. But he concedes that he could project a “blurred identity.”

But to Greeley--Andy to his friends, a man who knew in Sister Alma Frances’ second-grade class that he wanted to be a priest--his identity is perfectly clear:

“I am first, foremost and forever a priest.”

His parish, he says, is his mailbox, where he receives thousands of letters from his readers, among them Catholics who say they have returned to their church because his books introduced them to the benign and loving God they somehow hadn’t met back in parochial school.

His church, he says, is here to stay, no matter what it, or he, does.

“If at this stage of the game Catholics haven’t left the church, there’s precious little we priests can do to drive them out,” he jokes.

Greeley seems to relish all the things he is: best-selling author of mysteries, novels, science fiction, and soon a “half-Western;” a newspaper columnist; a soon-to-be screen writer and possibly comic-strip writer; a sociologist; a scholar; a professor at the University of Arizona; a Chicago Bears fan; a crack water skier; a man who has earned millions but lives somewhat less sumptuously than your average American parish priest in that he totes his own groceries and washes his own dishes; a man some Catholics see as a religious inspiration and others consider a gigantic thorn in the side of church.

Fantasy Plot

Greeley’s 13th novel and second science-fiction offering is “The Final Planet.” Its fantasy plot is set 3,000 years in the future and the Irish are again on the crusade trail. But this time the steeds are spacecraft and the head Abbess and commander of the spacecraft is a woman. Greeley, an advocate of ordaining women, never thinks small. The Holy Captain Abbess of the Holy Order of St. Brigid and St. Brendan is a cardinal, one Deidre Cardinal Fitzgerald, whose titian-haired likeness adorns the cover.

Greeley’s critics have often complained that he hit best-selling status with “The Cardinal Sins,” which sold more than 3 million copies, because of the novelty of a priest graphically writing about sex.

But if you want to watch his Irish rise, describe his novels as “steamy.” He hates that word. Quickly, Greeley, the sociologist, wafts out the statistic that only 11% of his readers consider the novels “steamy.” He says people who haven’t read them, or who saw one page out of context, call them steamy. He’d prefer erotic, if you want to get descriptive, and he is even more fond of defending his novels as covering considerably less ground than the Bible on the sex front.

Greeley maintains his books are essentially religious books.

Variety of Lessons

“I think the popular novel can be just as much a homily as what you do in church on Sunday,” Greeley says. “I think there is a variety of lessons in my stories. The basic lesson in all my books is the lesson of search and pursuit. If I say that human passion is a hint of what God’s passion may be like, that God loves us with more vehemence than the most passionate human lover, that’s just traditional Catholic doctrine, perhaps not taught very much, but traditional. I don’t go around trying to shock people with my novels and the lay readers have caught on very quickly to what I’m doing.

“I sense, through some of my sources, that many of the bishops are beginning to realize the religious aspects of my novels and I’m grateful. Better late than never.”

About the money, he says he’s given most of it away, a figure that will approach $2.5 million when he completes a grant to the inner-city schools in Chicago.

“I used to say it was between me, God and the IRS, and that was a perfectly honest Christian answer. The scriptures say don’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing when it comes to good works and don’t be like the Pharisees and sound trumpets in the streets, but my friend reminded me we can’t mindlessly interpret the scriptures,” Greeley says. The friend, a priest, persuaded him that he had a unique opportunity to teach a lesson about charity.

“Hopefully, I’ve done it. I made three public grants and from now on they will be private, if possible,” Greeley says.

The grants were not without irony. One, for more than $1 million, was to endow a chair for Roman Catholic study at the University of Chicago, the school that dealt him the crushing blow of denying him tenure after he had taught there 10 years.

“My friend pointed out I owed it to them, in a sense. If I had been granted tenure, I probably would have never written the novels.”

The coldest slap came when Greeley tried to give $1 million to the church. It was refused. And he admits he took it personally.

But Greeley, being Greeley, did not suffer in silence.

“The Catholic Church has taken money from corrupt politicians, stock market manipulators and Mafia dons,” Greeley says. “I may go down in history as the only man the church refused to take money from.”

More important, he got his way by putting the money in a foundation for the inner-city schools, which was his plan for the money in the first place.

The third public grant was $150,000 to Mundelein College.

While Greeley insists that he shuns controversy, he’s not one to repress pointed comments, a habit he attributes to his Irish ancestry. His thoughts on the PTL for example:

“I don’t think the Catholics ought to throw too many stones, because what Jim and Tammy Bakker did is small potatoes indeed compared to the $2-billion Vatican banking scandal.”

Greeley feels the current Pope “is a very complex man, an eastern European who is a romantic and an intellectual, and I feel he’s the most gifted man who has ever held the office, but he has no understanding whatsoever for American Catholicism.”

A champion of celibacy for priests, Greeley has come up with a “priest corps” plan to solve the problem of declining vocations. Years ago, when the church asked a man to be a priest forever, his life expectancy was about 36 years. He proposes allowing a young man or woman to become a priest, take the vow of celibacy for five or 10 years.

After that, if they wish, they can marry, raise a family, and maybe function as a priest for specific duties, such as hearing confessions in Holy Week when lines get long.

Greeley lives in a four-room Chicago apartment, on the 47th floor of a high-rise, six months of the year while wearing his sociologist hat at the National Opinion Research Center. The archbishop will not assign him weekend parish duties, so he says Mass privately.

In Tucson, where he teaches the second semester at the University of Arizona, he assists at four parishes, saying Mass, hearing confessions, baptizing babies, performing weddings, preaching homilies.

“I do all of the things a parish priest does, only not as often,” he says.

He admits he likes the exposure--he’s appeared on more than 200 television talk shows so far--but most of all he likes the letters affirming that his novels might be the most important aspect of his priesthood.

“If I get a letter telling me I’ve helped a student through a religious crisis or that someone came back to the church because he realized God doesn’t play by the rules, but loves them, that can make my day.