Many novelists would give their eye teeth to have pulled off what Rev. Andrew Greeley just did: drown out a hostile critic with a flood of statistics and sociological jargon.
When a reviewer savaged his new novel, ”Wages of Sin,” finding its sex scenes unrealistic for being played by senior-citizen protagonists, Chicago`s resident gadfly dashed off a research-paper rebuttal, ”Sex After Sixty: A Report.”
Greeley then called a news conference to announce his findings that the fires of passion continue well into old age. That done, he rushed to O`Hare International Airport and flew to New York to hold forth on ”Good Morning America” and ”Larry King Live!”
By the time he`d returned to his condo in the Hancock Center, phone messages awaited him from journalists worldwide.
Newsweek wanted to check whether 20 percent of people over 60 really report making love alfresco. Reporters in Ireland and Columbia inquired about the sexual appetites of their countrymen.
The media blitz and resulting publicity was vintage Greeley-showcasing the compass of his intellectual interests as well as venting his pugnacious never-let-the-other-guy-have-the-last-word personality. A kind of Orson Welles with a clerical collar, he never has been one for confining his creative juices or limiting himself to a single job category.
Depending upon which of his more than 100 books was under review, critics have identified him variously as a ”priest-novelist,” ”priest-sociologist,” ”priest-philosopher” or ”priest-journalist.” His clerical superiors have often added, sotto voce, ”priest-troublemaker.”
Greeley rejects a hyphenated identity. ”I`m a priest, pure and simple,” the 64-year-old Greeley explained while sitting in his apartment and fielding phone calls from reporters mesmerized by his findings, including the one that 16 percent of golden-ager couples conduct their foreplay in the shower.
”The other things I do-sociological research, my newspaper columns, the novels I write-are 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.”
Given half a chance, Greeley displays the psychological markings of having come of age as a Chicago street-corner boy. In 1984, he donated $1.25 million of his book royalities to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, which had steadfastly refused him a faculty position, even though his bibliography must dwarf that of all the university`s sociologists combined.
Two years after that, he earmarked $1 million for Chicago`s Catholic schools, despite being long denied a parish to minister by church officials who relegated him to the kind of non-person status Soviet leaders once bestowed upon fallen rivals.
Both gestures echoed the bravado of a young wise guy elbowing his way to the bar through a crowd of his blue-collar seniors, then throwing down a wad of dollar bills while loudly proclaiming he was buying a round of drinks for everybody in the tavern.
Came from Austin
Greeley grew up in the Austin neighborhood, where his Irish-American family was middle class before the Depression and not so middle class afterwards.
In that era, clerical vocations came with the territory of a big-city Catholic neighborhood, he recalled. When Sister Helen McCarthy asked her 2nd graders at St. Angela`s parochial school who wanted to be a priest, lots of hands shot up. One belonged to the present bishop of Grand Island, Neb. Another was Andrew Greeley`s.
After attending St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, the newly ordained Father Greeley was posted to Christ the King parish in Beverly, on Chicago`s far Southwest Side. In those pre-Vatican II days, a pastor ruled his church and the neighborhood with an iron hand. His priestly assistants meekly waited their turn.
”As John Powers observes in one of his short stories, a young priest, in the 1950s, was a mouse in training to become a rat,” Greeley said.
Still, Greeley has fond memories of his Beverly years, where he worked with the parish`s teenagers. Almost by accident, he started to write when the editor of a religious newsletter asked him to contribute.
The owner of a Catholic publishing house saw one of his pieces and asked if he wanted to do something longer, which resulted in Greeley`s first book,
”The Church and the Suburbs.” Even after its publication, he thought he`d wind up as a pastor who did a bit of writing on the side.
Nonetheless, there already were signs that Greeley was chafing at rectory life, especially in Beverly, which has more the quality of a suburb than a gritty big-city neighborhood. It is a place of broad lawns and tree-lined parkways where the grandchildren of immigrants enjoy the good life, upper-middle-class style.
”First parishes are like first loves,” Greeley noted in the thesis he wrote for his master`s degree. ”A priest cannot help but be fascinated, infatuated, and yet impatient and often disillusioned.”
The subject of that master`s thesis was Christ the King parish, and Greeley wrote it at the University of Chicago. Feeling the need to flush out his education, he had been given permission by his superiors to do graduate work in sociology while continuing to be an assistant pastor.
Shuttling back and forth from Beverly to the university`s Hyde Park campus, Greeley breezed through his classes with virtually a straight-A average and in near record time, completing his Ph.D. only a year after his master`s.
He also was co-opted into the university community by a fellow sociologist, Peter Rossi, who got Greeley a position as a researcher at the National Opinion Research Center, a sociological think-tank affiliated with the university.
Through the 1960s, he cranked out studies just as fast as his computer could crunch the data. By the publish-or-perish mores of academia, he should have been rewarded with a faculty slot in the sociology department.
Other of his specs and personal style, though, didn`t fit the reigning profile of a university professor. State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie was a graduate student in the early 1970s, and worked with Greeley at the research center. She recalls him as an idea-a-minute guy who could easily tire of those less quick of mind.
Two sides
”He was an amazing producer of words, work and arguments,” Currie said. ”He was challenging and tended to be irascible. Occasionally, the black Irish mood would take him over.”
James Coleman, professor of sociology, and a longtime friend of Greeley`s, recalls that he could be his own worst enemy.
”Andy would get upset by something and fire off an angry letter to his superiors in the church or the university,” Coleman said. ”The next day, he would realize he shouldn`t have.”
During a long-running feud with Cardinal John Cody, Greeley called Chicago`s late archbishop ”a madcap tyrant.” Cody was disliked by lots of clergy, many of whom silently agreed with Greeley`s verdict. But he was the one who said it aloud.
His older associates also recall seeing a softer, more impish side of Greeley`s personality. Currie says that, at the research center, Greeley was not only a researcher but also a kind of unofficial chaplain, something like the padre of a military unit, who other staffers would seek out when troubled. Martin Marty, a distinguished Protestant theologian at the University of Chicago who co-authored a book with Greeley, recalls that Greeley was never so busy that he forgot his commitment to being a parish priest.
There was a big celebration on the 25th anniversary of Greeley`s ordination, Marty recalled, that corresponded with a low point in his own life. His wife had just undergone cancer surgery.
”The church was packed,” Marty said. ”But Andy spotted me sitting in a pew and he cut through the crowd to hug me and be with me.”
But in the 1960s, the role of a priest wasn`t always a crowd pleaser at faculty clubs. John F. Kennedy had just moved into the White House, breaking the long-standing assumption that a Catholic couldn`t be elected president.
On campus, priestly garb could seem offensive to the secularism that was the reigning ideology, especially in the social sciences. Greeley was put up for tenure in three departments and rejected each time.
”Rossi told me,” Greeley said, ”that in sociology one professor said he would no more hire a Catholic than a communist.”
The subject matter of his research didn`t help. As an academic discipline, sociology was born at the University of Chicago, where its pioneers produced classic studies rooted in the reality of big-city life. But academic fashions change and by the time Greeley got there, the sociology department had largely given up its heritage in favor of more abstract studies.
`Not politically correct`
Greeley`s research continued to focus on the kind of people he had grown up with: The children and grandchildren of immigrants, who still lived the neighborhood life and honored traditional values. Long before the term was current, that made his work ”not politically correct.”
”I was a New Deal liberal and a Daley Democrat,” Greeley said. ”But a new kind of liberalism had come into academic circles, where `ethnic` became a derisive word.”
That new academic vision divided the world into three sociological groups: Minorities, elite and educated folks who wanted to break down the barriers of segregation, and unenlightened working-class types who resisted change.
From his colleagues` perspective, that latter group included the ethnic groups, often Catholic, that Greeley was committed to.
Gary Becker, a professor of economics, recalls that other sociologists weren`t too happy when Greeley`s research countered their prejudices about European ethnic groups. Greeley`s studies showed that blue-collar folks were more, not less, liberal than white-collar people.
His research also demonstrated that Catholics were not resolute anti-intellectuals, but that they are attending college and going on to graduate school, just like their Protestant counterparts.
Greeley`s findings were no more welcome by the Catholic Church, to which, with characteristic chutzpah, he appointed himself sociologist-in-resi dence. In the wake of Vatican II, the church had began to change-but not fast enough for many of its congregants, Greeley warned.
In particular, he told the American bishops, his studies showed that the Vatican`s unbending position on birth control was driving Catholics out of the church.
By the end of the 1970s, Greeley thus found himself on the margins of the two institutions he loved. He was without a permanent post until the University of Arizona gave him a professorship, allowing him to cram his teaching into one semester per year, so he could continue to shuttle back to his research projects in Chicago.
Relationship with the church
In the church, Cardinal Meyer had given Greeley permission to live in an apartment of his own, detaching him from other responsibilities so he could do his scholarly work, an arrangement silently ratified by Meyer`s successors.
Even Cardinal Cody didn`t try to crack down on Greeley, despite the running campaign Greeley conducted in his newspaper columns against Cody`s administration of the Chicago Archdiocese.
In the 1980s, Greeley began to write fiction with a passion-in more ways than one. Not only did he crank out novels, sometimes one or two a year, but he liberally sprinkled their plot lines with sex. His novels and detective stories have sold 14 to 16 million copies, a figure that high-brow critics often cite as evidence of the reading public`s unslakable thirst for titilation.
Greeley says that his novels reflect his theology. For him, God is revealed in the everyday lives of men and women, and especially in their love for one another. Unfortunately, the church has too often lost sight of that, substituting instead a Puritan ethic of denial. Sex, he argues, is a powerful sacrament.
Greeley continues to support clerical celibacy, arguing that the preservation of long-standing traditions is vital to the church`s survival. He rejects out of hand the suggestion that he must have carried the sociologist`s ”participant-observer” methodology into the researching of his novels.
”A parish priest learns all about sex from listening to his parishioners,” Greeley said. ”In fact, if he doesn`t know about sex, then he hasn`t been paying attention to what his flock is saying.”
Recently, Greeley`s life entered a new, less fractious phase. Last year, his supporters at the University of Chicago persuaded the administration to belatedly give him a professorship. Almost by accident, Greeley was also reconciled with the church hierarchy.
Offended by a piece of archdiocesan policy, Greeley stormed over to the Cardinal`s mansion, only to have Joseph Cardinal Bernardin acknowlege the justice of Greeley`s position. The time had come for the two of them to be friends again, Bernardin said.
Greeley has also been re-evaluating his life, with the help of a university colleague, Erika Fromm, a specialist in hypnotherapy. In their sessions, she has helped him re-experience his earlier years, and on one occasion to anticipate the future. Fromm`s trance took him to what lies beyond this life, he says.
”I saw this mystical looking city on a lake, and realized it had to be an even better Chicago,” Greeley said. ”That`s when I grasped that heaven is like the West Side.”
He does, though, admit that he is not quite sure how to feel about his new-found acceptance. The other neighborhood kids used to tease Greeley, calling him Don Quixote. Unless they and Cervantes were wrong, the going gets tough when a Quixote runs out of windwills to tilt.
”I will admit a moment of fear, standing on the Cardinal`s porch and pushing his door bell,” Greeley said. ”I said to myself: `That son-of-a-gun is going to want to make up!”`
