Andrew Greeley Quotes

• You’re a Catholic in Italy when you’re born, it’s unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

  Andrew Greeley

• Yet, if the most frequent s*x and apparently the best s*x is that between married partners who are faithful to one another, is there not a hint that affection might be an important aspect of s*x? Even love?

  Andrew Greeley

• Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

  Andrew Greeley

• 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.

  Andrew Greeley

• Two studies from the year 2000, however, indicate that Catholics give lower ratings to their clergy’s ministerial activities across the board than do Protestants.

  Andrew Greeley

• There is good news in the data the strongest support for priests is to be found among the younger generation.

  Andrew Greeley

• There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn’t changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.

  Andrew Greeley

• The leadership lost its nerve. Instead of taking the lead in the reform movement… they pulled the plug on it. They tried and are still trying to return the church to the dry ice of the previous century and a half.

  Andrew Greeley

• The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.

  Andrew Greeley

• Priest organizations around the country, both local and national, should realize that their membership has a serious image problem and undertake programs to improve it.

  Andrew Greeley

• Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.

  Andrew Greeley

• One cannot escape the harsh fact that as a ministerial profession, the priesthood has very serious problems. They are not new. They did not develop yesterday or last year.

  Andrew Greeley

• Note the three most important Cabinet positions. Rice said that it was better to find the weapons of mass destruction than to see a mushroom cloud.

  Andrew Greeley

• Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn’t like it.

  Andrew Greeley

• It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren’t going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.

  Andrew Greeley

• It is also asserted that the election settled the matters of the war and the torture of prisoners. These are dead issues that no longer need be addressed.

  Andrew Greeley

• Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?

  Andrew Greeley

• In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That’s been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites.

  Andrew Greeley

• If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it’s very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic.

  Andrew Greeley

• I write easily, let’s put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they’re doing. And I’m a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

  Andrew Greeley

Andrew Greeley (30)

Birth:	5th February, 1928
Death:	29th May, 2013
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Journalist, Novelist, Priest, Professor, Sociologist

About

Andrew M. Greeley was born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Illinois. He was an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist. Father Greeley was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a Research Associate with the National Opinion Research Center For many years, he wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.

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