For many years, Greeley wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.
[1] He grew up during the Great Depression in Chicago's Austin neighborhood, where he attended St. Angela Elementary School,[2] and by the second grade, he knew that he wanted to be a priest.
He was denied tenure by the University of Chicago in 1973, despite having been a faculty member there for a decade and having published dozens of books; he attributed the denial to anti-Catholic prejudice, although a colleague said his cantankerous temperament was more to blame.
As a sociologist, he published a large number of influential academic works during the 1960s and 1970s, including Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (1972) and The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (1977).
Greeley's biographer summarizes his interpretation: He argued for the continued salience of ethnicity in American life and the distinctiveness of the Catholic religious imagination.
Catholics differed from other Americans, he explained in a variety of publications, by their tendency to think in "sacramental" terms, imagining God as present in a world that was revelatory rather than bleak.
But Greeley also insisted on the disastrous impact of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical upholding the Catholic ban on contraception, holding it almost solely responsible for a sharp decline in weekly Mass attendance between 1968 and 1975.
He believed that lay Catholics understood far better than their bishops that sex in marriage was intended by God to be joyous and playful, a true means of grace.
"[1] Greeley believed that it was this viewpoint that had led the church to be a pre-eminent patron of the arts through the centuries, allowing it to communicate through artistic imagery spiritual concepts that doctrinal texts alone could not.
At the time of the book's release, Chicago's cardinal, John Cody, was the subject of allegations of having diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Church to a mistress.
[3] He insisted that from what they heard in confession from women, priests probably knew more about marriage than most married men; and he drew on this knowledge to write a marital advice book he called Sexual Intimacy (1988).
The Making of the Pope (2005) was a first-hand account of the coalition-building process by which the conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ascended to the papacy as Benedict XVI.
Politically, Greeley was an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, and a strong supporter of immigration reform.
"[2] Greeley was probably the best-selling priest in history, with an estimated 250,000 readers who would buy almost every novel he published, probably generating at least $110 million in gross income by 1999.
[4] In 1986, he established a $1 million private educational fund for scholarships and financial support to inner-city schools in the Chicago Archdiocese with a minority student body of more than 50%.
[12] Greeley also funded an annual lecture series, "The Church in Society", at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois, where he had earned his S.T.L.
[2] Greeley suffered skull fractures in a fall in 2008 when his clothing got caught on the door of a taxi as it pulled away; he was hospitalized in critical condition.