Andrew Greeley Quotes

I wouldn't say the world is my parish, but my readers are my parish. And especially the readers that write to me. They're my parish. And it's a responsibility that I enjoy.

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.

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.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

I think the only kind of acceptable evangelization is the evangelization of good example.

As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course.

If there is not laughter in intimacy, it becomes heavy, burdensome, and dull. At my best moments, the love dialogue I try to carry on with You each day is comic-what could be more comic than a human addressing the Ground of Being as an intimate? It's a kind of blasphemy that I dare because you have called for it, and that is pretty humorous, too.

I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.

People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good-Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice.

Angels are wonderful and exciting, and they have the appeal of beings who will take care of us and manifest God's personal concern.

The men who were running the church in the late '60s and '70s panicked when they saw the chaos, which developed after the council. The relatively modest changes of those years thawed the ice in which Catholicism had been frozen since the French Revolution.

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

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.

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.

Search for the perfect church if you will; when you find it, join it, and realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect.

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.

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.

God draws straight with crooked lines.

It is possible to begin again. It is hard, and we never do it perfectly, but it can be done.

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.

Angels represent God's personal care for each one of us.

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

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

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?

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