61 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

One Hispanic woman... was telling me about her religion, and all she was talking about were the parties, the festivals.

God lurks everywhere. That's the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level-that God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there's God.

I think Catholic Americans had better believe there's truth in all religions, because the Second Vatican Council said that. We don't believe that we have a monopoly on truth. We believe what we have is true, but it's not the whole truth. And we can learn a lot from the other religions if we listen to them respectfully.

I was never a teenager. I became a teenager in Christ the King and I never grew out of it. More seriously... as I'm always serious as you know, there weren't teenagers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There were adolescents. But by the time I was ordained and was dumped into Beverly, there were teenagers.

The seminaries must face the fact that they are not turning out well-trained professional clergy. They must realize that preaching is creative work and that some element of creativity should be required as a condition for ordination.

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.