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| Andrew Greeley
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. European Catholics tend to be somewhat grim and dour and straightlaced. We shouldn't have been, but we are. We can learn from the Latinos that Catholicism is a religion of festivity and celebration. Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort. However, during my 48 years as a priest, I have learned that in times of crisis, the dodos always charge in to make matters worse. I guess I'm a good story teller. What makes me a prolific writer is two factors at work. Celibacy; I don't have a family to distract me. And I'm glib. I reached facility with words. I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad. I have to say that I have no regrets about my decision to become a priest or about the major directions my ministry has taken me... I have been and am happy as a priest, and I have never been lonely... I could have used a bit more solitude. I mean, I'm a Chicago Irishman, I know how to finesse things. So at least, working with the young people I was able to accomplish pretty much what I wanted to. 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. 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. 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. Most people who are born Catholic are still Catholic, unless they've had a divorce and remarriage problem. I think the Church is just ham-handed in dealing with those people. 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. 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. One could say at a dinner party that most Americans are faithful to their spouses, and a loud mouth, semi-inebriated jerk can respond that the conclusion cannot be true because look at all the academics who sleep around at professional meetings. 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. The Catholics we lose-it's almost always over divorce and remarriage, of which problem we have made a real mess. The laity, who pay the bills, have a right to high quality priestly service, in strict commutative justice with the obligation of restitution. So too does the Lord Jesus, whom we purport to represent. 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. 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. 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. Why does God permit us whom he loves to die? And you know what I say, where was God at the World Trade Center? He was there weeping for his fractured children. That's not a direct answer to the question but it's the best I could do. God suffers with us. 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? 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? 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. |
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