Professor Greeley was making a point...He is actually quite well known and has written over 100 books...fyi...
uagrad.org
Andrew Greeley: Priest, Professor, Author, TV Personality
By Stephen Cox
On a Thursday afternoon in March, between St. Patrick’s Day and Palm Sunday, 80 UA undergraduates file into a large classroom equipped with a big screen VCR.
Sixty-six of the students are young women. The professor bestows upon them a charming smile, and they grin back, charmed. The professor is a celebrity, and there is no mistaking the dome of his forehead, his sharp Irish nose, his square chin, and the perpetual smile in his keen blue eyes.
“I saw you on TV yesterday!” one of the students says brightly.
“I talked about pedophilia and the priesthood,” the professor explains to the class. “I predicted this back in 1985. I said that if the church didn’t do something, there would be a terrible catastrophe.”
“But the show I saw was on the History Channel,” the student says. “You were talking about St. Patrick’s Day.” “Really? I’d forgotten I’d done that show,” says the professor. “The St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago is something else!”
A buzz of conversation continues several minutes after class is to have begun. The professor stretches his long arms above his head. “Quiet!” he cries in a mock shout, and the murmurs dissipate.
The course is God in the Movies, team-taught by the famous professor and colleague Al Bergesen in the department of sociology. Today’s movie is Chocolat. “Any film that Juliette Binoche is in can’t be all bad,” says the professor. “Chocolate is sacramental. Chocolate is a revelation of God’s sweetness and love for us.”
As the lights dim and the titles come up, the professor steps into the hallway.
The celebrity professor is Andrew M. Greeley, a Catholic priest and a Ph.D. He is professor of sociology at the University of Arizona every spring and at the University of Chicago every fall. And, because he is also a best-selling novelist, he may be among the most famous professors at the UA.
“This course always fills the classroom,” he says. “In this class, I am always Father Greeley. The Roman Catholic students call me that, and everyone else follows suit.”
Greeley joined the UA faculty in 1979 to teach the sociology of religion. “Every sociology department wants someone to teach the sociology of religion,” he says, because it attracts a large number of students, boosting the department’s budget.
He also has taught many other courses at the UA, among them the basic introduction to sociology and a graduate seminar for future professors on how to teach. “It’s a course in telling stories,” Greeley says.
“I tell our graduate students, ‘You all know how to tell stories. Think of the professors who have commanded your attention. As a university professor, you will be in the entertainment business. University students are late adolescents flooded with hormones, fears, and anxieties. You are a distraction in their lives.’
“A passion for your subject is essential for a good teacher,” he adds, “but it’s no good if you can’t convey your passion with good stories full of vivid imagery. Think of the image of a black hole! That one powerful image changed the way people think about astronomy.”
In addition to teaching, Greeley conducts research and writes about the sociology of religion. He is a journalist, writing a weekly column for the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times’ Daily Southtown. (In his spring 2002 columns, Greeley has expressed his outrage at the pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.)
He is a prolific writer — his own Web site lists 64 nonfiction books of sociology and religion and 49 works of popular fiction on religious themes — Thy Brother’s Wife; a dozen Blackie Ryan mystery stories featuring the fictional Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Chicago; and a new series of novels starring an Irish psychic, Nuala Anne McGrail, already running to eight volumes with captivating Irish titles — Irish Eyes, Irish Lace, Irish Whiskey.
How can Greeley be such a prolific writer? “Celibacy,” he says without hesitation. “It gives me plenty of time to write — I have no family to occupy my time. And”— he arches his eyebrows — “Irish glibness,” another term for his evident gift of Blarney.
As a priest, Greeley seems to relish occupying controversial ground. He gleefully expresses his contempt for bishops. Confronting the predominantly male Roman Catholic hierarchy, he claims to be a feminist. Greeley invites scandal by including scenes in his novels that some readers find steamy. To those who ask how he, a celibate priest, can know so much about sex, his response is brazenly coy — he’s not saying. But he is candid about whether it is OK for a priest to write anything quite so salacious. He writes novels, he says, as a means of propagating the faith. And, since 1964, the Archdiocese of Chicago has assigned Greeley to writing and research.
As a good sociologist, he inserted survey questionnaires in his early novels, to find out what his readers liked.
Evidently, among other things, they liked the juicy bits. “I have a core readership of 250,000,” he says. It’s as if those readers constituted a huge, far-flung parish to which Greeley ministers.
And he uses his income as a popular novelist to support his research in the sociology of religion. (He accepts no pay to teach at the UA.) Priest, scholar, professor, journalist, novelist — how can Greeley keep five challenging careers going full tilt? “Because I like them all,” he says. “I keep adding occupations and don’t like to give any of them up.”
Greeley’s eyes sparkle when he contemplates his UA students. “These are bright kids,” he says. “They write good papers. They think critically. The good ones are as good as students you’d find anywhere.”
As a UA faculty member for more than 20 years, Greeley says, “The Arizona legislature doesn’t realize that the universities are economic engines that drive the state’s economy. In budgeting for education, they are begrudgers.”
Greeley observes Tucson as a sociologist, noticing “the varieties of folk religion and the ethnic and racial blend. I am intrigued by third- and fourthgeneration Mexican-Americans,” he says — people such as his former student, Professor Alex Nava, now on the UA faculty. “My family,” Nava says, “has lived in the desert Southwest since the late 1800s.”
Nava was a premed student at the UA when he decided to take courses in religious studies from three legendary UA professors — the late Reformation historian Heiko Oberman, Bob Burns, and Andrew Greeley.
“Father Greeley’s a great storyteller, and his stories resonate with his students’ own experiences and upbringing,” Nava says. “I was born and raised Roman Catholic, but only with those college courses did I start to consider religion at a mature and critical level.”
Those courses had a profound effect. Nava switched fields. After graduating from the UA, he completed a Ph.D. at Greeley’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, and came home as assistant professor of classics at the UA, where he teaches comparative and world religions and the religion of the Southwest, with a course on Mission San Xavier del Bac that, as popular as Greeley’s own classes, regularly enrolls 125 students.
“I was attracted to Andy’s imaginative rethinking of Christianity,” Nava says. “He exposed his students to the religious role of poetry, music, and art. And he looked at traditional religious symbols in the light of gender — he questioned the monopoly of male symbols. Female images of God were startling.”
Female images are plentiful at Our Mother of Sorrows church, on Tucson’s east side, where Greeley celebrates Mass. (Greeley maintains his vocation as a parish priest through informal arrangements with Our Mother of Sorrows and with St. Mary of the Woods church in Chicago.) Icons emblematic of the church’s name, the mourning Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, in gray robes, flank the crucifix behind the altar. Ornamenting the spare, angular white stucco walls is a small medieval painting of Mary and the Christ Child.
A woman opens the well attended Saturday evening Mass before Palm Sunday. A woman guitarist leads the liturgical music. Later, two women are among those passing the collection baskets.
But those in charge of the service are three men — Monsignor Thomas P. Cahalane, Deacon Paul Welsh, and the Monsignor’s guest presenter, wearing red robes embellished in gold, Father Andrew M. Greeley.
At Greeley’s invitation, children leave their families in the pews to stand with him behind the altar during the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The Irish storyteller relates the central Christian story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, beginning with Palm Sunday, the day of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
Greeley celebrates Mass informally, the way he teaches. And, elevating the Host, he stretches his long, slender fingers high above his head, as when, in the classroom, he calls for silence. |
