Top 51 Andrew Greeley Quotes
#1. Two studies from the year 2000, however, indicate that Catholics give lower ratings to their clergy's ministerial activities across the board than do Protestants.
Andrew Greeley
#2. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#3. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#4. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#5. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#7. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#8. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#9. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#10. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#11. He returned her love. He lusted after her sweet young body. He wanted her the way he wanted to breathe the spring air.
He had never loved anyone before. He had not known even what this feeling for his tiny slave was.
Now in the crisp, clear spring sunlight, he knew.
Andrew M. Greeley
#12. I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.
Andrew Greeley
#13. Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits.
Andrew Greeley
#14. Angels represent God's personal care for each one of us.
Andrew Greeley
#15. It is possible to begin again. It is hard, and we never do it perfectly, but it can be done.
Andrew Greeley
#16. My songs will pass and be forgotten. What counts, however, is that I sang them.
Andrew Greeley
#17. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#18. So you would kill Old Ireland?" Anna Livia said. "You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn't be.
Andrew M. Greeley
#19. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#20. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#21. 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?
Andrew Greeley
#22. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#23. I don't think Jesus was an exclusivist. He said, and we believe, that He is the unique representation of God in the world. But that doesn't mean this is the only way God can work.
Andrew Greeley
#24. The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.
Andrew Greeley
#25. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#26. We are born with two incurable diseases, life, from which we die, and hope, which says maybe death isn't the end.
Andrew M. Greeley
#27. The kernel is the belief that God is love and, in Catholicism, God's love is present in the world. It is in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in our families, in our friends, in our neighborhood, and forgiveness in the touch of a friendly hand, in a rediscovered love God is there.
Andrew Greeley
#28. There is good news in the data the strongest support for priests is to be found among the younger generation.
Andrew Greeley
#29. Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.
Andrew Greeley
#30. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#31. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#32. Angels are wonderful and exciting, and they have the appeal of beings who will take care of us and manifest God's personal concern.
Andrew Greeley
#33. It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us.
Andrew Greeley
#34. I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.
Andrew Greeley
#35. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#36. 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?
Andrew Greeley
#37. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#38. 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.
Andrew Greeley
#39. Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn't like it.
Andrew Greeley
#40. Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?
Andrew Greeley
#41. His heart was now beating rapidly. He wanted to embrace her, cover her with kisses, caress her hair, touch her breast, stroke her thighs: he wanted to sing songs for her, dance dances for her, write poems for her.
Andrew M. Greeley
#42. There is an electricity about a friendship relationship. We are both more relaxed and more sensitive, more creative and more reflective, more energetic and more casual, more excited and more serene. It is as though when we come in contact with our friend we enter into a different environment.
Andrew Greeley
#43. I want to drink you in with my eyes till I am intoxicated forever.
Andrew M. Greeley
#44. An impish gleam flickered across the lakes of her eyes.
"Do I cause pleasure in the eyes of my master?" She asked sarcastically, twirling the red leine before him.
Andrew M. Greeley
#45. It is also asserted that the election settled the matters of the war and the torture of prisoners. These are dead issues that no longer need be addressed.
Andrew Greeley
#46. Well now, look at this, they keep winter in a box. That's clever, she congratulated me. Then she shut the fridge door ...
Andrew M. Greeley
#47. Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.
Andrew Greeley
#48. I think the only kind of acceptable evangelization is the evangelization of good example.
Andrew Greeley
#49. Since the end of the World War II, the United States has fought three "small" wars ... we lost all three of them and for the same reason-hubris.
Andrew Greeley
#50. The only real Jesus is one who is larger tahn life, who escapes our categories, who eludes our attempts to reduce Him to manageable proportions so that we can claim him for our cause.
Andrew M. Greeley
#51. We're given second chances every day of our life. We don't usually take them, but they're there for the taking.
Andrew Greeley
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