{"id":2463,"date":"2013-06-03T09:40:20","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T13:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/thecc\/?p=2463"},"modified":"2013-06-03T09:41:17","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T13:41:17","slug":"some-memories-of-andrew-greeley-by-larry-cunningham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/2013\/06\/03\/some-memories-of-andrew-greeley-by-larry-cunningham\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Memories of Andrew Greeley (by Larry Cunningham)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lawrencecunningham\"<\/a>I received a letter out of the blue from Andrew Greeley sometime in the late 1980s commenting on a book I had just published. As a postscript, he asked me if I wanted to see a yet unpublished work of his which, of course, I did want to see. Not to put too fine a point on it, within a few months I had on the floor of my study a pile of Xeroxed manuscripts of works \u201cto be published\u201d with approximate dates of their publication. When I joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in 1988 he invited me over to Chicago for lunch. It was then that I discovered that however pugnacious Andy was in print, he was reserved in person almost to the point of reticence. From that time until his terrible accident in 2008 I was the recipient of newsletters, books at Christmas, occasional exchanges of emails. And a few chance meetings when I would spy him on campus for football games.<\/p>\n

For some years Andy would be in Arizona \u2013 no fool he! \u2013 for the winter term teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I met him a number of times there. He helped out in a parish (Mother of Sorrows) where I had spoken and, on one occasion, he drove down to Sonoita with the parish pastor to meet me at Santa Rita Abbey where I would go to give some talks to the cloistered Trappistines.<\/p>\n

It would be too much to say that we were good friends but it is the case that I was part of a vast web of people with whom he \u201ckept in touch.\u201d An ancient father of the church once said that only a liar would claim to have read everything written by Saint Augustine and I would be a liar if I made a similar claim in having mastered the Greeley corpus. I can say, in truth, that I have read a fair amount with some works making a deep impression on me. His Unsecular Man<\/i> was a healthy corrective to all of the secularization talk I encountered in the coffee rooms of academe and I shared heartily both his convictions about the value of parochial education and his love for the visual power of the Catholic faith. \u00a0His love for the mythos<\/i> of Ireland struck me as overly romantic but there is something to be said for a country that produced a saint (Brigid of Kildare) who saw heaven as a great picnic next to a lake of beer.<\/p>\n

Andy entitled his autobiographical memoir A Loud Mouthed Irish Priest<\/i> which was a description he heard of himself pronounced by a professor at the University of Chicago. He took the putative insult as high praise for he indeed was a maker of noise; he was Irish; and he was a priest. He claimed that everything he did as a writer, a researcher, a composer of opinions, a novelist and as a poet was his way of being a priest. The late Eric Severeid once quipped that sociology is \u201cjust slow journalism.\u201d Andrew Greeley showed that sociology could be a powerful instrument to speak truth to those who were uncomfortable with the facts and with that instrument he was like the prophets of old: cranky, outspoken, irritating, powerful creator of symbols, indefatigable, but a needed voice for a church that would be shaken from its complacency just as he predicted.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lawrence S. Cunningham<\/strong><\/p>\n

John A. O\u2019Brien Professor of Theology (Emeritus)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The University of Notre Dame<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I received a letter out of the blue from Andrew Greeley sometime in the late 1980s commenting on a book I had just published. As a postscript, he asked me if I wanted to see a yet unpublished work of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":411,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/411"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2463"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2479,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions\/2479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}