Fr. Andrew Greeley: contrarian, burr under the saddle, friend of 50 years

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Harvey Cox  |  Jun. 5, 2013

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Appreciation I have been thinking a lot about Fr. Andrew Greeley since I read of his death on the front page of The New York Times a couple of days ago. I think Andy would have been pleased that even in passing, he achieved this degree of notoriety. He enjoyed attracting attention, and he deserved it.
Andy was just about my age, and we had known each other for about 50 years. We first met after the brouhaha that greeted my book, The Secular City, in 1965. Andy was one of the first to review it. He did not like it. Characteristically, he assailed me with a barrage of survey research data that utterly refuted my thesis (or what he took to be my thesis).The fact that my book and his critique may have missed each other did not really matter. I was trying to ask what the seemingly inexorable (at least at that time) advance of secularization meant for Christianity. He doubted then, and still did until he died, just how inexorable, or even empirical, that secular advance was. After that, we enjoyed a lifelong friendship-cum-argument that sometimes brought us together but also sometimes put us on different sides of a debate. Andy, for example, was no fan of liberation theology.