Andrew Greeley Quotes on Christianity (9 Quotes)

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.

The radical feminists include their sisters and their nieces and their mothers and all the women in their lives. They just don't like the way the Church treats them. And this includes lots of parish priests. They are just awfully sloppy in their respect and sensitivity toward women.

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.

I don't know what the next Pope is going to be like. I do know this, the Catholic laity all over the world have made up their minds-we have data from 37 countries-have made up their minds the Church is not going to interfere in their sex lives. That may be wrong, but that's the way it is.

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.

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 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.

I was never a teenager. I became a teenager in Christ the King and I never grew out of it. More seriously... as I'm always serious as you know, there weren't teenagers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There were adolescents. But by the time I was ordained and was dumped into Beverly, there were teenagers.

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.