Best-selling author, activist and Chicago priest Father Andrew Greeley died in his sleep Wednesday night. He was 85 years old. He died at his apartment at the Hancock Center, said Greeley's long-time spokeswoman June Rosner.
Father Greeley wrote more than 50 best-selling novels and had a column in the Chicago Sun-Times.
His family released a statement," Our lives have been tremendously enriched by having the presence of Fr. Andrew Greeley in our family. First and foremost as a loving uncle who was always there for us with unfailing support or with a gentle nudge, who shared with us both the little things and the big moments of family life. But we were specially graced that this man was also an amazing priest who recently celebrated the 59th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. He served the Church all those years with a prophetic voice and with unfailing dedication, and the Church he and our parents taught us to love is a better place because of him. Our hearts are heavy with grief, but we find hope in the promise of Heaven that our uncle spent his life proclaiming to us, his friends, his parishioners and his many fans. He resides now with the Lord of the Dance, and that dance will go on."
Greeley was a well-respected sociologist at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago.
A family-written biography said he had been recovering and resting at his Chicago home since a serious accident on Nov. 7, 2008.
At NORC, Greeley was a research associate for the Center for Study of Politics and Society, which investigates societal change in comparative perspective. Greeley's work on the sociology of religion included research on Catholicism, peoples' images of God, trends in belief in life after death and many other aspects of religion.
"Greeley busted myths about American Catholics. In scholarly and popular writings, he brought to light Catholics' upward mobility and interpreted what that meant for American society and the Catholic Church," according to Mike Hout, his longtime collaborator and the Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology & Demography at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was born Feb. 5, 1928 in Oak Park. And grew up in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, decided he would be a priest when he was a second-grade student at St. Angela's School. He received a S.T.L. degree from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in 1954, and was ordained a priest the same year.
He was assigned as an assistant pastor to Christ the King parish in the Beverly neighborhood. He started writing for a religious newsletter, and when a Catholic publishing house asked for something longer, he wrote his first book, The Church and the Suburbs (1963).
While continuing his work as an assistant pastor, he received permission to study at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D in 1962, and that year became senior study director at the National Opinion Research Center. Although he continued being a priest, he was not assigned to a parish and allowed to continue his work as a scholar.
At NORC, he forged a research career rich in seeking the details of religious experience, particularly the Catholic experience in the United States. His early research came at a time when the Second Vatican Council, which opened in 1962, was changing Catholicism worldwide.
Greeley was the author of more than 100 non-fiction books and 50 novels. In 1983, his donation to the University of Chicago established a faculty chair in honor of his parents.
"For the last quarter-century, my life as a priest has been devoted principally to trying to establish a bridge between the church and scholarship, to being a priest in the world of scholars and a scholar in the church," he said at the time of the donation.
Twenty years after making that donation, which he hoped would encourage dialogue between Catholics and academics, he examined the controversies that had fallen upon priests in the wake of sex scandals. The University of Chicago Press published "Priests, A Calling in Crisis" in 2004.
His findings revealed that priests report higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction than doctors, lawyers or faculty members; that they would overwhelmingly choose to become priests again; and that younger priests are far more conservative than their older brethren.
In 2004 he and Hout wrote "The Truth about Christian Conservatives." It was based on surveys from NORC's General Social Survey on practices, beliefs and attitudes among conservative Christians and found a wider range of opinion than people previously thought.
He also taught sociology at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona. His course "God in the Movies" drew hundreds of undergraduates a year at Arizona; the course "Sociology of Religion in Film" was also popular at Chicago.
One of his novels, "The Cardinal Sins" (1981) sold more than 3 million copies in English and was translated into a dozen other languages. The dozen Nuala Anne McGrail novels reflect on the many changes in Ireland from the 1970s to the current decade, while the O'Malley family series is a microcosm of Catholic Chicago that follows a family of Irish Americans from their immigration in 1900 to prosperity in 1999.
For 40 years, he wrote a syndicated column that appeared in dozens of newspapers, including the Chicago Sun Times and the Tucson Citizen. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Catholic periodicals including the National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and America.