Priest/Author Takes Aim At Church’s Authoritarianism

The Rev. Andrew Greeley hates to be called a “gadfly.”

“I hate, hate, hate that word,” he says, gently smacking the small table at the Sam Adams Brew Pub with each “hate.”

In a flash, his Irish blue eyes have gone from deep sapphire to bright aquamarine. “Gadflies are people who just go looking for trouble for trouble’s sake.”

Yet a few minutes later, he allows - with a smile around those perfect ivory teeth - that he is “a troublemaker.”

What, pray, is the difference?

“A troublemaker,” he explains, “acts out of principle. Not just to be difficult, but because he sees problems that need fixing.”

And this best-selling novelist, sociologist and troublemaking Chicago priest believes there is a problem in the Roman Catholic Church that sorely needs fixing.

“Authoritarianism,” he says, “The authoritarian style of the church just doesn’t play anymore.”

Bald and white-haired, dressed in a black double-breasted suit, he looks every inch the parish priest. The only evidence of whimsy is that red Chicago Bulls pin on his lapel.

“For the first thousand years of the church, every time a pronouncement came from out of the pope or a council, it carried the phrase: ‘With the agreement of the whole Christian people.”’

These days, however, the pope and cardinals and bishops display little interest in what the folk in the pew think, in Greeley’s not-so-humble opinion.

And, according to a Gallup Organization survey that he commissioned and released recently, the majority of American lay Catholics want more voice in the running of their church.

The telephone survey, conducted by Gallup among 770 American Catholics and interpreted by Greeley and other professional opinion researchers, found that:

Three-fourths of respondents want a pope who will choose some of his advisers from ordinary lay people.

Around two-thirds want a pope who will permit married priests.

The same proportion want a pope “more concerned about the life of ordinary people.”

Nearly two-thirds want a pope who will allow the laity and clergy to choose their own bishop, as the church once allowed.

Nearly 60 percent want a pope who would grant more decisionmaking power to local bishops.