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Rev. Greeley was a best-selling novelist, prolific priest and long-time NBC analystBest-selling novelist and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rev. Andrew Greeley has passed away. He was 85. Greeley, a prolific priest, sociologist and long-time NBC analyst, wrote more than 50 novels, including international mystery thrillers that were translated into 12 languages. In a statement, his family said their lives "have been tremendously enriched by having the presence of Fr. Andrew Greeley in our family." "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...

The Rev. Andrew Greeley, the outspoken Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist known for his deeply researched academic appraisals and sometimes scathing critiques of his church, died Wednesday night, several years after fracturing his skull in a freakish fall. The Rev. Greeley died in his sleep at his apartment at the John Hancock Center, according to his spokeswoman, June Rosner. He was 85. Rosner said the Rev. Greeley had been in poor health since an accident on Nov. 7, 2008. He was at Advocate Lutheran General Medical Center when a piece of his clothing apparently got caught in the...

Chicago priest, best-selling author, noted sociologist and long-time Sun-Times columnist Father Andrew Greeley died on Wednesday night. He was 85. He passed away at his apartment at the Hancock Center, according to June Rosner, Greeley's long-time spokesman.

Get the scene. The McCain/Palin ticket wins in November and soon afterwards mobs of wild eyed bible-toting evangelicals will burn stacks of books in giant bonfires. Sound ridiculous? Well, that is exactly what Andrew Greeley is laughably claiming in his latest Chicago Sun-Times column ominously titled, "Next Chapter for radical right: Burn books." Years ago, Greeley sounded somewhat sane but lately he has gone off the deep end such as his claim in June that it is racist not to vote for Obama. Greeley's latest sanity-challenged screed presents a bleak future of crazed book-burning evangelicals taking over the country. Try...

Andrew Greeley's column in today's Chicago Sun-Times is "American warmongers excel at talking a good game." Greeley's writings are often unintentionally amusing, filled with the sort of kneejerk liberalism we'd expect from a Barack Obama contributor. This morning's article is typically hilarious: If we chant "USA!" Often enough, sing God "Bless American!" fervently enough, wear flag pins, fly the flag in front of our house and croak the national anthem loudly enough, we will win victory and honor our dead heroes. Who are those who reject compromise of a useless and criminally deadly war like Iraq? They are the blusterers,...

Apparently, the Chicago media have decided that the meme for the 2008 general election is going to be that anyone who doesn't vote for Barack Obama is a racist because this is the second editorial (that I've seen, anyway) in Chicago stating such a theory. Last week the Daily Herald voiced the assumption and this week it's the Sun-Times with the volatile Andrew Greeley taking up the cause of ridding the world of racism one Obama vote at a time. Beginning with some meaningless banter where he throws around the names of a few Greek philosophers to sound erudite, Greeley...

When Chicagoans who know Sen. Obama read the columns about him turned out by the national punditocracy, we tend to gasp and shake our heads in bemusement. He has become an ink blot for sick minds, very clever sick minds. Call up realclearpolitics.com and see what I mean. My favorite recent outbursts of hate come from Thomas Sowell, an African-American conservative economist, and from Naomi Schaefer Riley, the "assistant taste editor" of the Wall Street Journal (which title may be an oxymoron). Both write about Obama's connection with the Trinity United Church of Christ.

I am ashamed for America. Note carefully that I do not say I am ashamed of America. Despite all its inherent flaws and all its tragic mistakes, the United States stands, however incompletely and with whatever imperfections, for the highest standards of freedom and democracy that the world has yet known. I am ashamed for America because all the evil done in the nation's name in recent years is turning off the light on the mountaintop. 1. The president urges Congress in effect to accept the Turkish protest against the attribution of Armenian genocide because it might interfere with Turkish...

Last week was a strange one. The commander in chief, the president of the United States, took refuge behind a military field commander to achieve credibility with the American people. Through constant repetition of his name, almost an invocation, George Bush built up Gen. David Petraeus as the man who finally found a strategy that would work in Iraq. Because he said it would work, therefore, it had worked. Robert Draper's Dead Certain, a sympathetic portrait of the Bush presidency, reports that the president had insisted to his chief of staff Andrew Card up to the time of Card's resignation...

Perhaps the quote is out of context. Perhaps I misunderstand the genius and insight of the sociologist/priest/pulp fiction writer. Perhaps I'm overreacting (no, that couldn't be it. Never!) But this remark by Father Andrew Greeley, found in a rather annoying National "Catholic" Reporter piece by John Allen, Jr. about "evangelical Catholics" vs. "liberal Catholics", is worth pondering for a moment: Pointing to Hoge’s survey, noted sociologist Father Andrew Greeley expressed skepticism about the long-term prospects of evangelical Catholicism. “It is not within the pope’s power to establish a Catholic identity,” Greeley said. “He may think it is, but he deceives...

The vice presidency, John Nance Garner is alleged to have told his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, isn't worth a bucket of warm spit. A lame-duck presidency isn't worth much more. While George W. Bush was traveling through Europe on what should have looked like a triumphal journey, back home, Republican senators were burying his immigration reform bill and the secretary of defense was confessing that he could not reappoint Bush's handpicked chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Does Bush comprehend that the public and Congress are repudiating him? His jaunty swagger on the shore of the...

Bigotry never goes away. When it becomes unfashionable, it goes underground and waits until a new hate group appears into which it can project its twisted sickness. Racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant nativism are chronic infections in the American body politic. Rush Limbaugh singing his obscene tune "Barack the Magic Negro" is inviting prejudice and violence. However, for pure irrational rage, the current crop of nativists are some of the worst to come along since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s or those God-fearing Protestants who burned convents in Boston in the 19th century.

The collapse of the shah in Iran was the beginning of American troubles in the Middle East. The shah was "our guy," an absolute ruler who was secularizing the country and freeing his people from the shackles of religious superstition and obscurantism. It never occurred to our foreign policy thinkers and experts that the people of Iran wanted their obscurantism and old-fashioned religion. The American leadership did not see the ayatollah coming and was unprepared for the defeat of the shah. Educated as they were in the great secular universities, our foreign policy gurus did not have a clue about...

Impeach the president? Impeach President Bush? We learned from the attempt to oust President Bill Clinton that there are few rules for indicting and convicting a president. A high crime and misdemeanor can be anything that a majority of the House of Representatives says is a high crime or a misdemeanor, and proof of guilt is anything that two-thirds of the Senate says is proof. Thus, a man can be indicted (impeached) for an alleged perjury in a civil trial over private sexual behavior (usually meriting only a civil punishment), and he could be deposed if two-thirds of the Senate...

The presidential address last week was pathetic enough to make one feel sad for the poor dear man, as they say in the old country. With little emotional affect he read a lecture about his ''new strategy,'' which was in fact nothing more than a new tactic, growled at Iran and Syria, threatened the Iraqi government, and promised that the United States would emerge the winner in Iraq. The notion that 20,000 more American troops would pacify Baghdad was farcical. If one really intended to stop internecine war between two religious tribes, one would have had to promise a lot...

Should Sen. Barack Obama run for president? It will be a tough call for the senator and for those who admire and respect him personally. If he runs, he has a good chance of winning because he represents what Americans want in their president at this very troubled time in their history, a man of firm principles but not an ideologue, a moderate who can sympathize with his opponent's position, a modest man with self-deprecating wit, a politician who tries to bring people together instead of polarizing them against one another. A candidate who does not swagger or shout and...

Why did the United States invade Iraq? The administration, still claiming to be "tough on terror," dances around in its search for a credibility-saving way out. Bloody bodies and great clouds of smoke appear every night on television. American casualties increase. President Bush no longer uses the words ''staying the course.'' He still seems to insist that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on global terror. The issue on this election eve ought to be: Why did we invade Iraq in the first place? We no longer hear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction aimed...

The "War on Islamofascism" is replacing the "War on Global Terror" as the favorite Bush administration buzz slogan. It is a good slogan because it appeals to the "nuke 'em" segment of the population as an election approaches and because it means nothing at all. The very word "war" has been misused so often that it has lost all its meaning -- the war on drunk driving, the war on drugs, the war on obesity, the war on pornography, the war on calories, the war on autism, the war on gay marriages, the war, as I saw in a newspaper...

What is the worth of a single Iraqi life? The New York Times reported that during recent months a hundred Iraqis die violently every day, 3,000 every month. In terms of size of population, that is the equivalent of 300,000 Americans a month, 10,000 every day. Yet the typical television clip on the evening news -- an explosion, automatic weapon fire, dead bodies on the streets -- has become as much a cliche as the weather report or another loss by the Cubs. The dead Iraqis are of no more value to us than artificial humans in video games. The...

To hate other humans or to feel no pain at their suffering, it is necessary to dehumanize them, to write them off as less than human. The Nazis are the classic example of this dehumanization. Germans were the obermensch, the master race. Jews, Slavs, Gypsies were the untermensch, the inferior peoples who barely had the right to exist. The Puritans dehumanized Native Americans, white Americans dehumanized African Americans, Irish Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland dehumanized one another, as do Jews and Arabs in the Mideast, and Shiite and Sunni Muslims. In every case, one attributes to the "other" characteristics...