"Fifty Years!"

Winter 2004

    I consider this event a thanksgiving, not a celebration. To achieve fifty years in the priesthood is not necessarily an achievement to be celebrated. All that is required is moderately good genes and a certain amount of stubbornness - or as Leo Mahon once remarked to me good genes and meanness.

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  It is not an occasion for triumphalism but for very modest reflections. It is an appropriate time for thanksgiving - first to God who thrust me into existence without consulting me about the matter, and then who thrust me into priesthood with only a little more consultation, and led me down paths in the priesthood that I could never have anticipated.

  Next to my parents who brought me up in the faith and to my sisters and my nieces and nephews -- the nieces and the niece in law organized this festival along with John Cussick-- and the grand nieces and grand nephews who keep me if not young at least open to youth and their exuberance and enthusiasm.

  Then to my friends, priests and lay who have put up with me, - not excluding the occasional odd bishop, archbishop and cardinal -to my teachers at St. Angela and Quigley and Mundelein and the University and my students from whom I learned at least as much as I taught, my colleagues and mentors (some of the latter were also students) to the people from the two parishes who shaped my life, St. Angela and CK. And of course to my neighbors, all my neighbors because I am a neighborhood person. Next to the various professionals who have tried their best to keep me out of trouble - doctors, lawyers, agents, editors, publishers, publicists, consultants, bankers, brokers, bosses, deans, department heads, research directors, university presidents, critics, reviewers, referees . . . As I go through this litany I hear in the background the old Gregorian chant : "Ora pro nobis" - pray for us, though it more likely is "libera nos domine" - deliver us O Lord!

  I will always claim that I am a parish priest, despite the begrudgers who would deny me the title. It might be said, accurately enough, that my path through the last half century as a priest has not been the average path. Yet as I look at the typical priest as portrayed in my book Priests: A calling in Crisis (University of Chicago Press) the data are a mirror. I am happy as a priest, happy in my life and in my work, happier then the average doctor, lawyer, teacher, university professor, even Protestant cleric. The priesthood is better, much better than I had expected it would be, I would most certainly do it all over again (including the untypical paths I've walked). And I'm not thinking of leaving, indeed as they know I wouldn't go even if they tried to throw me out.

  I have then no major regrets, but as the kids would say, tons of minor regrets. I must be careful here with words. I do not say that I am a failure. Success or failure is in the hands of God who alone grants it and judges it. But I have failed many, many times to live up to the ideals of the priesthood and to the goals I had on May 5, 1954, the coldest May 5 in history. The Epistle to the Hebrews says that priests are taken from humankind to work with the things of God and are thus acquainted with sinfulness and offer sacrifice not only for the sins of their people but for their own. The laity know this. They realize that we are human ("as in poor father was sick again this morning wasn't he?"). Yet legitimately they demand that we be better than they are, if only just a very little bit better. Herein is the great tension between laity and clergy which has been historic and may well be perpetual. The most we can say in response to this demand is that we try. So I apologize today for all the mistakes, errors in judgment, blunders, cruelties, harshness, stupidities, and spiritual sloppiness in my life. So many things would be different if I had to do them over again. But I add that I still try, and will continue to try, as long as God gives me life and grace.

God will have to continue to be patient with my faults because God loves me as She is patient with all of us because she loves all of us.

Incidentally, I claim exemption for everything I say or do before ten o'clock in the morning. On the grounds that no human acts are possible between
six and ten A.M.

  I'm one of the declining number of priests who have had the great privilege of living in the church before the Council and after it. The latter church despite the confusion and the controversy and the losses is by far the better church. If Council's promise of collegiality had been kept, the situation today would have been much better. The Council is one of he great epochal events of the Catholic story. Those who are trying to diminish it by nit-picking will eventually be swept into the ash can of history where they belong.

   Each year the chancellor of the Archdiocese sends out a necrology of priests who die every year and urges priests to pray for their departed brothers (that's the kind of trouble the church is in today, a man in the lay state tells priests to pray!) As the years pass, the list grows more melancholy. There are too many on it who are younger than I am. The oldest man on the list this year was Cletus "Spike" Lynch who as the administrator of St. Angela when we graduated was on our graduation picture. He was ordained in 1930. Almost seventy four years a priest. And a good man through all that time. I don't anticipate such durability. But, like I say, I'll try to use whatever time is left to be as good a priest as I should be and will surely not succeed any where near what I would hope.

So I thank you all for coming and for putting up with me through the years.

Let the thanksgiving begin.

Remarks by Eugene Kennedy at Dinner
TRUE CONFESSIONS
I have known Andrew Greeley almost as long as anyone here.
That emboldens me to ask this question:

How well do you know Andrew Greeley?

  It is hard not to know him, of course, because of his achievements as a priest. a writer, a teacher, and, as he confessed to me his ambition just before we both turned 40, as a savant, a word that means a learned scholar. a wise man. And he has long since carried that description.

But how well do you know Andrew Greeley?

  As a successful novelist who has instructed and entertained millions of readers? As a sociologist of religion who has found the glass of data half filled while so many others see it half empty:' As a public speaker with enough Irish charm to turn the Chicago river green without any help from the men who pour dye into it every March 17` ? As a columnist with ideas to inspire or infuriate you on men and events? As a frequent guest on radio and television when a sensible opinion on things Catholic is needed? Yes, you will say, thinking of the many faces of our celebrant, nobody will ever be able to say, "Andy, we hardly knew ye."

  Andrew and I were boat in the same year, along with theologians Hans Kung and Johannes Metz,historian Martin Marty, and, yes, Shirley Temple. If you think of us as Irish brothers - and some of you here might just understand that concept - you will not go far wrong. Irish brothers, as we know, love each other deeply. They stick together in the long run. The problem, of course, is along the way for, if in another of Andrew's favorite quotations, it can be said of the Irish that "all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad," then it can also be said that the closest of Irish brothers can fall into the deepest of estrangements, the worst of battles, and the stoniest of silences.

  Well I know him from a thousand adventures, including our grand battles for renewal of the Church after Vatican II and our memorable speaking tow of the Orient in which, among other things, we shared accommodations in a Japanese inn with boiling lava in the backyard and South Korean digs with a garbage dump in the backyard.

And I recall him lecturing at a university along the way. It was June, it was warm, and the windows were open. I had lectured first and the sun was just setting as Andrew began to speak. Within a few moments, creatures, everything but Godzilla, began to fly in the window and attack him. He stared them down, batted them away, waved them off, somewhat like King Kong under attack on the Empire State Building. And he did it with good humor and an Irish twinkle in his eye.

  How well do you know Andrew Greeley?

  Well, let's get back to the falling out for this is the tale I would tell you today. That, along with the fact that, of all his accomplishments and all his titles, it is that of being a priest that is most important to him. For, yes, in the tradition of all real Irish brothers, we entered a place where the trade winds of friendship died down and we drifted almost out of each other's sight if not out of the sound of each other's voices. Regrettable, one felt, remembering all the good, yes, but what could or would be done about it?

  How well do you know Andrew Greeley?

  I thought that I knew him very well until that November morning when I got to know him as I would like to celebrate him today. For Andrew, fifty years a priest, and a dozen others calling fulfilled along the way, revealed himself that day as that we would all long to be - a Christian to his depths and a light to the world. How well do you know Andrew Greeley, my Irish brother and friend, who remained that all through the years as long and uninviting as that Japanese buffet? He has driven away that demons as he did the invaders who flew in the window of that university on the other side of the world. 

  And it is Andrew my brother, I celebrate this day, fifty years a priest, a great Christian, a light, indeed, to the world.