Faith & Spirit Quote by Andrew Greeley

Greeley is trying to pry open a door that Catholic language has often kept half-shut: if God is genuinely beyond sex, then calling God “He” can’t be the whole story. By framing God as the place where “characteristics of men and women” are combined, he borrows a familiar Catholic move - the both/and instinct - and aims it at a modern pressure point: gender essentialism inside religious tradition.

The intent is pastoral and strategic. Pastoral, because it offers believers permission to recognize tenderness, authority, creativity, and steadiness as divine attributes without policing which ones “belong” to men or women. Strategic, because it reasserts that this isn’t a trendy concession but “traditional Catholic teaching,” a rhetorical shield against charges of liberal revisionism. He’s not saying the Church should invent a new God; he’s saying the Church has always had the resources to talk about God more honestly than its pronouns.

The subtext is a quiet critique of how theology gets domesticated into sociology. When the divine is described through a narrow set of “masculine” virtues, the hierarchy starts looking less like revelation and more like cultural inheritance. Greeley’s “combination of opposites” also echoes a mystical strain of Christianity (think paradox, mystery, via negativa): God exceeds our binaries, so our binaries can’t be treated as sacred architecture.

Context matters: late 20th-century Catholicism was absorbing the shocks of feminism, gender role debates, and the post-Vatican II push to renew language and liturgy. Greeley, a priest with a public intellectual streak, is translating that conflict into a doctrine-shaped argument: the tradition can stretch without snapping.