Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Greeley

A priest telling on his own team is the kind of insider candor that lands like a slap. Greeley’s line isn’t really about ordination policy; it’s about who gets to frame grievance inside an institution built on male authority. By claiming Catholic men are more upset than Catholic women about women’s exclusion from the priesthood, he flips the expected script: the people denied power aren’t necessarily the ones most invested in the fight for it.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a critique of clerical masculinity: men can afford to treat women’s ordination as a moral abstraction, a nice liberal cause that costs them little in daily parish life. Women, by contrast, may have developed a pragmatic relationship to the Church-as-it-is: they do the labor, sustain communities, and negotiate disappointment without the luxury of performative outrage. The subtext is not that women don’t care about equality; it’s that they’ve learned how institutions metabolize protest - especially when the gatekeepers are also the ones offering “sympathy.”

Context matters: Greeley was a sociologist-priest who trafficked in survey data and cultural observation, often puncturing pieties on both left and right. Coming from a cleric, the quote also functions as a quiet indictment of male conscience. If men are the loudest champions of women’s ordination, it can mask a more uncomfortable reality: the Church can tolerate men arguing about women’s roles far more easily than it can tolerate women demanding them. The line exposes that asymmetry in one clean, unsettling pivot.