Leadership Quote by Andrew Greeley

Greeley doesn’t bother with polite ecclesial euphemisms; he writes like a disappointed insider who’s watched the hierarchy flinch at the moment it mattered. “Lost its nerve” frames church leadership not as prudential or careful, but as fundamentally fearful. It’s an accusation of temperament: reform didn’t fail because it was wrong, but because the people tasked with stewarding it panicked.

The verbs do the real work. “Taking the lead” invokes a pastoral vocation with public stakes, then “pulled the plug” drops a blunt, almost industrial image of sudden shutdown. Reform becomes a patient on life support, and the leaders aren’t doctors making a hard call; they’re technicians yanking the cord. That choice of language also smuggles in a modern moral: institutions can kill movements not with arguments, but with procedure, delay, and administrative suffocation.

Then comes the killer metaphor: “dry ice.” It’s not just “cold” tradition; it’s preservation-by-freezing, a brittle, managed stasis that looks clean while quietly burning to the touch. Dry ice is also theatrical fog, suggesting an older church culture that prizes the appearance of mystery and authority over the messy heat of renewal. The “previous century and a half” dates the target: a retrenchment toward post-19th-century Catholic defensiveness, where control and certainty outweigh experimentation.

Contextually, Greeley is channeling the post-Vatican II hangover: a burst of reformist energy followed by institutional recoil. The subtext is betrayal. The church had a chance to model courage in modernity and chose instead the safety of refrigeration.