Love & Passion Quote by Andrew Greeley

Greeley’s line has the dry calm of someone who’s watched the same argument replay for decades and stopped pretending it’s a crisis unique to the present. By pairing “authority and sex,” he names the Church’s two perennial stress fractures: who gets to command obedience, and who gets to define the body. The rhetorical move is slyly deflationary. If departures have “always” clustered around these issues, then today’s headlines aren’t proof of unprecedented moral collapse; they’re evidence of a long-running institutional pattern.

The intent is partly pastoral, partly sociological. As a priest who also traded in data, Greeley positions himself against both hand-wringing traditionalists and breezy reformers who act as if one policy tweak will fix everything. The subtext: people don’t usually leave over abstract theology; they leave when the Church’s governance feels coercive or its sexual teaching feels punitive, invasive, or disconnected from lived reality. That’s less an indictment of individual believers than a critique of an institution that insists intimacy and obedience are the arenas where it must be most forceful.

The early-1960s reference matters. It nods to the pre-Vatican II world about to be upended, then to the post-conciliar era when expectations of participation rose while the hierarchy’s grip on doctrine and discipline often tightened, especially around contraception and clerical authority. Greeley is telling you the real story isn’t novelty. It’s the Church’s recurring inability to metabolize modern autonomy without treating it as rebellion.