Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Greeley

“Good news in the data” is a cleric’s way of borrowing the lab coat without surrendering the collar. Andrew Greeley, who spent much of his career straddling sociology and Catholic life, is doing two things at once: reassuring a rattled institution and disciplining the conversation about decline. The line frames faith not as nostalgia or inherited habit, but as something measurable, trackable, and therefore salvageable. If the numbers can be read as hopeful, the Church can be positioned less as a sinking ship and more as a story of cyclical renewal.

The subtext is defensive optimism. Priests in late-20th-century Catholicism weren’t just spiritual figures; they were lightning rods for generational revolt, sexual revolution, and later, credibility crises. By locating “the strongest support” among the young, Greeley quietly flips a familiar script: the assumption that modernity automatically secularizes, that youth equals skepticism, that the future is leaving the sanctuary. He offers an institutional dopamine hit - not “we’re right,” but “the trend line is on our side.”

Context matters because “support for priests” is narrower than “belief in God” or even “attachment to the Church.” It’s about legitimacy: whether the role still commands trust. Greeley’s phrasing also hints at a strategic appeal to leadership: invest in vocations, youth ministry, and visibility, because the audience you fear losing may be the one still listening. Beneath the cheer, there’s an implicit warning: if young people are your best constituency, the margin for scandal, arrogance, or irrelevance isn’t just moral. It’s demographic.