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He is a man who NEVER LOST FAITH IN HUMANITY. He was a young priest when the Vatican II and Liberation Theology revolution occurred, and had to ride out the counter-revolution, when liberal clerics like him were oppressed or silenced. And he did it through fiction. In fact, it was through reading his novels that I knew that the liberal church was alive and well--and by that I mean the REAL church, which I associate with the Pelagian/Druid monks of 4th-5th centuries in Ireland, who resisted conquest by Rome, and lived simple, poor lives among the people, worshipping both the Mother God and the Father God, and who re-emerged, after more than a thousand years, in Vatican II's liberalization and outreach. And this very progressive religious underground seemed to be centered in--or had one vortex in--Chicago.
When Barack Obama emerged from Chicago--with close ties to the Kennedy family--I thought about those Greeley writings, which reveal a vibrant Pelagian culture in Chicago--the Irish take on Catholicism, which ain't like any other. Though a few Irishmen were slavers, the Irish in general--both in Ireland and here--identify with the oppressed classes everywhere, whether they be the progeny of former slaves in the U.S. or the indigenous here and in South America. The reason, of course, is that the Irish themselves have suffered centuries of oppression, and faced bigotry here, similar to the bigotry against blacks and browns. I don't remember the "Irish need not apply" signs, but I DO remember the foul pamphlets about JFK and the Pope that circulated during JFK's 1960 campaign for president. Irish Catholics need not apply. We got rid of that rule. Now we've gotten rid of another, much harder to break rule: A multi-racial president, with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas. The meeting of the ways.
And I'm inclined to think that the attitude toward life and politics of the Irish Catholic culture in Illinois, and its warmer, more cooperative and generous regard toward black civil rights and advancement--moreso than other "white" cultures--helped to produce this result: President Obama.
I know this was true in my Irish Catholic household when I was a kid. My family naturally supported black civil rights, even though it didn't seem to have anything directly to do with our lives. This is part of what propelled me--a poor but privileged white, California college student--to Alabama, a place I had never been, in 1965, to volunteer for Martin Luther King's voter registration drive. I naturally identified with this struggle. Struggle was a part of my heritage.
Anyway, Father Greeley's novels express this liberal Irish Catholic culture in Chicago, and besides being great reads in themselves, clued me in to Chicago's role in preservation of the Vatican II awakening.
I imagine that Greeley was ecstatic with joy at Obama's win. If that is his last memory--if he succumbs to this accident--it will be a great one to send him on his way. This is a man who truly "kept the faith." His faith in people. His faith in social justice. His faith in the progress of the human race.
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