Greeley's literary output was such it was said that he "never had an unpublished thought". He said, "The only way I can write fiction is to keep those hours from 6:00 to 9:00 A.M. sacred." He published his first novel,
The Magic Cup, in 1975, a fantasy tale about a young king who would lead Ireland from
paganism to Christianity. A second novel,
Death in April, followed in 1980. His third novel,
The Cardinal Sins (1981), was his first work of fiction to become a major commercial success. As one reviewer put it,
The Cardinal Sins "did for the Catholic Church what
The Godfather did for the mafia". The novel's principal characters were both priests—one a writer-sociologist (like Greeley), and the other a
Cardinal who had broken the
vow of celibacy. At the time of the book's release, Chicago's cardinal,
John Cody, was the subject of allegations of having diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Church to a mistress. Church officials accused Greeley of using the novel to attack Cardinal Cody, although Greeley denied the charges and told the
New York Times that Cody was "a much better bishop ... and a much better human being" than the character in the novel.
The Cardinal Sins was followed by the
Passover trilogy: ''Thy Brother's Wife
(1982), Ascent into Hell
(1983), and Lord of the Dance'' (1984). Thereafter, he wrote a minimum of two novels per year, on average. In 1987 alone, he produced four novels and two works of non-fiction. He once said that he wrote an average of 5,000 words per day, and was known to quip, "Why should I practice contraception on my ideas?" The explicit treatment of sexuality in Greeley's novels was a source of controversy for some. The
National Catholic Register said that Greeley had "the dirtiest mind ever ordained". Greeley responded to his critics by saying that "there is nothing wrong with sex" and that "at the most basic level, people learn from the novels that sex is good ... Then they get the notion that sexual love is a sacrament of God's love, that sexual love tells us something about God." He told one interviewer that his erotic writing was not pornography and that it was "less erotic than the
Song of Songs in the scriptures". He insisted that from what they heard in confession from women, priests probably knew more about marriage than most married men; and he drew on this knowledge to write a marital advice book he called
Sexual Intimacy (1988). At the height of the Catholic Church
sexual abuse scandal, Greeley wrote
The Priestly Sins (2004), a novel about a young priest who is exiled to an
insane asylum and then to an academic life because he reports abuse that he has witnessed. His book
The Making of the Pope (2005) was intended as a follow-up to his
The Making of the Popes 1978.
The Making of the Pope (2005) was a first-hand account of the coalition-building process by which the conservative Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger ascended to the papacy as
Benedict XVI. Greeley also dabbled in science fiction, writing the novels
God Game and
The Final Planet. Greeley wrote about the spiritual life in his prayer journals "that revealed a man who most of all wanted to love God and let people know that God was a Tremendous Lover who loved them as if He loved them alone and loved everyone as if all of them were one". "Love Affair" (1992) was his first prayer journal, a winner of the Catholic Association book award in the spiritual category, followed by "Sacraments of Love" (1994), "Windows" (1995), "I Hope You're Listening, God" (1997), and "Letters To A Loving God" (2002). The prayer journal was neither a book of prayers nor a book about prayer but rather an experience of praying, to dialogue with God. It is prayer as it happens. He said that writing out prayers on a computer screen for his journals "are the best way to pray I've yet discovered." Thus, paraphrasing a famous quote about him, it might be said he "never had an unpublished prayer". Leach said, "The prayer journals were among his favorite books." Greeley wrote his first major collection of poetry entitled
The Sense of Love (1992), taking his place among the priest poets of the Anglo-Roman tradition, as he examined the love relationship between God and humanity on the levels of eros (sexual), philos (social), and agape (spiritual) (Robert McGovern, foreword,
The Sense of Love, 1992, pp. viii-xi). Greeley wrote numerous
mystery novels, including one series about
Father "Blackie" Ryan and another about the
Nuala Anne McGrail character. ==Politics==