Best-selling author, outspoken Rev. Greeley dies

CHICAGO (AP) — The Rev. Andrew Greeley, an outspoken Roman Catholic priest, prolific best-selling novelist and Chicago newspaper columnist whose career spanned five decades, has died. He was 85.

His longtime publicist, June Rosner, says Greeley died Wednesday night at his Chicago home.

Greeley wrote more than 50 novels, many of them international mystery thrillers, as well as a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times that explored the relationship between religion and politics.

Greeley was a critic of the Vatican bureaucracy. And in the 1980s, he said the Roman Catholic church in the United States was losing billions of dollars in contributions because it alienated its members.

In 2008, Greeley suffered a traumatic brain injury when he snagged his jacket in the door of a taxicab and fell.