[In The Making of the Popes 1978 Greeley] rambles, tells bad jokes, blows his own horn, indulges in guess and gossip. He pretends to know what he obviously doesn't (e.g. what cardinals were thinking in their sequestration). We have to rely on his unnamed informers for the count of votes in both conclaves. But he brings to papal politics the skills and interests of a sociologist who studies voter behavior through computer models. He knows there is hard bargaining behind the hocus pocus, and he thinks the papacy needs a kind of demythologizing for its own good. I'm not sure John Paul II would disagree with him. The papacy will probably have to mean less, in terms of conventional piety, before it can mean more again.

Garry Wills, in a review of "The Making of the Popes 1978: The Politics of Intrigue in the Vatican," in The New Republic...