Authority, Responsibility, and Dancing Prophet

More than one reader has pointed out to me that Dancing Prophet, the fourth novel in the Dancing Priest series, seems to be talking about the Catholic Church, even though the church is never mentioned in the book. And did I unfairly transfer the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal to the Church of England, even done for a fictional story?

And my answer has been yes, you’re right, but only partially.

I’ve noted before that the original impetus for the story that eventually became Dancing Prophet was the 2008 arrest and conviction Michael Devlin, a pizza shop manager who kidnapped and abused two boys, one of them for years. Devlin lived in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood; his apartment was on my route biking from my home to the beginning of Grant’s Trail. I cycled past the apartments hundreds of times. I likely saw one of the boys on his bike.

I was horrified. The only way to deal with it was to write a story, about 25,000 words, inspired by but unrelated to what happened in Kirkwood. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Michael Beckwith via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Strange Gods” by Peter Daly and John Myslinksi

To read a novel like Strange Gods: A Novel About Faith, Murder, Sin and Redemption by Peter Daly and John Myslinski is to take a stroll through today’s headlines. It was published in 2016, but it eerily forecasts some of the stories we are seeing today about the Roman Catholic Church.

Nate Condon is an attorney in Manhattan. He’s something of a devout Catholic, in spite of the scandals that have engulfed the church and its clerical culture. The same can’t be said of his wife, Brigid, raised a Catholic but no longer a faithful one. She’s an attorney, too, and works for the Federal Reserve helping to ferret out money laundering and other illegal activities. 

Nate is a member of the Knights of Malta, and he’s asked to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral of a former U.S. attorney general at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The funeral service is led by Cardinal John Michael Manning. During the service, Manning is shot in the forehead, dying of his wound just feet from where Nate is standing. 

Manning is one of six cardinals who’ve died recently in unusual, mysterious, or violent circumstances. Nate is called by a former CIA director, also a Catholic (there’s still an old boys’ Catholic network). He’s asked to undertake an investigation for the Vatican. He accepts it, even knowing his marriage is getting rocky and his enduring faith in the Catholic Church is part of the reason. 

The trail inevitably leads to the Vatican, its powerful bureaucracy, the connections to the Mafia, and the conservative-liberal politics playing for control of the church and its future. 

Authors Daly and Myslinksi are both ordained Catholic priests. 

Peter Daly

Daly, after receiving a B.A. degree in religious studies from the University of Virginia and a J.D. degree from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., practiced law before entering the seminary. He was sent to the North American College at the Vatican and received degrees from the Gregorian University and Lateran University, both in Rome. He was ordained for the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Washington in 1986. He’s been a syndicated columnist for Catholic News Service and has written for both the Washington Post and the National Catholic Reporter.

John Myslinski

Myslinski received a B.A. degree from Boston College and became a Jesuit in the New England Province. He served as federal officer with the Capitol Police before entering seminary at Mt. St. Mary’s, where he received an M.A. in divinity degree. He was ordained to the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Washington, severed as the “TV priest” for the District of Columbia, a chaplain in the Air Force Reserves, and a pastor at a church in Maryland. He was named a monsignor by Pope John Paul II in 2006. 

The novel was published two years before the public scandal involving Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington and the letter published by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano calling for Pope Francis to resign for allegedly setting aside sanctions placed on McCarrick by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict, and making him a powerful advisor to Francis. McCarrick was forced to resign his cardinal position after the scandal involving McCarrick’s sexual abuse of Catholic seminarians and underaged teens became public.

Strange Gods is suspenseful and often riveting, and occasionally given to a bit of extended sermonizing (the authors are priests, after all). It argues a more liberal position in the ongoing conflict between clerical and lay debates in the church, but it does provide a vivid picture of the powerful clerical culture that so dominates the church and its archdioceses.

Top photograph: St. Peter’s Basilica interior, Vatican City, by Ellen Auer via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Broken Cross” by Luke Davis

The Basilica Cathedral of St. Louis is one the city’s great landmarks located near several other landmarks. Situated on Lindell Boulevard in what we call the Central West End, it’s close to Forest Park, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital complex and medical center. The cathedral’s distinctive green roof can be seen from miles away on Interstate 64, and its interior is famous for what is the largest installation of mosaic decoration anywhere in the world. Pope John Paul II said mass here when he visited St. Louis in 1999, and it was the church where baseball great Stan Musial’s funeral was conducted. (While not quite as momentous, my oldest son’s graduation ceremony was held here in 1998.)

It’s also an unlikely seen for a murder, this place that even we Protestants call “the New Cathedral” to distinguish it from the “Old Cathedral” adjacent to the St. Louis Arch. But that’s exactly what it is in The Broken Cross, the second Cameron Ballack mystery by Luke Davis.

An attorney, fresh from a major courtroom win defending the St. Louis Archdiocese, is found stabbed to death in one of the cathedral’s chapels. Ballack and his partner Tori Vaughan, police detectives assigned to the suburban St. Charles County Police Department, are currently assigned to the special investigation unit that investigates major crimes with significant religious connections.

In this case, Ballack is assigned as the lead detective, a not-exactly-welcomed move from the other officers involved in the investigation. They’re from the City of St. Louis’s Police Department, and they don’t initially take kindly to having to report from the rube from St. Charles. Not to mention the fact that Ballack is wheelchair-bound. But Ballack is in charge because of his success in solving a series of murders at an Orthodox seminary in St. Charles County, once that nearly cost him and his partner’s lives (Litany of Secrets, the first Cameron Ballack mystery).

This case involves the scandal of sexual abuse that engulfed the Catholic Church, a priest shuffled from ministry to ministry, a suicide from five years before, lawyers and real estate executives trying to shield the Archdiocese’s assets, and a more-than-sufficient number of suspects.

It is one enormously satisfying mystery story. Davis is a great storyteller who does something interesting with his lead character. What might have easily become too much sympathy for the man in the wheelchair is blunted by Ballack’s character – slightly acerbic, something of a chip on his shoulder, not exactly the guy you’d like to have a beer with. Despite his Christian parents, he’s trying to find God, not entirely convinced of his existence. And he even has a love interest. In short, he’s recognizably human. His first-rate mind and ability to process information and connect the dots will eventually identify the killer. But he does make mistakes.

Luke Davis

Davis teaches at Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis (and yes, the story does contain a small plug for the school as Ballack’s alma mater which I can forgive, since it was also my youngest son’s high school). He’s also taught at schools in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia. He describes himself as “Presbyterian body, Lutheran heart, Anglican blood, Orthodox spirit,” all of which have served him well in writing the Cameron Ballack mysteries.

I have to say I can’t help but enjoy reading a story with recognizable sights from the city where I live. In addition to the Cathedral, there’s the Drury Inn downtown, Cardinal stadium, Whitfield School, familiar office buildings and law offices in Clayton (the county seat of St. Louis County), references to my own suburb of Kirkwood, Fast Eddie’s Restaurant across the Mississippi in Alton – well, you get the picture.

The Broken Cross is a great story about horrifying events straight from the news that all of us are familiar with. It’s a fine mystery. And it ultimately is about what can happen when the church – any church – doesn’t deal with the sin that threatens to destroy it.

Related:

My review of Litany of Secrets

Reading a Novel That Stars Your Hometown

Luke Davis blogs at Sacred Chaos.

Photograph: Basilica Cathedral of St. Louis, scene of the first murder in The Broken Cross.

Roderick Strange’s “John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive”

I read what I thought was an essay in a high school literature class: “The Idea of the University” (1852) by John Henry Cardinal Newman. It was something that, at one time, high school seniors read in literature class, and might show more than casual interest in because college was imminent, at least for many of them.

It turned out that what we were reading was only an excerpt; the work is a full-length book. For a long time, possibly until the time of post-modernism in literature, Newman’s work had great influence on our collective understanding of what a university was supposed to be. (It also took me a while to realize that the Newman Center at my university, LSU, took its name from the Cardinal, as did the Newman Centers at universities across the United States, from the man who wrote The Idea of a University.) (I was raised Protestant, so I had a slight excuse for my ignorance.)

At the heart of the work was that the purpose of the university was intellectual and pedagogical, not religious or moral. And he believed that the discussion of controversial topics was important in discerning truth. (And this, of course, would set the stage for conflict with church authorities.)

What I did not know much about was who Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) was. And then, in the shop at Westminster Cathedral (not the Abbey) in London, I saw a paperback copy of John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive by Roderick Strange. Home it came to St. Louis.

The work is both an intellectual biography of Newman as well as something of a memoir by Strange, rector of the Pontifical Beda College at the Vatican. Strange describes how he came to discover and study Newman, and how the works of the cardinal became a lifelong interest and passion.

Newman didn’t start out as a Catholic. He was originally Church of England, and an ordained C of E priest. He was assigned to a post at Oxford University, and there became interested in Catholicism. He became known as a leader of the Oxford Movement, which aimed to return the Church of England to its Catholic roots. He eventually left the church, embraced Catholicism, and became a Catholic priest.

For many years, life in the Catholic Church did not go smoothly for Newman. The man had a brilliant, inquisitive, almost restless mind. He questioned. Occasionally he was suspected of heresy. He resigned (out of frustration) as the rector of Catholic University of Ireland. In 1859, he was named editor of the Catholic newspaper The Rambler, replacing someone considered a bit too liberal. He wrote and published an article that suggested that there were times and circumstances when the laity should be consulted in matters of doctrine. The article was not well received by the priests and bishops, and he resigned a few months later.

For years he worked under something of a cloud, serving the church at the Birmingham oratory. In 1864, he published Apologia Pro Vita Sua, another milestone in English literature and one in which he defended his religious beliefs.  And then, in 1879, Pope Leo XIII elevated Newman to the status of cardinal.

Strange focuses on Newman’s thinking and writings, placing them in the context of both England and the Catholic Church in the 19^th century (it’s helpful to remember that Catholics in England were only granted full citizenship rights in the 1829, when Newman was 28, even though he was still Church of England at this time). And he approaches his subject much as Newman himself would have done, with a question if reverent perspective.

The book also taught me something else I didn’t know – Newman was a poet. One of his better known poems is “The Dream of Gerontius,” but he wrote a number of other religious poems as well.

A Mind Alive is a solid introduction to Newman’s thinking.

Photograph: The Birmingham Oratory in England, where Newman served for many years. Birmingham is also Newman’s birthplace.