“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.

“A pilgrim of the future”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955) isn’t as well known today as he was 50 years ago. He was a Jesuit scholar, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher, writer, speaker, and archaeologist.  He helped identify and authenticate the fossil that became known as “Peking Man.” He wrote several works, some of which had to wait until after his death for publication – the Vatican always sensed a touch of heresy about his theology, at least while he was alive (and not entirely without reason).

He described himself as “a pilgrim of the future on my way back from a journey made entirely in the past,” and the description is an apt one. His writings challenged the Catholic Church on evolution, among other things, and suggested a kind of pantheism. And yet he was true to the church to the very end of his life, always obedient to his superiors.

In Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and the Cosmic Christ, author Alex Terego has provided a short and concise biography of the man and a summary of his thinking and philosophy. Teilhard de Chardin, Terego says, envisioned the “the whole world as the extension of God,” and his understanding of Jesus as “the Incarnate Being in the world of matter stayed with him his whole life.”

Yes, there were some of what we would understand as pantheistic leanings; Teilhard de Chardin was fusing what he had learned through science and philosophy with Catholic theology. He was concerned that the Church was being superseded by discoveries in science, and he understood those discoveries to be expressions of God. Most importantly, he didn’t see contradictions between faith and science, instead understanding a kind of convergence by both.

He had an important influence on many people, three of whom were the man who became Pope Benedict XVI, who recently resigned the papacy; Rowan Williams, the immediate past Archbishop of Canterbury; and the writer Flannery O’Connor. (In fact, it was in O’Connor’s letters that I first discovered Teilhard de Chardin.)

This is not an exhaustive biography, but it wasn’t meant to be, consisting of some 60 pages. Instead, it is an introduction to the man’s life and thought. Terego has done a real service in explaining his subject’s philosophy and theology – it’s not that simple to follow in the original writings.