Cardinal Mahony: A Novel - Softcover

Robert Blair Kaiser

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0964664291 ISBN 13: 9780964664296

Publisher: Humble-bee Press, 2007

An American bishop gets kidnapped outside his cabin in the High Sierras one snowy morning in November 2008 by three liberation theologians who look like terrorists. They take him off to southern Mexico in his own helicopter and put him on trial for his sins in front of an international television audience. A jury of his peers, six retired Latin American bishops, find him guilty, and give him a surprising sentence. He falls in love with his kidnappers and leads the American Catholic Church into a radical new way of being, still Catholic, but aggressively accountable to the people, which is to say aggressively American. The fictional bishop in this novel is, obviously, based on Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles in a piece of reality fiction that pushes the envelope. It is set in the reality of the current priest-sex-abuse scandal, and it projects ahead in time to tell the story of a colorful crewand a new Cardinal Mahony working to give Catholics a voice, a vote, and citizenship in their Church.

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About the Author:

Robert Blair Kaiser covered Vatican II for Time, worked on the religion beat for The New York Times, and served as journalism chairman at the University of Nevada Reno. Four of his eleven published books deal with Catholic church reform. This is his first novel. From 1999 to 2005, Kaiser was a contributing editor in Rome for Newsweek magazine and a Vatican consultant for CBS-TV.

Review:

This is a rollicking good tale by the esteemed American Catholic journalist and writer Robert Blair Kaiser. It’s a sort of cross between a Morris West novel – with its superb understanding of Catholic Church culture and politics – and a Tom Clancy action thriller.

West went to some trouble to disguise the identity of the people his characters were based on. Kaiser does not need to do that. His central character, Cardinal Roger Mahony, is in fact the present archbishop of Los Angeles – and a guy not exactly enjoying the best press at this moment. Most readers will not warm to him in the opening chapters of Kaiser’s novel. By the end of the book though, they will warm to him considerably. Mahony in a sense ends up as an Oscar Romero-type hero.

This novel has pace, it has action and above all, it has a point. I suspect this novel – perhaps like the novels by Morris West – might achieve more than a thousand homilies, papal encyclicals and serious commentaries that are endlessly dissecting the problems of the Catholic Church. Kaiser paints a picure of a different kind of leadership, a leadership that will have no fear in facing their final judgment. This is a leadership that great masses of ordinary people might be able to identify with again. This is a leadership that both tells the truth and is not afraid to face the truth.

This book will also annoy the hell out of those who think the Church is headed in the right direction as it sinks toward Remnant status. Let us hope it does finally annoy “the hell” out of them, enough to realise that the present direction is a one-way ticket to oblivion.

Brian Coyne, editor and publisher of Catholica Australia.

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