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Cardinal Mahony
A Novel
Robert Blair Kaiser
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Price: $19.95 US
Paperback | 272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9646642-9-6 |
Summary
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. This work has some ancient literary antecedents. Jonathan Swift and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote their message novels to entertain and to make a point. Their books--Gulliver’s Travels and Uncle Tom’s Cabin--are still selling, still being read around the world in more than 20 languages. 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 crew — and a new Cardinal Mahony -- working to give Catholics a voice, a vote, and citizenship in their Church. Utopian? Yes! Why not dream? Eugene Kennedy writes: “This is a cunning, mischievous novel that cuts behind the scenes, with a cast of characters drawn from real life who turn all of their old assumptions (and ours) upside down. A mesmerizing work.” Robert Mickens says: “Kaiser writes the impatience and tenderness of a true believer. No one has better journalistic instincts, or more experience reporting on Church politics. His novel will irritate as many readers as it is sure to delight.”
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.
