This year has been awash with fantastical tales: The ending of the Harry Potter series, the movie versions of “Beowulf” and “The Golden Compass.”
None of them compare with this:
“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, ï¬Ând him guilty, and give him a surprising sentence. The bishop falls in love with his kidnappers and leads the American Catholic Church into a radical new way of being, still Catholic but aggressively accountÂable to the people.”
That’s right, veteran Vatican journalist (and former Jesuit) Robert Blair Kaiser has penned a novel called “Cardinal Mahony,” with the aforementioned plot.
Kaiser says: “This work pushes the envelope. It is both “ï¬Âction” and “non-ï¬ÂcÂtion,” set in the reality of the current priest-sex-abuse scandal and projecting 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?”
Check out the awesome cover here.
