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The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection's title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator's eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they've been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.
In One Happy Old Priest, Father Thomas Sullivan looks back on his eighty years as a catholic, a life that includes both family and scores of fine seminarians, priests, nuns, and parishioners. With an honest and rollicking writing style, Father Sullivan recreates moments that stand out in his childhood, seminary education, priest training, and life as a foreign missionary and pastor stateside. One Happy Old Priest is one mans look at how the church has cultivated, preserved, and navigated decades of sometimes unwelcome change. The volume includes photographs of family, priests, nuns, and parishioners. An appendix lists Columban Fathers mentioned in the text, a testament of the many who dedicated their lives to the service of the church. The epilogue draws attention to the man Father Sullivan believes represents the best of what the church has to offer, then and now.
Father John is the parish priest of Our Lady of Sorrows in Westonville, but when the ordered tranquillity of his life is shattered by a stranger walking into the confessional on Ash Wednesday, he finds himself on a Lenten journey of increasing dread and horror. And when he is confronted with memories of his historic abuse, John discovers that what he thought to be forgiven and forgotten still lurks deep in his memory. A pattern of murders unveils terrifying associations between the stranger’s appearances, John’s own past, and the murders. Could the stranger be the cardinal who abused him during his time in Rome, and who is rumoured to have died in the 9/11 attacks? Is he a ghost emanating from the same world as Sarah, the ghost of a little girl whose benign appearances are a protective presence in John’s life? Or is the man in the confessional not really dead? Through the increasing traumas of Lent, John struggles with the temptations and fears that begin to assail him wherever he turns. The Good Priest is a story of faith and doubt, of real and imagined hauntings, of the epic dramas that lurk beneath the surface of an ordinary Catholic parish, and of the devastating power of violence and terror to rip apart relationships, friendships and loyalties. At once a thriller and a theological exploration, the book takes the reader into a world of altered realities where nothing is quite what it seems...
When a young priest makes some bad choices, it becomes a blight on his vocation that follows him all his life. Father Bernard made some bad choices. Jennifer was one. Helen, another, although Helen began as an innocent mistake that got out of hand. After twenty years as an assistant pastor at Immaculate Conception Church on the west side of Chicago, Father Bernards vocation has deteriorated, not only because of his moral lapses but also from its lack of substance and value. His duties have become tedious and distressing; the sin, dying, dishonesty, and infidelity drains him. Deepening his distress is his life at a rundown, disintegrating parish, with an outdated liturgy and a pastor, Father McElroy, who is a rude, spiteful, and offensive old man. His attempt to save himself from his cheerless, desolate life leads him down a dangerous path, one that puts him in direct conflict with his vocation. Can he salvage his failing vocation and repair his troubled soul? Can he find the strength to restore the spiritual meaning and substance that once guided him as a priest?
Tony Bartlett's story is thrillingly upside-down. Rather than the classic conversion narrative of escaping the world to dedicate your life to God, it is about escaping a collapsing institutional order to discover a different self and learning to be in the world. An extraordinary account with pivotal themes of sexuality, trauma, revolution, and relationship, Unbecoming a Priest spans eras, classes, continents, cities, wars, iconic figures, spiritualities, and above all divergent modes of Christian-being-in-the-world. From London to Rome, from Europe to Latin America, journeying with exceptional fellow pilgrims like Mother Teresa, Pedro Casaldaliga, Carlo Carretto, it is a story of pain and messiness becoming ultimately one of joy, life, and meaning. Subtly but surely, the journey is also gospel-inspired, where the figure of Jesus takes on a provocative, anarchic role, helping in the overturning of sacrificial cliches and systems. Inevitably at stake is the meaning of priesthood itself, either propping up an eternal order amidst history's escalating crisis, or seeking with others the germ of authentic new human becoming and hope. Here is the inescapable drama and contemporary truth of unbecoming a priest.