Prince of Peace
O'Rourke, William
liantly reminds us that this course, interrupted and repressed, is a road worth taking again. But to take it requires some redoing, some concerted psychophysical exercise I think. For...
...Yet, significantly, it is also amazingly close...
...Again Greeley and his "theological sibling" touch a raw nerve of vital concern to the Commonweal: 696...
...Besides the park's free-wandering deer, the Shannons' only neighbors are the papal nuncio and the president of Ireland...
...Darling, you must...
...Maguire's heroics in Korea, as depicted, are right out of a G.I...
...That's how you resist...
...Deerfield, the ambassador's residence, is a white Monticello arising in Dublin's great Phoenix Park...
...The soap opera gravity of Carroll's re-imagining of events and participants pulls all action and characters into the most predictable of orbits, rather than the weird and eccentric orbits of actual life...
...Who could fault someone whose last ambassadorial act was to plant a tree, a copper beech at that...
...Our individualistic common sense, confined as it often is to the boundaries of skin, inhibits these expansive rebirthing moves...
...I appreciate the basic spirit of hope which pervades the work...
...Durkin accurately describes himself as " a two-bit professor at a second-rate college, a sometime contributor to smallcirculation journals," a fellow who hopes to write a novel one of these days, and who is, apparently, something of an unexamined sexist, a classic homophobe, a licentious prude, and, most injurious to the book, not a very good writer...
...E.L.Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, which uses the Rosenberg case, is an example...
...Here is a sample of the dialogue between Durkin and his wife, Carolyn, the ex-nun, that takes place during their period of anti-war work...
...Shannon's reflections touch all the bases of Irish social problems - - women, work, welfare, wine...
...The charge of "Rotarian optimism" is a fit counterpart to Sheehan's simpleminded village-atheist agnosticism which I hope and pray does not constitute the true description of the state of the question...
...PATRICK JORDAN is an assistant editor of ~ DONALD Io F I I ~ ' . , l~Co Commonweal...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...Prince of Peace is slated to become a best seller (it is a Book-of-the-Month selection, has a "major" paperback sale), but I'd be surprised if it actually becomes one...
...She notes an Irishman's manner of proposal: "Will ye be buried with my folks...
...I hope that it will live and thrive and grow and watch over this house and these gardens...
...66r three times...
...One cannot help liking this Mrs...
...We are treated throughout to such gems of reflection and dead stick prose from Durkin a s , " I was filled with regret, but also stern acknowledgment that opaque hardening is the only law that heartbreak knows...
...PATRICK JORDAN Correspondence (Continued from page 674) message, transforming and being transformed in the process, without losing sight of a basic unity underlying the apparent multiplicity and variety...
...Surely not all of us have lost sight of the gospels as "good news" in our fashionable eagerness to embrace Kierkegaardian despair...
...Mrs...
...Their testaments are rich with a full range of emotion: joy, anger, humor, pathos and guilt...
...Shannon and her book...
...Don't leave us here...
...Her book has such a reach...
...She nodded...
...We had an interesting visit with the elderly bishop [of Cork], but I'm afraid that as a woman, a liberal, and an American Catholic, my views and those of the bishop are very, very far apart...
...That' s how you keep faith...
...Box 5719, Baltimore, MD 21208...
...Shannon to be either bland or uninvolved...
...The former is a low calorie diet for fashion-plate models, no meal...
...You take care of me...
...more likely, it will be its one principal virtue: too much depressing and painful history about the Vietnam war, served up too plainly -- and, in that case alone, all too true...
...The narrative method Carroll has chosen may have been the easiest, but it leaves the novel with a plodding structure and a repetitive way of telling the story: which is, roughly, the tale of the 1960s Catholic anti-war resistance, as lived by the war-hero, priest, and movement celebrity, Michael Maguire, told, with some mixed emotions, by his adoring boyhood chum, Frank Durkin...
...or call, Days: 919-8210350 - - Evenings: 919-851-7949...
...For Renaissance artists and saints could take for granted, as part of their "common sense," a participatory mode of consciousness that could, like Michelangelo, identify with solid rock and draw human figures from it...
...He teaches at the University of Notre Catholics Speak Out About Confession By QUENTIN DONOGHUE and LINDA SHAPIRO This fascinating, groundbreaking book is the first objective investigation of-the Sacrament of Confession-not only exploring its roots and development, but revealing how its practitioners feel about the experience...
...I will have fun...
...If this be considered romantic and foolish, so be it...
...Her arms went around me...
...Carroll may have wanted to portray just such a person, but he certainly risks censure (and a flawed book) when he makes such a creature his novel's narrator...
...Write Fr...
...In some cases, romans ti clef, key novels, are attempts at serious literature...
...I just talked about what it is like to be the Classified RATES: 70r a word, one time...
...and "Jesus was the ultimate Mister Goodbar...
...Somehow, Father Imbelli manages to make nostalgia and aspiration seem dirty words, without realizing that hope-fullness and faith-fullness coupled with thoughtful respect for tradition are among the most essential characteristics of Catholic Christianity...
...Bill Axe, The Trinitarian Friars, P.O...
...That material is the most affecting, since it reads, more or less, like straight history, not the chopped-up and rearranged story of the Berrigans and the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives...
...That's niy job, love, I'm your husband...
...For those familiar with the actual history and personalities of that period of Catholic resistance, Prince of Peace is an affront...
...In consequence, writers have often cleaved to historical sources...
...Bernardin considers the topic a "critically important subject...
...In her diary, the restraints are more removed...
...Imbelli belittles Greeley and Durkin's suggestions for positive action...
...Still he stared pleadingly up at him...
...Please contact Rev...
...The appreciation of women as analog of God, while firmly grounded in New Testament (and some Old Testament) evidence and kept alive in much of our mystical and artistic tradition, has been far too long overshadowed by the Augustinian distrust of femininity...
...You're not working...
...Oh, Durk, you know me, don't you...
...As if Jesus had said, "take my ideas and eat," not "take my body...
...Interested in learning more about becoming a priest in the Missionary Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina...
...But that was impossible...
...She opens her heart and her house not only to the glittering, but to itinerants, the handicapped, the elderly...
...Shannon sets down some rules for her tenure: " I will not leave Ireland known merely as 'the American ambassador's wife.' I will not complain about the weather...
...And she does have fun...
...II I In brief I UP IN THE PARK: THE DIARY OF THE WIFE OF THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR TO IRELAND, 1977-1981, by Elizabeth Shannon, Atheneum, $17.95, 358 pp...
...No one takes care of me like you do...
...or call collect (301) 484-2250...
...Maguire performs the original marriage ceremony in some sort of sacred and profane version of a m~nage tl trois (overall, the sex in the novel is written in a romantic style where breasts seem always to be described as "flaring...
...128 East 36th Street, NY 10016 14 December 1984:695 narrative flaws, wooden characters, and lack of eloquence that would prevent Prince of Peace from becoming a best seller...
...But, it will not be the many REVIEWERS FATHER DAVID T~LAN, SJ., edits the book section of Commonweal...
...When recent history is used, the fictional device employed is the roman ~ clef, where foolhardy authors dare libel laws and serve up "thinly veiled" characters lifted from life...
...Carroll can rightly claim that few know that history intimately anyway -- and that his book is a novel and should be judged as such...
...Most of this is done through you-are-there com, enfions, since Carroll makes young Father Maguire, newly-ordained, the right-hand man of the above mentioned Father O'Shea, who is the right-hand man of SpeUman while the Cardinal tours and wheels and deals in Vietnam...
...63r six times...
...the ringside seat books are potboilers, generational sagas, Leon Uris-like fare...
...How to Save the Catholic Church makes a convincing case for developing positive models of the sacramentality and asceticism of sexuality, a position supported by Cardinal Bemardin in his introductory remarks to Mary G. Durkin's Feast of Love: Pope John Paul H on Human Intimacy and Marital Intimacy: A Catholic Perspective...
...Father Maguire and the narrator form a not-soclassic triangle: they are in love (and both eventually marry) the same woman, an ex-nun from a wealthy family...
...The mother of three growing sons who enliven these pages, she is an ardent feminist...
...WILLIAM O'ROURKE is the author of the Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, and the novels Idle Hands and The Meekness of Isaac...
...Your paintings are the opposite of war...
...but it is as a novel that Prince of Peace falters most: what is verified history is at least Commonweal: 694 informatively retold...
...Perhaps publishers feel, given the evidence of Father Greeley, that there is a large audience out there for' romantic fiction about current and expriests and nuns, if there is enough sex and guilt in it...
...From her diary, one would question whether it is possible for Mrs...
...F l u t e s Bamboo flutes, recordings...
...I have no problem appreciating their ability to get to the core of things and suspect that even many New Yorkers might agree with me...
...His peripheral characters are true to life, but the central figures are distorted...
...She has nightmares over "the violence...
...but Doctorow kept the central figures of his story intact and distorted the peripheral figures, while Carroll does just the opposite...
...This will be her diary, not the ambassador's...
...James Carroll's new novel, his fifth, Prince of Peace, falls somewhere in between the two types, half historical soap opera, half roman d clef...
...She leaned against me, and I felt the tension drain out of her...
...The heart of the book is a wealth of interviews with Catholics of all ages, from all walks of life, penitents and priests alike...
...redoing dramatic public events has long been a staple of popular fiction...
...And so, too commonly, authentic spiritual impulses in our time deliver a muddled message: they temptus to jump out of our skin or to keep our faith strictly above the belt...
...The silver cross...
...There is a touch of Masterpiece Theatre here...
...given its peculiarly Catholic Origins we should have" felt responsible for vietnam, .the narrator keeps reiterating~ Where Vietnam is concerned, though, there is plenty of blame to go round...
...Over 30...
...His priest-resister, Michael Maguire (whose last name may be a dig at Cardinal Spellman's chancellor, Archbishop Maguire, who had a hand in giving Daniel Berrigan the bum's rush out of the country in 1965) is a Frankenstein creature: the torso of Philip Berrigan, the head of Dan, arms and legs, ecumenically, of William Sloane Coffin and Daniel Ellsberg, and the fingers of anyone's guess...
...She is also a public figure...
...After she appeared on Irish television's "Late, Late Show," Elizabeth Shannon, the wife of William V. Shannon, President Carter's ambassador to Ireland, noted in her diary: "My appearance was noncontroversial and bland...
...wife of the American ambassador...
...We hear the voices of clergy and laity reflecting positive and negative views of a relationship that apparently leaves an indelible imprint...With remarkable ease the authors shape a lengthy evolution, from the Irish invention of the confessional 'box' to present-day 'reconciliation' spaces...
...Usually, the events depicted are at least a generation old, principals dead and buried...
...she asked, "I really can?' ' "What, go back to painting...
...You must work...
...He focused on the soldier's breast insignia off which light glanced...
...WUliam O'Rourke F OR NOVELISTS there has always been the Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not problem: truth has shown itself over and over to be stranger than fiction: more vivid, alas, more, imaginative...
...That's the longing you feel, the unhappiness...
...Joe comic book: "Why didn't the man in the chopper jump down and help him save Pace...
...The FBI eventually makes use of the goings on between Father Maguire and the narrator's wife as blackmail against the hapless Durkin, who becomes, first an Iscariot, then a Benedictine monk...
...At the novel's core is the history of the Vietnam war, told from a Catholic perspective, though one quite chauvinist...
...Hybrid but hackneyed I PRINCE OF PEACE James Carroll Little, Brown, $17.95, 488 pp...
...Imbelli mentions it only within the context of judging the entire work unworthy of a $16.95 expenditure...
...Classified payable with order...
...Popular fiction demands rather simple conflicts, but Carroll's model seems to be more an episode of Dallas, rather than, say, Gone with the Wind...
...My own background is Austrian, surely far removed from the Greeleys' Chicago experience...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., NYC 10016...
...You mean I can...
...You are an artist, Caro...
...The man who'd been firing from the doorway was Father O'Shea...
...Completed B.A...
...Durkin tells Carolyn, "You're an artist...
...Under the circumstances, I kept my views tO myself and praised the tea...
...There is a serious and important subject buried in the center of Carroll's novel...
...Or this consciousness could, like Ignatius's, identify with historical archetypal figures I like Christ and find one's soul, one's true body, "in Him...
...For over a thousand years the official church has allowed Neo-Platonic, Gnostic, and Manichean wodd and flesh negation to obscure the message of life and world affirmation contained in the Christian understanding of Christ as homoousios, fully God and fully human...
...John A. Wall, Vocations Director, 300 Cardinal Gibbons Dr., Raleigh, North Carolina 27606...
...You're my best friend...
...The hybrid mentioned earlier, part soap opera history, part roman d clef, though a taxing form, can be handled dexterously...
...Readers get, they hope a ringside seat on how it was...
...The novel doesn't improve, much when we're away from domestic wars and onto the battlefield...
...Founded to ransom slaves, our small community of men have grounded our lives and our work of liberation in fraternity, prayer, and the Bible for over 800 years...
...Box 273 Mountainview, HI 96771...
...1-800-633-2252, Father Nigro, Gonzaga University, Spokane 99258...
...Same thing...
...The novel reads as an informal biography composed by a friend, but a friend, unfortunately, who is not a likable chronicler...
...Surely Imbelli does not mean to imply that only Irish Catholics are sexual beings...
...and, because of it, Prince of Peace is more disheartening than bad...
...what Carroll invents is hackneyed and too easy...
...wide-ranging survey that includes history, anecdotes and the reminiscences of contemporary American Catholics...
...Priesthood Desire Priesthood...
...It is an enlightening panorama, opening up this intimate experience to all in a uniquely nonjudgmental perspective'- Publishers Weekly A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB ALTERNATE $17.95 at all bookstores Dame...
...R e l i g i o u s Community Considering Religious Life...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
