The Red Hat
Christie, John
sometimes perplexing. Why, for example, does Kamen place his discussion of the creation of the Inquisition myth in the final chapter rather than at the beginning? Why does he examine the...
...Francis Martin, Edward & Susan Mathews, John & Margaret McCarthy, Glenn Olsen, Marc Ouellet, William Portier, Christophe Potworowski, Rosita & Thomas Rourke, Robert Royal, David Schind[er, Msgr...
...While on trial for the murder, O'Keefe produces the surprise DNA evidence, but the tests turn out negative...
...Meanwhile, Lannan, who had earlier supported the White House in a dispute over a lesbian Supreme Court justice, calls in the favor and gets Morrow appointed as U.S...
...Another is James Morrow, Lannan's seminary friend who's now a widowed University of Notre Dame author of a history of American Catholicism's decline...
...20017 Phone: (301) 962-7955...
...You can with this novel about an emerging African and Asian Catholicism and its corresponding Western dissipation...
...In much earlier novels, like The Priest (1973) and Gate of Heaven (1975), Notre Dame's distingtfished philosopher Ralph McInerny was funny and timely in dissecting the inane manifestations of modernism abounding in his fictional diocese of Fort Elbow, Ohio...
...Most important, he succeeds in reinterpreting a dark legend of torture and persecution as a series of human attempts to deal with issues of belief and social conflict...
...Other readers might feel underestimated by the novel's too neatly served eschatology and conclude that it overtaxes the faith readers extend to novelists...
...Joseph Capizzi, Peter Casarella, Fr...
...The schism collapses and Pius XIII repents before Timothy...
...That may not matter to one segment of his veteran readership which will relish the book precisely for its absolutes...
...To their consternation, the succeeding conclave elects another conservative, the Tanzanian Pope Timothy who sees the church's future as more with the growing, devout African and Asian masses than with the decadent, affluent West...
...Matthew Lamb, Thomas Langan, Bradley Lewis, Bishop William Lori, Fr...
...McInerny's artistic focus is the priest as agonized academic...
...Despite these problems, Henry Kamen's new version of his classic work is a major contribution to the history of religion and the history of Spain...
...The subplot features Julian O'Keefe, an ultramontane jettisoned from the semiCommonweal aj 4 August 14, 1998 nary by gay and liberal elements within its administration...
...The novel ends with an exordium to eternity and the ever-renewed riches of Christ, one of many such moving paragraphs that McInerny crafts...
...The action is, you might say, headlong...
...McInerny is often compared to J. F. Powers, a comparison inaccurate and unfair (though Red Hat incorporates playful allusions to Morte d'Urban...
...Lannan, who earlier and for once in a fence-sitting career, had sided against the schismatics, is again vindicated...
...There's much to value in this novel...
...Robert Sokolowski, Margaret Steinfels, Thomas Storck, Carol & Philip Zaleski, Louise & Mark Zwick Advance Registration: $135 Student rates available Make checks payable to The Religious Sense Symposium Hotel information will be sent with confirmation...
...But the pervasive Manichean voice McInerny brings to The Red Hat finally disables the novel...
...Later in Rome, he kidnaps and drugs Lannan, Alberto-Moro style, and draws a blood sample for the DNA evidence that will ensure disgrace...
...They personify Pius X's definition of modernism as the summation of all heresies, trail clouds of what Paul VI called the smoke of Satan...
...Ambassador to the Vatican where he is to lobby for Lannan's red hat...
...Augustine DiNoia, Marguerite & Roger Duncan, Ft...
...It's worth anybody's time, even though in his depictions of post-Vatican II progressives Mclnerny, cofounder of Crisis magazine, forsakes the scalpel for a baseball bat, and plausibility loses...
...He craves the honor so that, with ambition at last behind himself, he can be humble...
...The Religious Sense Symposium: Person, Meaning, and Culture in America Commemorating the English publication of The Religious Sense, by Msgr...
...In 2004, modernist U.S...
...McInerny's modernists come off as nothinghuman-is-alien-to-me caricatures bent on turning the City of God into Los Angeles...
...Seeking vengeance on all hypocritical progressives, Julian investigates a rumor that Archbishop Lannan fathered an illegitimate daughter while a seminarian...
...The Americans grumble about the conclave's legality and clamor for a new conclave, but Benedetto dies, conveniently, they can't help but think, in a plane crash...
...Caught your breath...
...At the height----or nadir---of the schism, they impose an astounding New Order with homosexuals of both genders in the hierarchy, euthanasia defined as a sacrament, and the Feast of the Holy Innocents celebrating the courage of women who abort their children rather than subject them to life in an overpopulated, underfed, patriarchal world...
...NOT A GREELEY NOVEL John Christie ~ eed to brush up your Spengler...
...For further information contact: The Religious Sense Symposium P.O...
...Romanus Cessario, Larry Chapp, Robert Connor, David Denny, Fr...
...bishops, theologians, and seminary rectors await the death of John Paul II, whose pontificate they view as having thwarted what they think Vatican II really meant: ordaining women, easing out celibacy, muting, if not ending, all church prohibitions and negatives, and stressing Christian love...
...Mentally locked in the p o s t u r e s of 1968 and w i t h meringues of 1990s political correctness, they misguide the American church into gradually and imperceptibly becoming Protestant...
...The clarity of the writing will make it appealing to interested general readers, as well as to specialists...
...Even when Kamen's conclusions are debatable, he asks the right questions...
...With tinges of racism and pique at feeling shut out of the game by the third worlders, the Americans engineer a schismatic conclave at Avignon, France, which elects an Italian and their kind of progressive, Pius XIII...
...But Red Hat's American heavies are another matter...
...Fax: (202) 526-1934 Commonweal 2 5 August 14, 1998...
...Lannan and the twenty others named along with him are excluded from the conclave, which elevates another c o n s e r v a t i v e , the frail Pope Benedetto...
...John Christie teaches in the Department of English at Indiana State University...
...There's more...
...With The Red Hat, he's a long way from Fort Elbow and targets heftier clerical prey...
...This is followed by a round of excommunications that brings the recalcitrant American bishops, for now, back into line...
...The secular and religious journalists, laden with Restoration comedy names like Nathaniel Patch, Ben Trovato, and Della Boca, are either theological amateurs or boozy, opportunistic hacks...
...Why does he examine the expulsion and dispersion of Spain's Jews in the second chapter and then look at Spanish anti-Semitic racialism in the eleventh chapter, separating these closely related topics with chapters devoted to a variety of other themes...
...The chapter devoted to the structure and politics of the Inquisition and the chapter devoted to its operation provide an excellent description of the Holy Office as a functioning bureaucracy, but it is difficult to understand why these two chapters should be placed in the middle of the book...
...The results are a series of beautiful, troubling interior monologues on the part of Lannan, his secretary Father Wales, Pope Benedetto, even Pius XIII, men fearful and alone on what Yukio Mishima once termed the battlefield of the spirit, on the edge of unbelief...
...The main characters are Archbishop Thomas Lannan of Washington, D.C., who's campaigning to be a prince of the church...
...Welcome: Cardinal James Hickey, Archbishop of Washington Keynote Address: Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, President, Pontifical Council for the Laity, Rome Confirmed discussants: Msgr...
...Luigi Guissani September 10-13, 1998 Georgetown University Conference Center, Washington, D.C...
...Box 4468 Washington...
...Lorenzo AIbacete, Frederick Bauerschmidt, Michael Baxter, Brian Benestad, John Berkman, Mary Ellen Bork...
...John Paul II names Lannan a cardinal but dies before the consistory...
...They're a surreal lot who dither at Roman synods about altar girls while bishops from India worry about their countrymen killing off female infants...
...Paul Griffiths, Robert Imbelli, Joop Koopman, Ft...
...Avery Dulles, Michael Garvey, Nori Grassi...
...Like renegade theologian Frank Baily, they're media-savvy as stage managers of discord at any cost...
...Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana...
...The mother surprises O'Keefe when he breaks into her home looking for evidence and she ends up murdered...
Vol. 125 • August 1998 • No. 14
