Product Description

Our Fathers is history at its best—as intimate as a diary, as immediate and epic as a novel.

When, in early 2002, a team of Boston Globe reporters broke open the pedophilia scandal around Father John J. Geoghan—and then Paul Shanley, Joseph Birmingham, and hundreds of other priests in Boston and across the country—the entire American Catholic Church spun into crisis. But by that time, the damage was already done. Perhaps a hundred thousand children had already fallen into traps laid by their priests. Every Catholic in the country – and everyone who had ever set foot in a church—faced troubling questions: Why had this happened? How could the secrets of this abuse have been so widely held, and so closely protected? How could the church have let it happen?

David France takes us back to the church of the 1950s, a time of relative innocence, to look for answers. With deft nuance, he crafts a panoramic portrait of the faithful, encompassing the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and courage of hundreds of Catholic and non-Catholic families over the last fifty years. Based on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, he shows how the church’s institutional suspicion of human sexuality ironically lit the fuse on the crisis.

Our Fathers braids a heartbreaking narrative from the personal lives of good and bad priests, pious and heartless prelates, self-interested lawyers turned heroes, holy altar boys turned drug-addicts, mothers torn between their children and their faith, hard-bitten investigative reporters reduced to tears, and thousands of church critics who, through this crisis, returned to their faith renewed and invigorated. He shows us the intense history of dissent within the ranks, especially regarding Catholic teachings on sexuality and homosexuality. He tells the heroic stories of whistle-blowing nuns, independent pastors, church insiders trying to do the right thing, and—ultimately—a group of blue-collar men, all molested by the same priest, who overcame their bitterness and took it upon themselves to try to save their church.

This book is a tribute to those ordinary Catholics called upon to make extraordinary contributions. Our Fathers is the sweeping, authoritative, and gripping work the scandal and its aftermath demand.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1680423 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-05
• Released on: 2005-04-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.20" h x 1.44" w x 5.40" l, 1.15 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

From Publishers Weekly
France, who covered the Catholic Church sex scandal as an investigative editor at Newsweek, delivers a huge volume that offers reasons for the scandal and humanizes those involved-victims, perpetrators and hierarchy. Apart from interviews with some participants that are woven into a sweeping 40-year-long chronology of events, there isn't a great deal of factually new material in this tome, as copious footnotes drawing on others' reporting and analysis show. But the author dramatizes the story with you-are-there intimacy, from the opening vignette that confusingly narrates a movie scene; through "the soft deep heat" of an adolescent kiss experienced by a sexually confused teenager "who once was struck by love" (and who grows into a self-hating gay priest); and on through interior views of a victim's devastated mother. The 672-page book isn't all adjectival color, but especially in its early chapters, which reach back to the 1950s to recreate incidents, France's tone is sometimes melodramatic, which some may appreciate as storytelling, while others may perceive as sensationalizing. The author argues that the cause of the scandal is an antiquated misunderstanding of human sexuality, with a view of homosexuality that is pernicious, a thesis that gives the church the burden of societal homophobia. So readers get a side tour of the 1969 Stonewall bar riot, Vatican-driven suppression of advocates for gay Catholics and other anecdotes, including that of a gay Italian man who in 1998 immolated himself in St. Peter's Square. Although France sees them as essential, such episodes lengthen the book and dilute its focus on what happened in rectories, chanceries and family living rooms.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
France conducts a fascinating journey across the troubled landscape of the Catholic Church over the course of the past 50 years. Claiming that the cultural and social milieu created by the institutional church and imposed on the faithful during the last half of the twentieth century was largely responsible for fomenting the current sexual abuse crisis, he interviewed scores of laypersons, priests, victims, lawyers, psychologists, insiders, and outsiders to provide a comprehensive overview of the context in which pedophilia was allowed to flourish unchecked. In his capacity as an investigative journalist who covered the crisis in the Catholic Church for Newsweek, he accessed a wealth of previously unpublished Vatican documents, scientific reports, and private correspondence that supply the compelling background for this explosive analysis. The searing personal portraits of individuals struggling to come to grips with both their faith and with the frailties of their leadership lend a haunting emotional intimacy to the often disturbing subject material. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
The author, a former Newsweek editor, "has set himself the daunting task of making sense of a whirligig... France succeeds marvelously... Our Fathers has a kind of compulsive readability."
-Mary Gordon, The New York Times Magazine

"No matter how thoroughly this material has been presented by other reporters, the effect of this cumulative retelling is devastating."
-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Stunning in its insight, ...France wrties with compassion and intelligence."
- John D. Thomas, Atlanta Journal & Constitution


"...a well-written, fast-paced and riveting account involving thousands of clergymen and youths whose innocence was destroyed by trusted authority figures."
- Bill Wililams, Hartford Courant


From the Hardcover edition.