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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 Based on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, he shows how the church’s institutional suspicion of human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.
Publisher : Harmony; 1st edition (January 20, 2004)
Language : English
Hardcover : 672 pages
ISBN-10 : 0767914309
ISBN-13 : 978-0767914307
Item Weight : 2.3 pounds
Dimensions : 6.33 x 1.54 x 9.47 inches
Reviewer: klavierspiel
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Difficult to read, impossible to put down
Review: Most of us non-Catholics followed the breaking story of the sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic church that rocked the nation a few years ago in news reports that originated from the Boston Globe and spread throughout the nation. David France's book brings the fascinating, horrifying tale together in this volume whose chronology spans half a century. France, a senior editor for Newsweek magazine, has combined original reporting with a wealth of sources to paint a picture of a deeply afflicted institution that seems incapable of healing itself. The individual tales of predatory priests unpunished and the young men and women whose lives they destroyed are difficult enough to read; even more appalling is the systematic defensive reaction of church superiors, who shuffled offending priests from parish to parish, sent them to inadequate treatment facilities, and never reported their criminal offenses to secular authorities. Then, when the scandal broke and lawsuits began pouring in, their defense was to stonewall and obfuscate at every possible opportunity.France juggles a large cast of heroes and villains with a sure hand, though his quasi-cinematic technique of cutting back and forth between different stories occasionally makes the narrative too fragmented. His only serious failing is that, by keeping himself consistently in the background, he does not tie the entire tale together, so that the reader is left wondering what, if anything, has come of this whole sorry saga. One would guess that the death of John Paul II and the ascendancy of Cardinal Ratzinger to pope, both of whom come off in the book as insensitive to the crisis, bodes ill for any meaningful reform within the church for years to come.
Reviewer: A reader
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Brilliant and Painful Reading
Review: This book is an absolutely horrifying indictment of the Catholic Church. In chapter after chapter of searing personal anecdotes, rather than dry abstractions, the author shows the devastating, life-long effects that being abused by priests has on the victims. Interwoven with the victims' stories are the stories of the abusers: those sordid, shoddy, worthless excuses for human beings who used the enormous power of their priesthood to victimize thousands of children and adolescents, and then terrify them into silence. And on top of that, the author also details the relentless campaign of coverups that the higher clergy engaged in: concealing the priests' misdeeds, and assigning them to other parishes where they continued to molest children, or sending them off to "retreat centers" where they would supposedly be "cured." Then, of course, they were forgiven their trespasses and allowed to begin trespassing anew. A final obscenity is the Catholic Church's decision to blame the whole problem on the "homosexualization" of the priesthood, although study after study has shown that child molesters are rarely homosexuals, and homosexuals are hardly ever child molesters.The book proves how hollow the concepts of forgiveness and redemption are with regard to such incorrigible men: these abusers can NEVER be forgiven or redeemed: they should all be locked up in chains in dungeons somewhere and left to rot. Instead, they're protected, coddled, cared for and endlessly "forgiven" by a solicitous hierarchy, while the victims are left to stew in their own bitterness, helplessness and rage. What a totally ugly and profoundly disturbing picture. How can anyone retain a shred of allegiance to an institution that permits such monstrous misdeeds to go for the most part unpunished?
Reviewer: Maine Writer
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Are all religious hierarchies ultimately corrupt?
Review: I believe so. And the Catholic hierarchy of today ranks close to the top. Setting aside the monstrous abuses involving thousands of clergy members, the Vatican's reaction and unwillingness to stand up and atone for these horrors is the greatest outrage of all. But don't think that these abuses are limited to the United States, or are anything new. They aren't. Ever since the church instituted its doctrinally bankrupt policy prohibiting priests from marrying (the vow of celibacy was a political move intended to shift money and assets from individual priest's families to the Vatican), the church has attracted men who are either in denial of their own sexuality (whether deviant or not), or looking for easy access to their prey or sexual partners. Now, this certainly isn't all or most priests, but it is a significant minority. Those who think that this scandal doesn't go the very heart of the church are avoiding reality, in my opinion.This book takes a compelling slice of the modern cases and shows a church seeking little other than to avoid responsibility. I would like to get these so-called religious men--not the perpetrators, but those who protect them to protect the church--and ask them, "What would Jesus do?" Protect the abusers? Feign ignorance? Try to avoid paying compensation? Interpose technical legal defenses? Just read the Gospels and the answers to these questions become very, very clear.
Reviewer: Lavinia Whately
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: grief or disgust. think bad people depend on that as a ...
Review: There is no simple way to tell the enormity, depth and complexity of the horror of this case. And one must be brave and strong to read about such evil and not turn away in fear, grief or disgust. think bad people depend on that as a way to hide in plain sight..This is a brilliant book detailing the heroism of many people who brought to light how much child abuse and child-rape was committed by priests without any real effort to stop it for decades. I think the person who reads this book is a hero too. Highly recommended.
Reviewer: Mark&Morgan
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Book bent and torn
Review: The packaging was fine, but this book was sent in the package bent and torn.
Reviewer: AMA
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: a must read for any Roman Catholic who is concerned with the church's welfare!
Review: comprehensive and factual
Reviewer: david wooton
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Every think you need to know about the American catholic church
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This book provides a timeline to the evolving sex abuse scandal. The Catholic Church emerges as an institution which is more concerned about its assets and reputation than about the pain and suffering that a minority of priests imposed on individuals and families and it is successful in this regard. It strives to be impartial but it does not succeed and this limits its efficacy in the documentation of the unfolding disaster . You cannot push a hidden agenda as truth.