Cardinal Mahony: A Novel
by By Kaiser, Robert Blair
Category: Fiction , Religious

An American bishop gets kidnapped outside his cabin in the High Sierras one snowy morning in November 2008 by three liberation theologians who look like terrorists. They take him off to southern Mexico in his own helicopter and put him on trial for his sins in front of an international television audience. A jury of his peers, six retired Latin American bishops, find him guilty, and give him a surprising sentence. He falls in love with his kidnappers and leads the American Catholic Church into a radical new way of being, still Catholic, but aggressively accountable to the people, which is to say aggressively American. The fictional bishop in this novel is, obviously, based on Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles in a piece of reality fiction that pushes the envelope. It is set in the reality of the current priest-sex-abuse scandal, and it projects ahead in time to tell the story of a colorful crewand a new Cardinal Mahony working to give Catholics a voice, a vote, and citizenship in their Church.