Clerical Error: A True Story (Handbooks of Catholic Theology)
by Robert Blair Kaiser
Category: Religion

Bob Kaiser was Time's man at Vatican II, and he told the story of that council in his bestseller of the early sixties, Pope, Council and World. It was a work as well informed as Xavier Rynne's Letters from Vatican City and probably more influential. "No reporter knew more about the council," said Michael Novak. "In the English-speaking world, at least, perhaps no source was to have quite the catalytic effect on opinion outside the council and even to an extent within it." This is a different story. It is the tale of an intrepid reporter who is so intent on covering the Vatican beat better than anyone else that he doesn't notice that one of his best informants is playing around with his wife. When Kaiser blows the whistle on the man, a charming Irish Jesuit named Malachy Martin, Martin persuades Kaiser's clerical friends (including Archbishop T. D. Roberts and John Courtney Murray) to send him to a psychiatric clinic. The story is at once hilarious (Martin was one of the great clerical con men of all time) and sobering. The "clerical error" - the refusal to see what Martin was up to - was as much Kaiser's as that of his clerical friends, who defended their fellow priest simply because he was a member of the club. Their naivete and blindness simply mirror the church's inability to update the ancient institution called priesthood or to deal realistically with any issue touched by sex: birth control, remarriage after divorce, priestly celibacy, clerical child abuse, or the ordination of women.