Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
This epic account of the hidden sexual abuse and the scandal that rocked the foundation of the Catholic Church reads likeThe Perfect Storm. Using a riveting, being-there narrative device, France recounts 50 years worth of real-life characters, events, and institutional policies that created the breeding ground for the horrendous sexual abuse and ensuing scandal. Ultimately, this is an indictment of the Church--revealing how its institutional condemnation of homosexuality led to it predatory deviance and deplorable cover-up.The structure--dated vignettes in chronological order--seems like a logical device for organizing France's extensive research. Although these vignettes offer excellent character sketches, scene work, and vivid, heartbreaking details (such as the smell of the musty bare mattress where one teenage boy was raped by his priest); this tight chronological structure has limitations. For instance, readers are never given an introductory or concluding discussion in which France makes overall sense of the scandal. Rather, readers are asked to piece together date-by-date entries and glean conclusions and insights through the unfolding chain of events along with France's occasional melodramatic assertions. ("It was the church's worst nightmare and it had come to pass. As the flock knew, the shepherds had struck themselves"). While France has tackled an important trauma, and has meticulously noted and indexed all his research, he could have used a more heavy-handed editor--weeding out the extraneous entries and forcing France to step forward more as the informed narrator. --Gail Hudson