Plenty of description and Church background material, but still a gripping read as words march for their presold audience.
Timothy John Cardinal Mulrennan returns (Conclave (2001)—and gets elected Pope.
While still Archbishop for Newark, Mulrennan was called to Rome to organize business in the Curia Romana and spent several years there learning Vatican politics. He loved Pope John but stood against the ultraconservative Evangelium Christi. When Good Pope John dies, a Filipino is elected, but Innocent XIV is assassinated within six months (by Muslim fanatics?), and Mulrennan is his successor: Pope Celestine VI. Now we learn that Innocent XIV had planned to bring the Church into the modern world, a plan admired today by Mulrennan. The new pope, a knowing politician, spots his enemies quickly when he decides to call an ecumenical council of bishops to discuss “a world of unspeakable terrorism and abuse of human beings,” to seek unity among Christian denominations, and understanding between Christians and other faiths, such as Judaism and Islam. The successor to an assassinated pope, Mulrennan knows firsthand the horrors of terrorism: he lent his presence and aid to victims of the World Trade Center attack. Meanwhile, Kurt Schulhafer, a veteran of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard, is rubbed out after he attempts to hire a murderer to kill a young guardsman who may expose Schulhafer’s homosexual past and cost him his job, pension, and family. This points to the need for heightened security measures for Mulrennan and the 4,000 bishops attending the council. Mix in a troubled parish priest called to Rome from New Jersey, his old Greek girlfriend (now a bureau chief in Rome), a girl from Bosnia-Herzegovina who has seen the Virgin six times and received ten secrets by her, a tumor on Mulrennan’s spine, a fanatical Argentine businessman sponsored by Evangelium Christi who murders Mulrennan’s closest advisor and has plans for a suicide plot.
Plenty of description and Church background material, but still a gripping read as words march for their presold audience.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-87353-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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