Familiar themes of a wounded church take fictional form

UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Jamie Manson | Apr. 29, 2015 Grace on the Margins

For the past 15 years, Fr. Donald Cozzens has distinguished himself as a commentator on religious and cultural issues, especially those relating to the sexual and financial crises gripping the Catholic church. His best-selling book The Changing Face of the Priesthood exploded onto the religious publishing scene in 2000, receiving both broad acclaim and fierce critique — and changing the direction of his ministry as a priest.

He went on to write four more books, including Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church (2002) and Notes From the Underground: The Spiritual Journal of a Secular Priest (2013). He now travels widely, lecturing on the upheavals engulfing the Catholic church and leading retreats for priests and religious. He is also a writer-in-residence and adjunct professor at John Carroll University in Ohio.

In Cozzens’ latest work, Master of Ceremonies, published by In Extenso Press, he revisits themes that have dominated much of his writing: clergy sex abuse, clericalism, Vatican intrigue and corrupt bishops. But this time, he spins the narrative in the form of a mystery novel.

I recently spoke with Cozzens recently about his new tale of secrecy and silence, murder and suspense.

Manson: Why did you choose to write your first novel rather than another nonfiction book? Are you a fan of suspense novels?

Cozzens: We know that stories compel us in ways that only the best of nonfiction can. So I thought that telling a story about our wounded church might be something I should try. And once I started, I simply couldn’t stop. I do like suspense novels, and I’m happy to have the book described as a thriller, because I wanted the story to move at a fairly fast pace. One of my colleagues in the English department here at John Carroll, a novelist himself, said that it galloped. …

Why did you choose to make clergy sexual abuse and its subsequent cover-up a key part of the plot?

The church is trying to cope with a number of scandals and urgent pastoral issues today. I’m thinking of the fraud and bank scandals, bishops living like princes, the church’s attitude toward the divorced and remarried, its failure to really listen to Catholic sisters who teach and minister with integrity and humility. The list goes on. But nothing has so rocked the church as the sexual violation of our teens and children and the repeated bungling of many of our bishops as they tried to contain and spin and manage the scandals.

Our laity is saying to the bishops, you might mess with my money, but don’t you dare mess with my children. So sexual abuse and its cover-up remain the stick in the eye of the church. But the reader will also find among the plot lines of the novel faith-killing revenge, naked clerical ambition, and misplaced loyalty. Still, the net holding the narrative in place is the abuse of a young boy by a priest who later becomes an archbishop.

The story involves a secretive group called the Brotherhood of the Sacred Purple. Do you think groups like this really exist, or were you simply trying to infuse Da Vinci Code-like intrigue into the novel?

I’ve had some fun with the Brotherhood of the Sacred Purple. In the novel, it’s a secretive band of bishops and priests who are hell-bent on saving the church from pastoral-minded bishops who, in their judgment, threaten what they call the church’s supreme center — that is, papal infallibility, hierarchal patriarchy, doctrine carved in stone, and the like. And they’re willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their sacred duty as they see it. Groups like this exist today, but I certainly hope they’re not as ruthless as the Brothers of the Sacred Purple. Da Vinci Code intrigue? No. Master of Ceremonies isn’t as dark or complex as Dan Brown’s novel. But intrigue there is.

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