KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
Nov. 20, 2019
By Tom Roberts
Jason Berry loves character-driven narrative. He’s good at writing it, sending wonderfully drawn figures, whether wretches of the clerical sort or zany, colorful Louisianans, on journeys along a tight weave of data and history.
And himself? Berry, who recently turned 70, is a character who’s bounced between those poles, the weave supporting him a mix of his intense examination of the ugliest side of Catholic reality and the soul-restoring gumbo of Louisiana life, particularly his hometown New Orleans.
NCR has run tens of thousands of Berry’s words on our pages in the past three-plus decades, but we’ve never spoken to him or about him much in these spaces. This is a stab at doing that, a gathering up of conversations that have gone on for years and, more recently, during the months since the release of his latest work, City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300.
Full disclosure is warranted: Berry and I count each other as friends, meeting first as deliverer and recipient, respectively, of pitches for stories about the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal; then as writer and editor going round for round over the words, the data, the characters, the numbers; and spending hours on conference calls with lawyers vetting stories that delivered the details of ecclesial corruption — sexual and financial.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.