UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
As with any text, there are a number of different ways one might approach Vincent Panettiere’s new novel These Thy Gifts (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016). The plot certainly deserves attention. It’s frankly engrossing, spanning the history of American Catholicism from the post-World War II period to the present in a way that mimics the action of a camera scanning back and forth from period to period. The camera metaphor is not beside the point, since the novel itself makes frequent references to classic films and is self-consciously aware of the way in which it mimics theater and probes the thin (perhaps nonexistent) line between fact and fiction.
Another way to approach These Thy Gifts is as commentary on what has happened to American Catholicism as it emerged from its ethnic ghettoes with their family-centered parishes in mid-20th-century America and became the thing it is now — in much of the country, a suburban phenomenon with priests and bishops raised in families with little connection to the working-class struggles that gave the Catholicism of the past such strong sympathy for working people, and caused many Catholics to vote Democratic. Whereas today, the pastoral leaders of the church, raised in families without strong concern for those who labor and struggle, do everything but stand on their heads in many cases to assure us that real, honest-to-God Catholics vote Republican. . . .
These Thy Gifts focuses on the priestly life of an Italian-American priest ordained in the post-war period — Stefano (Steve) Trimboli, son of Sal, a taxi driver and committed union member, and Gloria, a dressmaker. It moves in a series of flashbacks from Father Trimboli’s discovery, after he has been made a monsignor, that a young priest sent by his bishop to his parish has sexually abused a boy in the parish who happens to have a personal connection to Trimboli himself. The flashbacks survey Trimboli’s entire clerical history, as he seeks to come to terms with the recognition that there are bad priests and bad bishops in a church in which he himself had genuinely sought to fulfill his vocation to serve the people of God.
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