Three Liberation Theologians Who Look like Terrorists In Recently Published Novel, La's Archbishop Is Kidnapped, Tried in Mexico and Returned to US with Radical Vision for American Church, California Catholic Daily, December 6, 2007

" Three Liberation Theologians Who Look like Terrorists"
In Recently Published Novel, La's Archbishop Is Kidnapped, Tried in Mexico and Returned to US with Radical Vision for American Church

California Catholic Daily
December 6, 2007

http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=14d6476b-e152-4277-8080-095e973bd3ca

Robert Blair Kaiser, a veteran religion writer who covered the Second Vatican Council for Time magazine, has written a curious new novel about Cardinal Roger Mahony. The book, Cardinal Mahony, tells the story of "a new Cardinal Mahony," who works, says a blurb on Kaiser's web site, "to give Catholics a voice, a vote, citizenship in the Church." But only after the cardinal undergoes a harrowing experience.

A Jesuit for 10 years, Kaiser left the order before ordination to become a journalist. After covering the Second Vatican Council, he worked as a religion writer for the New York Times and Newsweek. He has also has worked as a news commentator for various television networks, and has written eight other books not dealing with the Catholic Church.

Besides his latest, Kaiser has written three other books on Catholic subjects: Pope, Council and World, The Politics of Sex and Religion; Clerical Error; and A Church in Search of Itself.

A Church in Search of Itself, subtitled "Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future," offers vignettes of six cardinals Kaiser "believes can lead Roman Catholicism back toward the light," says a 2006 Los Angeles Times review. One of the cardinals is Roger Mahony, who Kaiser praises "for his emphasis on tending to the poor (along with some rightful condemnation for Mahony's atrocious handling of the archdiocese's priestly sex-abuse scandal)." Another is Cardinal Francis Arinze, who, says the Times, earns Kaiser's "acclaim for allowing Nigerian tribes to synthesize their traditions with the Westernized Mass."

In Clerical Error, Kaiser takes on Malachy Martin (deceased when the book was published). Jesuit Fr. Martin, Kaiser claims, seduced his wife in Rome in the 1960s. Kaiser portrays Martin as not only venal but also as a destroyer of reputations and careers, according to a review in the March 8, 2002 National Catholic Reporter. The book claims that, because of Martin's machinations, Kaiser ended up for a time in a mental institution. But the book itself reveals something about Kaiser. The Reporter said that, as a Time correspondent covering Vatican II, Kaiser, "by his own admission… was trying to … play God of the council."

Cardinal Mahony is the only work of fiction among Kaiser's Catholic books. It tells the story of how LA's archbishop "gets kidnapped outside his cabin in the High Sierras one snowy morning in November 2008 by three liberation theologians who look like terrorists," according to Kaiser's web site. These cardinal captors "take him off to southern Mexico in his own helicopter and put him on trial for his sins in front of an international television audience. A jury of his peers, six retired Latin American bishops, find him guilty, and give him a surprising sentence."

Mahony "falls in love with his kidnappers and leads the American Catholic Church into a radical new way of being, still Catholic but aggressively accountable to the people, which is to say, aggressively American," says the web site book promo.

In an interview found on his web site, Kaiser gives his vision of the American Catholic Church. It is to be "loyal to the pope," but locally controlled, with its own married clergy and its own liturgies. The Church, he said, "could follow a U.S. constitutional model," with an elected executive and bicameral legislative branch (bishops and commons). The judiciary could be "appointed with the advice and consent of both houses," said Kaiser.