Clerical Error
A True Story
Published on 1. May 2002
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-8264-1384-0 (ISBN)
Description
The memoirs of Robert Blair Kaiser's teens and twenties in the Jesuits, and of his early thirties as a star correspondent at Vatican II. Twenty -nine years old, newly married, and fresh from the Society of Jesus, where he had spent ten years as a novice and scholastic, Bob Kaiser was picked as "Time" reporter at the Second Vatican Council. Much of inner story of the Council - its personalities, machinations, maneuverings between progressive forces and the old guard - was told in Bob Kaiser's book of the early sixties "Pope, Council, and World". This is a different story, told some 40 years later in a very different church and by a much matured Bob Kaiser. The heart of the story is how Bob's wife was seduced by his friend, the Jesuit priest Malachy Martin, and how Martin persuaded Kaiser's other clerical friends to send him to a sanitorium. The "clerical error" - the refusal to see what Martin was up to - was as much Kaiser's as that of his older clerical friends who defended their fellow priest simply because he was a member of the club.
Their naivete and their blindness mirrored the church's inability to deal realistically with any issue touched by sex: birth control, remarriage after divorce, priestly celibacy, clerical child abuse, or the ordination of women.
Their naivete and their blindness mirrored the church's inability to deal realistically with any issue touched by sex: birth control, remarriage after divorce, priestly celibacy, clerical child abuse, or the ordination of women.
Reviews / Votes
"Wow! Quite a book!"--Andrew Greeley "Clerical Error is written in quadraphonic sound. It leaves readers with questions that demand answers on every level if they want to grow up."--Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B. "Kaiser has made himself our Virgilian guide to the lower depths of the church. A memoir that will hold its own beside classics like Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That."--Ted Morgan "An insider's memoir of the Second Vatican Council by a gifted journalist whose reportage became a dynamic force at the council. Painfully honest, courageous, and unafraid."--Kevin Starr "Great entertainment. A genuine page-turner. It races along like a fast-paced thriller. Strutting aside, Kaiser provides discrete chunks of cameo, first-class Catholic history here. There are lots of names, but not name-dropped names. Quite honestly, the "Kaiser, now the Vatican correspondent for Newsweek, has revealed everything in a cathartic memoir, Clerical Error: A True Story, to be published next month in the US. It reads like a Shakespearean saga of innocence, ambition, betrayal, farce and tragedy "His views of the Vatican are compelling." --The Dallas Morning News, April 11, 2002 "A steamy soap opera. Kaiser's views of the Vatican are compelling." --Susan Hogan, The Wichita Eagle "A remarkable story... Although this memoir is based on a true story, it reads in many places like a novel."--Publisher's Weekly "...[a] riveting read....A timely and prophetic book, which you will not be able to put down." --Catholic New TimesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
647 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8264-1384-0 (9780826413840)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Robert Blair Kaiser is the author of 8 books. His articles have appeared in a score of magazines from Life to Look to Rolling Stone, Saturday Review, Ladies Home Journal, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He currently writes for Newsweek from Rome, where he also pens his periodical e-mail letters on the Vatican, which are enjoyed by thousands of persons around the world.