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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
This epic account of the hidden sexual abuse and the scandal that rocked the foundation of the Catholic Church reads like The Perfect Storm. Using a riveting, being-there narrative device, France recounts 50 years worth of real-life characters, events, and institutional policies that created the breeding ground for the horrendous sexual abuse and ensuing scandal. Ultimately, this is an indictment of the Church--revealing how its institutional condemnation of homosexuality led to it predatory deviance and deplorable cover-up.
This epic account of the hidden sexual abuse and the scandal that rocked the foundation of the Catholic Church reads like The Perfect Storm. Using a riveting, being-there narrative device, France recounts 50 years worth of real-life characters, events, and institutional policies that created the breeding ground for the horrendous sexual abuse and ensuing scandal. Ultimately, this is an indictment of the Church--revealing how its institutional condemnation of homosexuality led to it predatory deviance and deplorable cover-up.
The structure--dated vignettes in chronological order--seems like a logical device for organizing France's extensive research. Although these vignettes offer excellent character sketches, scene work, and vivid, heartbreaking details (such as the smell of the musty bare mattress where one teenage boy was raped by his priest); this tight chronological structure has limitations. For instance, readers are never given an introductory or concluding discussion in which France makes overall sense of the scandal. Rather, readers are asked to piece together date-by-date entries and glean conclusions and insights through the unfolding chain of events along with France's occasional melodramatic assertions. ("It was the church's worst nightmare and it had come to pass. As the flock knew, the shepherds had struck themselves"). While France has tackled an important trauma, and has meticulously noted and indexed all his research, he could have used a more heavy-handed editor--weeding out the extraneous entries and forcing France to step forward more as the informed narrator. --Gail Hudson
From Publishers Weekly
France, who covered the Catholic Church sex scandal as an investigative editor at Newsweek, delivers a huge volume that offers reasons for the scandal and humanizes those involved-victims, perpetrators and hierarchy. Apart from interviews with some participants that are woven into a sweeping 40-year-long chronology of events, there isn't a great deal of factually new material in this tome, as copious footnotes drawing on others' reporting and analysis show. But the author dramatizes the story with you-are-there intimacy, from the opening vignette that confusingly narrates a movie scene; through "the soft deep heat" of an adolescent kiss experienced by a sexually confused teenager "who once was struck by love" (and who grows into a self-hating gay priest); and on through interior views of a victim's devastated mother. The 672-page book isn't all adjectival color, but especially in its early chapters, which reach back to the 1950s to recreate incidents, France's tone is sometimes melodramatic, which some may appreciate as storytelling, while others may perceive as sensationalizing. The author argues that the cause of the scandal is an antiquated misunderstanding of human sexuality, with a view of homosexuality that is pernicious, a thesis that gives the church the burden of societal homophobia. So readers get a side tour of the 1969 Stonewall bar riot, Vatican-driven suppression of advocates for gay Catholics and other anecdotes, including that of a gay Italian man who in 1998 immolated himself in St. Peter's Square. Although France sees them as essential, such episodes lengthen the book and dilute its focus on what happened in rectories, chanceries and family living rooms.
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