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Title: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse by Jack Fritscher ISBN: 1-890834-33-5 Publisher: Palm Drive Publishing Pub. Date: April, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Pyscho-sexual development & immaturity of priest training
Comment: Inside the priest factory.
The media continues, even today, to be full of news of priest molestation of and priest abuse of children. I found this novel, "What They Did," to be amazing because it is totally insightful as to how and why Catholic seminarians had their psycho-sexual development stunted by the corporate institution of the the Church vis a vis seminary education.
The poor boy who narrates this story is a lost boy. Not one priest comes forward to help him. Not one priest comes forward to educate him or help him mature. This central character is typical of the priests who psycho-sexually remain young teens all their lives--with the attendant teenage emotional problems.
By the last page, I wanted to hold this suffering priest-boy in my arms. The last operatic scene says everything about the lonely isolation of the priesthood and celibacy. This book is entertaining, sometimes lyrical and mystical in the Catholic sense (which means Freud would find it interesting!), but definitely eye-opening regarding the abuse of young seminarians. Highly recommended if you want to see inside the priest factory!
Rating: 5
Summary: Bravo! Tells all with no prurience, scares no one
Comment: I agree with some of these reviews. Well written coming-of-age story. A psychologist or psychiatrist could picnic on this powerful little book that tells the truth close to the way my brother the priest, and I (the former seminarian) both agree we remember it.
This novel of a repressed boy who wants to give his all to Christ is almost a case study, and all one needs to know, about why the Church needs to understand the recent charges about priest pederasty as a wake-up call for the Church's larger need to update itself on the whole, huge, complicated front of modern sexuality: priests'celibacy, women's issues of sex and abortion, couples' issues, homosexuals' souls, etc. etc.
The author manages to tell about Church abuse of seminarians (the future priests) which is a far more complicated psychological abuse than the sexual. What little sex there is, is dramatically (and historically) important, and is handled in an understated way that the most chaste reader could handle.
Bravo. Bravissimo!
Rating: 5
Summary: Schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law
Comment: The author is a schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law, and so am I. Consequently, I found Jack Fritscher's novel to be as much memoir as fiction, as I was also a student at the Pontifical College Josephinum with both Law and Fritscher, and found the fictive parallels to my memories to be evocative of how we as young seminarians were taught and trained "to be pure and avoid scandal at all costs." That, I suggest, is the innocent essence of the secrecy the media now calls "cover-up." Don't all groups--from firemen and cops to Marines--close ranks around their own?
If one is at all analytical, one thinks that this "scandal of priest sexual abuse and priest molestation"--driven by media terribly hungry to fill 24/7 programming--is just another part of the fundamentalist religious war to destroy Western Civilization: i.e. Christianity, and Christianity's oldest bastion, Roman Catholicism.
At any rate, Fritscher's novel, despite its media-juicy title, is a gentle, yet eye-popping read about the rigors of seminary life as lived by the thousands of young men recruited by the Catholic Church in the 1950's. His insight lights up the seminary culture that produced the priests of a certain age who now stand--rightly and wrongly--accused.
The story is human, engaging, and quite literary, and never exploitative or graphically embarrassing even when confronting a variety of behavior including a Jesuit spiritual director distributing prescription drugs--without a prescription--to depressed seminarians at the fictive "Misericordia Seminary."
Actually, the novel is a credit to both the PCJ and to Monsignor Leonard J. Fick who was, apparently, so much a mentor to Fritscher that he dedicates the book to Msgr. Fick. (Anyone conjecturing about the seminary culture of Bernard Law's life might well enjoy this parallax story.)
What a good writer! What an entertaining book! One suspects Fritscher kept notes hidden under his bed, because he remembers minutiae I had long ago forgotten, but--reminded by this wonderful book--remember, with nostalgia, as true.
I think a "novel" like this--better than can nonfiction--brings out a truth of how we young seminarians were trained, particularly by priests who, as returning veterans of World War II, set very high standards for priestly masculinity in the adolescent world of young seminarians. Those standards' inherent flaw froze many an adolescent emotional life at 14-years-of-age, perhaps later causing some of them to seek others also at 14-years-old. Author Fritscher even writes, "What happens to a boy when he is 14, marks him for life." If this novel, which is never about the obvious, is at all autobiographical in its experiences, what a wonderful life for an author to have led!
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Title: Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal by David France ISBN: 0767914309 Publisher: Broadway Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns by Elizabeth Kuhns ISBN: 0385505884 Publisher: Doubleday Books Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by Tony Hendra ISBN: 1400061849 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 01 May, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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