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Our Fathers

The Secret Life Of The Catholic Church In An Age Of Scandal

by David France

Summary

A senior editor at Newsweek, David France spent several years covering the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church. In OUR FATHERS, France offers his own take on this crisis, how it was covered up for so long, and what could have been done to avert it.

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Media Reviews

"Mr. France presents [the] details in a clear, readable style....He has done a thorough and sometimes transfixing job of assembling evidence....OUR FATHERS is a valuable, sometimes verbose, frequently shocking account. But even its most extreme expressions of anger ('If the Catholic Church in America does not fit the definition of organized crime, then Americans seriously need to examine their concept of justice,' one man exclaims) are accompanied by a serious respect for questions of faith. How, the book asks, can devoted Catholics reconcile the violations that are described here?"    -- Janet Maslin

   -- New York Times

"OUR FATHERS has a kind of compulsive readability...France is adept at making his characters real, breathing human beings, and his very lack of final judgement allows him a delicacy of tone that neutralizes the blood-in-the-water instinct that has too closely been associated with the pedophile scandal."    -- Mary Gordon

   -- New York Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
Published date: 2004
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.75 x 9.75 inches
Weight: 2.3 pounds
Pages: 656

Publisher's Notes

Our Fathers is history at its best—as intimate as a diary, as immediate and epic as a novel.

When, in early 2002, a team of Boston Globe reporters broke open the pedophilia scandal around Father John J. Geoghan—and then Paul Shanley, Joseph Birmingham, and hundreds of other priests in Boston and across the country—the entire American Catholic Church spun into crisis. But by that time, the damage was already done. Perhaps a hundred thousand children had already fallen into traps laid by their priests. Every Catholic in the country – and everyone who had ever set foot in a church—faced troubling questions: Why had this happened? How could the secrets of this abuse have been so widely held, and so closely protected? How could the church have let it happen?

David France takes us back to the church of the 1950s, a time of relative innocence, to look for answers. With deft nuance, he crafts a panoramic portrait of the faithful, encompassing the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and courage of hundreds of Catholic and non-Catholic families over the last fifty years. Based on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, he shows how the church’s institutional suspicion of human sexuality ironically lit the fuse on the crisis.

Our Fathers braids a heartbreaking narrative from the personal lives of good and bad priests, pious and heartless prelates, self-interested lawyers turned heroes, holy altar boys turned drug-addicts, mothers torn between their children and their faith, hard-bitten investigative reporters reduced to tears, and thousands of church critics who, through this crisis, returned to their faith renewed and invigorated. He shows us the intense history of dissent within the ranks, especially regarding Catholic teachings on sexuality and homosexuality. He tells the heroic stories of whistle-blowing nuns, independent pastors, church insiders trying to do the right thing, and—ultimately—a group of blue-collar men, all molested by the same priest, who overcame their bitterness and took it upon themselves to try to save their church.

This book is a tribute to those ordinary Catholics called upon to make extraordinary contributions. Our Fathers is the sweeping, authoritative, and gripping work the scandal and its aftermath demand.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Bantam Dell Pub Group (2004) - from $1.07
• Paperback Reprint - Bantam Dell Pub Group (2005) - from $6.49

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