Clerical Errors

The Catholic church is in serious decline. This book claims that the corruption of the institution derives from various "clerical errors," especially clericalism, which assumes that clergy are superior and deserve privileges. Clericalism divides the church into two unequal classes, betraying the gospel, which teaches that all people are equal. Clerical privilege makes the sexual abuse of children more likely, and has led most bishops to conceal it. Clerical Errors begins by examining the trials and acquittal of Cardinal Pell. Was it the jury who made a grave error--or was it the cardinal? Other chapters look at worldwide sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and traumatic impacts on survivors. What might have caused this tragedy? The institutional nature of the church? Defective Canon Law? Misuse of the sacrament of Confession? Compulsory celibacy? Homosexuality? The book's last, hopeful chapter proposes a radical but simple model for restoring the Christian church.

From the National Jewish Book Award-winning author of The Prince of West End Avenue comes a sparkling new novel that confirms Alan Isler's unique gift for mingling comedy and tradgedy. Despite a severe lack of piety and the inconvenient fact of his Jewish birth, Edmond Music chose the priesthood as a career. Much to the Vatican's chagrin, he is entrenched at an English estate possessed of a fabulous library. There, he would rather pursue a decades-long liaison with his Irish housekeeper, Maude, than crack down on his assistant's dial-a-confession phone ministry. He would rather immerse himself in his study of an eighteenth-century Jewish mystic, the epigrammatic Pish, than deal with a Shakespeare quarto gone missing on his watch. Then Father Music's car is found wrapped around the famous Stuart Oak (blessedly, without Edmond inside). Are Vatican henchmen to blame? What's more, Edmond's persistent nemesis, the American priest Twombly, is headed to town, eager to prove Edmond a thief. And the once passionate Maude is having an inconvenient religious revival. With his forty-year idyll thoroughly disrupted, Edmond can no longer ignore the present danger. Nor can he evade the reach of his buried past. Rife with Alan Isler's characteristic wit and wordplay, Clerical Errors is a deeply moving exploration of a world of faith, love, and identity, a world lost and found again, perhaps too late.