Vows of Silence
The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Going deep behind the headlines about scandals in the Catholic Church, Jason Berry and Gerald Renner follow the staggering trail of evasions and deceit that leads directly to the Vatican and taints the legacy of Pope John Paul II.
Based on more than six years of investigative reporting and hundreds of interviews, Vows of Silence is a riveting account of Vatican cover-ups. Both a profound criticism and a wake-up call to reform by two Catholic writers, this book reveals an agenda of top-down control under John Paul II and a hierarchy so obsessed with secrecy as to spawn disinformation.
Vows of Silence cuts between the life story of Father Tom Doyle, who sacrificed a diplomatic career with the Vatican to seek justice for sex-abuse victims, and Father Marcial Maciel, an accused pedophile and founder of the militaristic religious order, the Legion of Christ. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Father Doyle and with ex-Legionaries who filed a canonical suit against Maciel, as well as interviews with Vatican insiders and an array of sources in Mexico, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, Berry and Renner provide a penetrating account of a hierarchy directly in conflict with its followers.
With keen insight and scrupulous reporting, Vows of Silence is a powerful narrative that chronicles the church's struggle between orthodoxy and reform—going straight to the heart of one of the world's largest power structures. It is not a book about sexual abuse; it is a book about abuse of power throughout the Vatican.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This impassioned expose explores the history of priestly pedophilia scandals, and their roots in what the authors portray as the Church's blinkered sexual mores and arrogant hierarchy, through profiles of two emblematic Church figures. The first is Thomas Doyle, an American priest who investigated abuses in the early 1980s; when his recommendations for reform were ignored, Doyle broke with the hierarchy and began testifying about the Church's cover-up. Doyle's antithesis is Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a secretive, fanatically disciplined order of conservative priests and laymen with a chain of universities and schools that critics liken to a cult. Lionized by John Paul II, Maciel is also a pedophile and Demerol addict, according to at least nine former priests and seminarians who claim they were victimized by him. Investigative journalists Berry and Renner build on years of research and hundreds of interviews to paint a portrait of ecclesiastical corruption. They blame the Church's sexual doctrines--particularly the rule on priestly celibacy, which, they contend, has driven away heterosexual men and fostered a pathologically libertine"gay priest culture" at some American seminaries. The result is an atmosphere of silence and hypocrisy that simultaneously condemns and tolerates both homosexuality and priestly sexual abuse, in which an authoritarian Church hierarchy, reaching up to the Vatican, protects pedophiles, and buries accusations in labyrinthine legal maneuvers. The book's sprawling, somewhat disorganized narrative sometimes bogs down amidst incidental characters and insignificant details, and the panorama of sordid sex crimes, quasi-fascist brainwashing and cynical Vatican mandarins may lead critics to accuse the authors, professed Catholics themselves, of retailing lurid anti-Catholic cliches. But their exhaustive reporting adds up to a disturbing indictment of a deeply troubled Church, and this book will no doubt cause much discussion and controversy.
