Ma Perkins in Rome

Fans of Morris West, the Catholic answer to Lloyd Douglas in the field of religious soap opera, can tune in with confidence, knowing they will get more of the same. The Devil’s Advocate had a Worldly and Wise Monsignor, investigating a candidate for canonization, who finds his dusty life unsettled by this involvement in the history of a scandalous saint. Daughter of Silence had a Worldly and Wise Psychiatrist who gets involved in a murder scandal and finds himself rejuvenated by this contact with Real Life. The new (?) work has a Wordly and Wise Cardinal (Rinaldi), ready to retire, who involves himself in the election of a scandalous saint (Kiril) as Pope, and helps a scandalous theologian (Télémond) die with dignity under the stones of the Holy Office. There are the usual irrelevant characters (a journalist with “elegant legs” who types “vividly, precisely, professionally”; a loose woman in process of reform; a homosexual Italian minister), whose job it is to add Sex to Religion. Connoisseurs of West’s original style, who remember the old man in Daughter of Silence who endearingly tossed his white mane before saying anything, will be happy to learn that Cardinal Leone, “he of the lion’s white mane,” invariably tosses this appendage before delivering a sentence. And there is a new joy in store for them: Pope Kiril “spreads his crooked hands and says” whatever he says in this book. Apparently El Greco has made crooked hands a sign of spirituality.

If there is any change in the formula, it is only a development of lines already drawn—as in the increasing emphasis on reportorial detail, delivered by the Journalist as Insider. The first book rested heavily on the information West could supply about the canonization process. In the second book, the crime reporter totally replaced the novelist. The story of “Anna Albertini” was, in fact, that of a girl named Alfa Giubelli, who was tried in Crevacuore in 1957. It is difficult to guess whether West wrote Time’s melodramatic account of this trial, or simply took the choice and emphasis of details from some unacknowledged coauthor. At any rate, he was given a story, and the chance to pad it with Perry Mason discussions of Italian legal procedure, along with disquisitions on the odd brand of psychiatry practiced by that novel’s Worldly and Wise One.

GW

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Garry Wills

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Fans of Morris West, the Catholic answer to Lloyd Douglas in the field of religious soap opera, can tune in with confidence, knowing they will get more of the same. The Devil’s Advocate had a Worldly and Wise Monsignor, investigating a candidate for canonization, who finds his dusty life unsettled by this involvement in the history of a scandalous saint. Daughter of Silence had a Worldly and Wise Psychiatrist who gets involved in a murder scandal and finds himself rejuvenated by this contact with Real Life. The new (?) work has a Wordly and Wise Cardinal (Rinaldi), ready to retire, who involves himself in the election of a scandalous saint (Kiril) as Pope, and helps a scandalous theologian (Télémond) die with dignity under the stones of the Holy Office. There are the usual irrelevant characters (a journalist with “elegant legs” who types “vividly, precisely, professionally”; a loose woman in process of reform; a homosexual Italian minister), whose job it is to add Sex to Religion. Connoisseurs of West’s original style, who remember the old man in Daughter of Silence who endearingly tossed his white mane before saying anything, will be happy to learn that Cardinal Leone, “he of the lion’s white mane,” invariably tosses this appendage before delivering a sentence. And there is a new joy in store for them: Pope Kiril “spreads his crooked hands and says” whatever he says in this book. Apparently El Greco has made crooked hands a sign of spirituality.

If there is any change in the formula, it is only a development of lines already drawn—as in the increasing emphasis on reportorial detail, delivered by the Journalist as Insider. The first book rested heavily on the information West could supply about the canonization process. In the second book, the crime reporter totally replaced the novelist. The story of “Anna Albertini” was, in fact, that of a girl named Alfa Giubelli, who was tried in Crevacuore in 1957. It is difficult to guess whether West wrote Time’s melodramatic account of this trial, or simply took the choice and emphasis of details from some unacknowledged coauthor. At any rate, he was given a story, and the chance to pad it with Perry Mason discussions of Italian legal procedure, along with disquisitions on the odd brand of psychiatry practiced by that novel’s Worldly and Wise One.