It might soon be necessary to add a new subcategory in religion: books on clergy sexual abuse. With at least three potential blockbusters already acquired by major publishers, and more than a few rereleases and previous examinations of this and related subjects—not to mention a plethora of more specialized psychological treatments—the topic may eventually need its own section in the bookstore. The recent media exposure of the sexual transgressions of priests in the Catholic Church—and the perhaps even more puzzling actions of their superiors in reassigning rather than removing the transgressors—has readers clamoring for more information on this sordid subject. Authors who already have books out on the topic are fielding plenty of media requests, while future experts are working on their manuscripts even as the end of the story has not yet been written. One of the only gaps seems to be a first-person account from a victim.
Getting There First
"There's definitely a place for more than one book on the subject," said Geoff Shandler, executive editor at Little, Brown, the publisher expected to win the race to get a new book into stores first. A June publication date is possible because the authors are Boston Globe reporters who have already written hundreds of articles since January, when they broke the story—or at least the most recent revelations in a tale that reaches back decades. "They've been so far ahead of the pack," said Shandler, adding that Globe reporters also have access to more than 10,000 pages of evidence. "This is going to be the first book that puts it all together in one place."
The provocatively titled Betrayal also will contain new material, according to Shandler and Globe deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr., who is coordinating the writing of the book. "In addition to drawing on what we've already reported, we're conducting lots of new interviews and doing new reporting for the book," Bradlee told PW. Although Boston has been the most recent epicenter of the story, Betrayal will be broader both geographically and historically, he added. It also will include a section of documents, many of which have not been previously made public, as well as an eight-page photo insert.
The team of eight reporters, including the paper's elite Spotlight Team, has been juggling continuing coverage for the newspaper while also working on the book, although some have been freed from duties for the daily to write Betrayal full-time. Bradlee confessed that it's been challenging, since new angles keep popping up, such as Pope John Paul II's emergency meeting with the U.S. cardinals in mid-April. And, unfortunately, new allegations continue to be uncovered. "We're praying for a lull in the story so we can get the book out," said Bradlee, who admits that rushing it into print has its downside. "The story is still unfolding. Ideally, there would be more of a sense of resolution than we have now."
The resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston is still a question mark, and any action by the U.S. bishops at their June meeting in Dallas will come too late to be included in the Little, Brown book. But the publisher defends its decision to publish while the public's appetite for the story is still strong. "Even for books that come later, authors will have to create an artificial endpoint," said Shandler. "The story's going to develop for years and years."
One Story, Two Voices
The other two major trade houses with new sex abuse books in the works are going to give the story a little more time to play out—and their authors a few more months to write. The tentatively titled Our Fathers by Newsweek reporter David France is scheduled for release from Broadway in fall 2003. France has the distinction of being the first author to land a book deal following the sexual abuse scandal, reportedly for a mid-six-figure advance.
"We've all carved out our different areas," France said of the trio of books slated for publication in the next 18 months. "The Boston Globe has certainly written more inches on this crisis than anybody, and they've got a great shot at a Pulitzer. But my book is reaching for the broader historical strokes. I'm also taking a psychological perspective and asking, 'What caused this?' "
Broadway editorial director Gerald Howard said France's handling of the material will be modeled on Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. "He deals with this very upsetting material in such a strong, responsible way," said Howard, himself a former altar boy. France, who is openly gay, also will make the distinction between homosexual priests and pedophiles. "They're not the same thing," Howard emphasized.
Although France is not Catholic and only a few on the Boston Globe team are, Crown has acquired a thoroughly Catholic author in New York Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin. The Pulitzer Prize winner has been typically outspoken, calling for an end to mandatory celibacy for priests. "This is a very personal issue for him," said Crown senior v-p Steve Ross. The book is slated for publication "early next year," he said.
As would be expected, Breslin's book will be more personal and opinionated than the other, more investigative books, although the columnist has been doing quite a bit of research and may even travel to Rome. "I don't know when I realized there is a Catholic religion and the Catholic Church. I am in the religion and never have had a moment's doubt about my belief," Breslin said. "On the other hand, the Catholic Church is made up of men who betray us in their red hats. The many millions in the religion are too good for the church, and they are tired and angry. I am going to report and write on how long [it might be] until this Church of secretive men might be toppled."
It's the System
As U.S. Catholics have moved from shock over the revelations to outrage over the way church leaders have ignored or even covered up the problem, books that challenge the current hierarchical system will attract readers. Author and historian Garry Wills, whose 2000 book for Doubleday, Papal Sins, took a critical look at the papacy, has once again written about church authority in Why I Am a Catholic, to be published by Houghton Mifflin. Originally scheduled for October, HM moved up publication to July. "The current Catholic scandals make all the more urgent a presentation of the relevance of the Catholic Church and the true meaning of the faith even in a time of crisis," according to senior publicist Walter Vatter. "There was intense interest from booksellers at BEA," he added.
Wills, like Breslin, tries to distinguish between the current structure of the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith itself. Although written before the most recent crisis, the book speaks to it, Wills said, "because it shows how the creed, the gospel and the people of God have survived the many times when the hierarchy was corrupt, misguided and misguiding." Wills added, "The Church cannot be identified with its leadership, since its leadership has often been morally deficient, as Dante knew when he put popes in hell."
A pair of Canadian authors also place the blame for the church's current woes at the feet of its leadership. In Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads (HarperCollinsCanada, April), professors Michael W. Higgins and Douglas R. Letson argue that the church is "under seige" with a variety of problems, sexual abuse by priests included. "This is not a book that slams the church," explained senior editor Don Loney, who acquired the book long before the U.S. scandals. "The authors revere the church and see it as an institution that does much good. But they hold the Vatican responsible for a lack of progress and say the church needs to be more all-embracing and open-minded."
An even more insider look at the culture of secrecy and denial in the church hierarchy is coming from Donald Cozzens, the former seminary rector whose The Changing Face of the Priesthood (Liturgical Press, 2000) attracted much media attention for its frank discussion of homosexuality in the priesthood. His newest, Sacred Silence: Denial and Crisis in the Church, is due from Liturgical in November. "His books are unique because they come from two insiders—Father Cozzens and the Liturgical Press," said publisher Peter Dwyer. "We're not a major trade house rushing to capitalize on this." Cozzens has been a credible commentator in popular media, doing dozens of print interviews as well as appearances on Meet the Press, CNN Live and NPR. The Changing Face of the Priesthood is selling "very briskly," Dwyer said, with 45,000 total copies in print. More than 3,000 copies were sold in April alone.
Backlist Bumps
Liturgical also has noted an upsurge in sales in its previously published series of books for the Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute of Collegeville, Minn. Restoring the Soul of a Church: Healing Congregations Wounded by Clergy Sexual Misconduct (1995), edited by Mark Laaser and Nancy M. Hopkins, has gone into its fourth printing, and sales are up 40%: total sales in 2001 were 550; more than 300 have sold in the first quarter of 2002 alone, Dwyer said. Also moving at about double last year's pace is A Tragic Grace: The Catholic Church and Child Sexual Abuse by Stephen J. Rossetti of the St. Luke's Institute in Maryland, where priest pedophiles often are sent for treatment. Liturgical sent a letter to every U.S. bishop offering free samples of any of these books; so far, Dwyer said, only two have responded.
Also hot on the media circuit is investigative journalist Jason Berry, who has done more than 300 interviews in the past few months, including an appearance on Oprah. For Berry, a Catholic, the recent revelations are no news flash. He followed a similar story a decade ago in Louisiana and wrote about it in Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Originally published by Doubleday in 1992, the book was rereleased by the University of Illinois Press in April 2000 with a new introduction by the author and a new foreword by popular Catholic commentator Father Andrew Greeley. Illinois has returned to press for 3,000 more copies after a 3,500-copy first printing sold out, according to publicity manager Danielle Wilberg.
"I think this scandal rivals Watergate in the American consciousness," said Berry. "There is a great hunger for justice, and the church is not responding in a way that demonstrates a process of justice." Berry became an authority on this subject during the late 1980s when he reported on the personal and political fallout from sexual abuse by Father Gilbert Gauthe of Louisiana. Despite moderate media attention, "the country wasn't quite ready to focus on it," in the '90s, Berry believes. And after allegations against the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin were later retracted, "it was as if the news media turned on a dime," he said. From then on, headlines focused on the unreliability of so-called repressed memories. There was another ripple of attention to the subject a few years ago when the Archdiocese of Dallas was nearly bankrupted by a record-breaking sex abuse award, which was later reduced.
But Cardinal Law himself may be responsible for refocusing the media spotlight, having publicly invoked God's wrath on local reporters for coverage of a case involving Massachusetts priests a few years ago. "That was like a shot fired over the bow," said Berry. "It invites the kind of investigative scrutiny he's gotten."
Berry said he was quietly working on a book about jazz funerals "when the Boston Globe invaded my life." Now he has set aside that manuscript to work on one that explores the relationship between the Vatican and the American church through the case of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, the head of the powerful Legionaries of Christ, who has been accused of sexual abuse by nine seminarians but has so far been protected by the Vatican. The yet-to-be-titled book, coauthored by journalist Gerald Renner, will be released by the Free Press in spring 2003. As for the other book, Berry quipped, "I plan to finish it before my own jazz funeral."
Another decade-old book also will be returning to bookstore shelves soon. HarperPerennial has acquired the paperback rights to A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church by journalists Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett, originally published in hardback in 1993 by Viking. Bruni and Burkett, both now HarperPerennial authors, have written a new introduction and afterword for the paperback version, due in stores in June. "The sad thing is this book is still relevant. I wish it were out of date," said Susan Weinberg, Perennial's senior v-p and editorial director. A Gospel of Shame details dozens of cases of clerical sex abuse, stressing that it is a crime, not just a sin. "This is true, deep investigative journalism," Weinberg said. "It was not written as a quickie."
Neither was Eugene Kennedy's The Unhealed Wound, a 2001 St. Martin's Press hardcover that was released in paperback smack dab in the middle of the current crisis. But the author, who has been busy with dozens of media interviews, did write a new 40-page introduction for the next printing of the book, which also will feature a new cover and subtitle: The Church, the Priesthood and the Question of Sexuality. The new edition should be in stores by May, said senior editor Diane Higgins. "We wanted to take advantage of the fact that [Kennedy] has had so many clear insights in the past few weeks," she explained.
Interest in The Unhealed Wound is very strong, she reported, estimating that more than 10,000 total copies have already been sold. Kennedy, a psychologist and former priest, insists it's the church hierarchy—not the church—that is in crisis. "He describes how Pope John Paul II seems mystified by a problem that has been worsened by his massive efforts to restore an outmoded and unworkable hierarchy to the church," Higgins said.
Tom Fox's Sexuality and Catholicism (George Braziller, 1995) has seen a bump, especially since the author has been doing public speaking on the issue. More than 200 copies were sold in just one week last month, according to publisher George Braziller. "Every issue that's being raised today is in this book, " he said. Sadly, the list of books like these may only grow longer in the coming months and years.
