Piers Paul Read on writing novels and avoiding novel theologies

Piers Paul Read talks to Catholic News Agency about The Death of a Pope, liberation theology, and secularism:

He spoke with CNA by phone in a Monday interview, explaining that several different experiences helped inspire “The Death of a Pope.”

The novel’s opening trial scene, for example, resulted from his witnessing a trial at England's Central Criminal Court, commonly called the Old Bailey.

Read explained he was also very struck by the “hatred” that some people have for the Catholic Church and the rise of the “secular spirit” particularly evident in Britain and Europe.

Some people use advocacy for condoms in the African AIDS crisis as a “stick with which to beat the Church,” he added, noting that he noticed progressive Catholics thought the Church would change with a new Pope.

These elements combined to form his story about the ex-Jesuit, ex-liberation theologian on trial in London. Read told CNA he wanted to write a novel that was a good story about terrorism, but in a way that served to highlight the phenomenon of liberation theology and its contrast with what he called “the more supernatural and sacramental appreciation of what the Catholic Church is about.”

CNA, noting that Read’s book derives dramatic energy from factionalism in the Catholic Church, asked what his novel says about the present state of the Church.

“The Catholic Church is divided. I’m not one to cast aspersions on other people’s good will, but I do think that after Vatican II a large number of Catholics sort of took a few phrases from ‘Gaudium et Spes’ and elevated them into a kind of social ideology.”

He said this was particularly true in South America and El Salvador, and among some Jesuits in North America.

Read explained that he had once written about El Salvador on the anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. In his interviews for the story, he found that “progressive, revolutionary, Marxist Catholics” had taken control and enacted what was “almost a persecution” of traditionalist Catholics.

Read the entire piece. Read's essay about El Salvador and liberation theology, "Catechists and Commissars," which is in the collection titled Hell and Other Destinations, can be read on Ignatius Insight.

Comments

[David Murdoch]

Jesus didn't kill people in His liberation of souls. Although on the other hand St Joan of Arc killed people in her fight against oppressive and cruel forces and the church would not have called her a saint if she hadn't lived a holy life. I suppose the difference between what she did and what the liberation theologians are doing though is that she didn't presume that killing people to liberate the oppressed was what the gospel was all about, which is what I've heard has been taught by liberation theologians. Furthermore, she received her mission from God fighting against a foreign army under her king, while the liberation theologians received their mission from a warped interpretation of scripture and fight against people that God had set over them as the legitimate civil authority.

God Bless,