Anatomy of a Saint

THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE (319 pp.)--Mom's L West--Morrow ($3.95).

Saints issue from the hand of God, but they are canonized on earth. In what seems a paradox to most non-Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church brings the full light of reason to play on a complex mystery of faith: whether a man or woman has displayed Christlike sanctity, including the performance of miracles. To this question, the church brings the meticulous accounting of a bank examiner, the ferreting instincts of a good detective, and the judicial lore of centuries of precedents. In practice, these are embodied in an initial diocesan investigation of claims to sainthood, followed by a formal examination before an appointed court of the Congregation of Rites in Rome. Even when the claims are upheld by the court, decades, years or centuries may elapse before the Pope's official ruling.

This spiritual investigation--the making of a saint--is the subject of Australian Novelist West's devout and fascinating new novel.

Other Men's Deaths. Author West is a Roman Catholic, but his book is intensely Christian beyond the limits of creed. Like Graham Greene and Francois Mauriac, West is concerned with sin and redemptive grace, but without their somewhat morbid preoccupation with evil. Rarely has the vocation of a priest or the problems of leading a Christian life been explored with such dramatic passion and compassion. One quality is completely absent--what Author West himself calls the "peppermint piety" of the stock religious bestseller.

The setting of The Devil's Advocate is the mountain town of Gemello Minore in Calabria, in parched and poverty-scarred Southern Italy. The cult-prone townsfolk have taken to worshiping at the tomb of Giacomo Nerone, a mysterious World War II deserter who lived less than a year in the town before being shot by Communist partisans. The local bishop asks Rome to send a "Promoter of the Faith" or "Devil's Advocate" to sift the ambiguous signs of Nerone's saintliness.

The Devil's Advocate is Monsignor Blaise Meredith, a dry, self-contained English priest whose sense of vocation has been all but choked under the dust of years in Vatican offices. As he sees himself, he is one of God's empty vessels, a decent man barren of human warmth and love. Furthermore, he is dying of cancer, and the thought panics him: "It was his profession to prepare other men for death; it shocked him to be so unready for his own."

Blood on a Shirt. Gemello Minore has other shocks for Monsignor Meredith. The Nerone case is a web only sinful men could spin. There is Aldo Meyer, a Jewish doctor and humanist who plays a reluctant Judas to Nerone. There is Nerone's mistress who bore his bastard son and who nightly kneels before his bloody, bullet-torn shirt. The boy, now a troubled adolescent, is himself the prey in a vicious, sensual tug of war between a neurotic drug-taking contessa and a homosexual English painter. Without Author West's innate good taste, these characters might be merely sordid and sensational; he keeps them in the perspective of human frailty and suffering. As Meredith probes on, the proofs of Nerone's possible sainthood mount--his conversion and surrender to God, his healing miracles, his selfless care of the villagers, his martyrdom at the hands of the Communists. But Blaise Meredith, brimming with a new-found humanity, cares less and less about the dead saint, trembles instead for the living sinners.

It is proof of Author West's fictional skill and Christian spirit that his ending is psychologically convincing and unconventionally happy because it is holy. His implied moral: few men are chosen to be saints, but many are called to prevail over wickedness with good--and do.

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