Spoiled Priest's Tale

THREE CHEERS FOR THE PARACLETE by Thomas Keneally. 240 pages. Viking. $4.95.

There are those who see the aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII as an erosion of the ancient rock of St. Peter, and those who see it as nothing less than a revival of all Christendom. It was likely that sooner or later these conflicting views would be explored in fiction; it is only strange that the first credible and moving novelistic exposition of the crisis of faith among clergy and laity that followed Vatican II should come out of Australia.

Young Novelist Thomas Keneally showed his talents in Bring Larks and Heroes (TIME, Aug. 16), which bore on the special subject of colonial servitude. Despite its title, Three Cheers for the Paraclete is less special. Modern Sydney, where the story takes place, is not remote; indeed, its population, one-sixth Irish Catholic, lends the quality of life there something of the familiar, built-in tensions of Boston or Philadelphia.

Keneally is what the Irish call a spoiled priest--after years of novitiate, he did not take his final vows. Thus his fictional priests are drawn from knowledge, not research. His protagonist, James Maitland, with a fresh doctorate from Louvain, is a 29-year-old priest teaching history in a Catholic House of Studies. Set off as it is against the Mediterranean glitter of Sydney's splendid harbor and the sunburned hedonists who inhabit it, this comfortless, twilit gothic barracks with an "eczema of stained glass," emphasizes one of the book's controlling ironies. For Maitland fits neither world, though he can swim like a fish in the troubled waters of theology.

Going by the Book. He has written a book (pseudonymously and without episcopal imprimatur) called The Meanings of God, and it is his undoing. He explains the work as "a history of the God of the institutions, pulpits, political parties and wreath-laying generals. It is a history of the abuse of the notion of God and of its place in the motives of modern man."

As such, The Meanings of God causes deep offense to Des Boyle, a local L.C.L. (Leading Catholic Layman), who heads something called the Knights of St. Patrick and has all the tricks of chancery politics at his blunt fingertips. Boyle has talked the Archbishop of Sydney into asking Maitland to write a refutation. It would be a refutation of his own book, but the time has passed when Maitland can possibly admit to his own duplicity. It can be seen from this exquisitely complex confrontation that Keneally is far from making a loaded brief for the modernist clergy against the hard-core traditionalists. There are grievous sins on both sides.

To Maitland, God is not so much a presence as an "absence in the heart," and faith is a yearning to fill the void. His natural enemies in the faith are the Irish dogmatists for whom God is not an unknowable otherness but a "kinsman" --in his most ignoble form honorary president of an Irish friendly society. The ecclesiastical embodiment of the dogmatist faith is Dr. Costello, a clerical bully who heads the House of Studies and, perhaps prophetically, grows to bishop-size before the reader's eyes.

Costello is not a mean man by his own fixed lights. Even when presiding over an ecclesiastical kangaroo court that is investigating a nun suspected of heresy, he is not lacking in charity but in imagination. It can be seen that the nun on trial has grace; Maitland seeks it and Dr. Costello believes that he is already blessed with it.

Father Maitland's dilemma is intricately worked out like a fine, stout piece of convent lace. In the process, the author shows himself as a dealer in the comedy of the spirit far different from Graham Greene's celebrated psychodramas of doubt, doom and--damnation. His scenes are as funny as J. F. Powers', but without their cozy in-joke comicality. Keneally's humor is white, not black--a blessed relief. His book is infused with a pawky clerical awareness that human life, though sometimes capable of holiness, is more often merely funny. Thus perceptively armed, he has succeeded in translating the historic fissure in the present church into human terms. Whatever may be said of Thomas Keneally's vocation for the priesthood, he has a true vocation for fiction.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.