Overview
One typical parish, one pivotal year. A religious educator weighs her feminist views against her duties as a teacher of Catholic doctrine. An orthodox layman launches an attack on what he sees as a wave of moral anarchy. A young priest chooses between his vow of celibacy and his burning need for intimacy. These are some of the people we come to know in What God Allows, journalist Ivor Shapiro's chronicle of a year in the life of St. Paul's Church in Kenmore, New York. Among others we encounter: a seventy-year-old divorcee, as devoted to the Mother of God as she is skeptical about the celibate elite that rules her church; a seven-year-old boy, conquering new Nintendo worlds while preparing for his first sacramental confession; a young professional couple, living in the shadow of grief and finding in the church reasons to hope - and to fight. One parish, one year. Squabbles over authority, quests for inner peace, small victories of faith. In Rome, Pope John Paul II launches a renewed assault on liberal thought and instruction in the church he leads. In Kenmore the much-loved pastor of St. Paul's prepares to end his twelve-year tenure. By year's end, two disillusioned ministry staffers quit the St. Paul's payroll. But beyond the clash of personalities in one parish, the events of this year display the ambiguous power balance that marks today's Catholic Church. In these pages, the church is neither target nor stereotype. What God Allows weaves real-life human dramas into a highly readable narrative, vividly portraying a seasoned church's cheerful tenacity in a time of trial. The story touches on (without obsessing over) the issues that divide parishioners from one another and, sometimes, from their sacraments: birth control, divorce, and abortion; celibacy and scandal; orthodoxy and freedom of thought. The author paints a gentle but sardonic portrait of ordinary people with foibles both amusing and annoying - people who seek meaning in a puzzling world, and find itAn incisive and penetrating study of a year in the life of one Catholic parish, What God Allows provides the intimate feel, smell and rhythm of Catholic Church life in the United States today. Concurrent with the renewed spiritual interest of readers today, the book encourages the reevaluation of notions and relationships within and outside the religious and societal boundaries.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The sweeping social and ecclesiastical changes wrought by Vatican II left American Catholicism awash in a sea of doubt about its identity. In order to show how deeply rooted is the religious schizophrenia of American Catholicism, journalist Shapiro draws a portrait of a year in the life of the members of an ordinary Catholic parish in Kenmore, N.Y. In doing so, he faithfully represents the struggles of various parishioners to weave the dogma of their beloved faith into the fabric of contemporary culture. Moreover, he demonstrates that the crisis of religious identity that characterizes many of these believers arises not out of institutional practice but out of the extent to which Catholic faith and doctrine are embedded in the conscience of the believers themselves. Unfortunately, Shapiro's often condescending tone, which gives the impression that he is silently laughing at his subjects for their inability to relinquish what to him are antiquated views, compromises his narrative. Even so, his story is one of the few to examine honestly the ongoing identity crisis in the American Catholic Church. (Mar.)Steve Schroeder
To illuminate "the crisis of faith and conscience" in a Catholic Church that has historically understood itself as universal, Shapiro narrates one year in the life of St. Paul's Parish, Kenmore, New York--May_ 1993 to May_ 1994. That year encompassed the period leading up to John Paul II's encyclical "Veritatis Splendor" as well as the period of its immediate aftermath. The encyclical crystallized questions of moral authority that had raged for some time in the Roman Catholic Church. Looking at the life and conflicts of a typical parish at the time of the encyclical is an excellent way to gain insight into the questions and their local reality. More to the point, it is an excellent way to encounter the Catholic Church as something more than an abstraction at the end of the twentieth century. With sensitively and sympathetically drawn characters and an engaging and eminently readable narrative, the book should prove valuable to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.Kirkus Reviews
Carefully researched but basically slanted story of one year in the life of a "typical" American Catholic parish.Between May 1993 and May 1994 Shapiro, a South Africanborn magazine editor and former Anglican clergyman, conducted more than 150 hours of taped interviews and attended services and meetings, both social and educational, at St. Paul's parish, Kenmore, N.Y. The result reads like a novel but is in fact a kind of documentary, with just a few name changes and about 20 characters, among whom Shapiro moves back and forth, interspersing his text with quotations from Vatican pronouncements, which he uses to spice his clearly confrontational approach. The Catholics we meet are mostly likable and discontented, such as Judy, an adult religious educator weighing her feminist views against Catholic belief, and Father Don, a young priest who leaves the Church for his male lover. Shapiro gives his material some measure of continuity by focusing on the regular group classes for would-be Catholics, and he graphically describes conflicts in both instructors and students as they move toward baptism at Easter. The reader is left wondering how the Catholic Church—or at least St. Paul's parish—carries on, as hardly anyone actually appears to believe in any meaningful way. Shapiro sees Catholicism as an alienating system that imposes its doctrinal and moral positions on people who are more or less bewildered and spiritually passive. In Shapiro's scenario, Pope John Paul (whose speeches are described as "spiel") frequently plays a kind of Grand Inquisitor role, especially with his 1993 reaffirmation that moral values have objective as well as subjective force. Our author presents the disaffected as heroic dissidents who are loyal to their consciences, and most of the clergy as well-fed cynics, while the token orthodox layperson looks like a clever, albeit well-intentioned, apparatchik.
The author's polemical tone throughout must raise doubts about the reliability of his work.