The Defilers will rob you of a few hours sleep

Deborah Gyapong (Ottawa), who won the “2005 Best New Canadian Christian Author Award” for her now newly published book, The Defilers (Castle Quay Books, 2006), will surely rob you of a few hours sleep as you work your way through her first novel—a suspense-filled story set in rural Nova Scotia, involving the RCMP, clergy suspected of arson, abuse and murder and a credible rediscovery of Christian faith. One reviewer says Gyapong’s book is “mature beyond what one would expect for a first novel.” Learn more at www.thedefilers.ca.

Bizarre story about flamboyant priest under investigation

Came across this story in the New York Times via this post at Get Religion via this post by Rod Dreher via this post at Relapsed Catholic.

Now to the NYT story:

Starting in 2000, Father Fay's star seemed to rise. Sacred Heart University honored him for community service in 2002, and the Bridgeport Diocese appointed him to a sexual misconduct review board that year.

For all his outward success, it was evident that Father Fay had an appetite for little luxuries, such as the blond highlights his Darien hairdresser said he put in his hair.

A small bridal shower he threw for a Sunday school teacher had a three-piece combo and jaw-dropping flower arrangements, a person who attended said.

Parishioners said he spent thousands of dollars sprucing up the church and expanding the house where the priests lived. When one parent questioned the cost of a tapestry, Father Fay cut her off by saying, "What makes you think it wasn't a gift?" said Regina Damanti, a parishioner who heard the exchange.

and

In the spring of 2005, Father Fay and his friend from Philadelphia, Cliff Fantini, a wedding consultant, jointly bought a $449,100 condo in Fort Lauderdale, property records show. Furnishings and monthly cable bills were charged to the parish, church records show.

The two men are also listed as tenants of a luxury apartment on East 63rd Street in Manhattan, the building's staff said. Mr. Fantini, known professionally as Cliff Martell, also stayed at the rectory for extended periods, Ms. Patafio said.

Ms. Patafio said Father Fay showered gifts, meals and trips on Mr. Fantini. "Jude was always chasing after him," she said.

The Get Religion post says this about the NYT story:

Talk about dancing around the subject and burying a lead. Here is the opening of a New York Times report by Alison Leigh Cowan about the financial sins of Father Michael Jude Fay, who is accused of misusing funds and some other minor problems.

The Rev. Michael Jude Fay had his hair highlighted each spring at a local salon at prices of $85 or more, his hairdresser said. His vacation getaway was an ocean-view condominium in Florida that he owned with a close friend from Philadelphia. And he repeatedly spent thousands of dollars on luggage, jewelry and designer clothes, even though his salary was a modest $28,000 a year.

To many of his parishioners at St. John Roman Catholic Church in Darien, Father Fay’s lavish ways came as a shock nearly two months ago when the Diocese of Bridgeport demanded his resignation because of questions about his suitability for the priesthood, his lifestyle and his financial stewardship of the church.

Oh, he also had a flair for producing local versions of Broadway shows.

That enough information? In light of certain Roman Catholic teachings, I think that even the most tone-deaf reader would have a pretty good idea of what is going on there. Nevertheless, readers needed to dig deep into this long story — in which many of the crucial details come from parish bookkeeper Ellen Patafio — to hit a detail that might, just might, have needed to go higher in the story.

Dreher writes:

I do believe, having seen the media's unwillingness to confront more openly the gay-culture aspect of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, it's pretty clear to me that the media, as a general rule, have a habit of sanitizing coverage that reflects badly on gay male culture.

Latest The Defilers news

Yesterday I signed books at Salem Storehouse on Merivale Road in Ottawa. The first person who came had heard me on the Michael Harris radio program June 28. She had run out to buy a book after that show and brought it in for me to sign. Then she bought three more as Christmas presents. Michael had me on for the whole two hour show and gave me a chance to share the story of my adult conversion to the Christian faith.

Well, back to the book signing. I didn't have a big line out the front door and around the corner. We sold about eight or nine books, all the copies of The Defilers Salem had in stock except for one. Other book signings that I've been to though have been slower than that, so that's okay. But something happened that looks like a divine appointment. I sure hope so, anyway.

At 1:10 p.m. I headed out the door with my big poster of the book cover to my car and a woman came up to me in the parking lot and asked if she as too late. I told her there was one copy left. So I went back inside with her. Turns out she never listens to the radio, but happened to hear me on the Michael Harris program. She told me she stayed in her car to listen to the whole thing. Then two weeks later, she just happened to be listening to the radio again, this time at night and heard me on John Counsell's Ask the Pastor, also on CFRA radio. At the end of that show, I mentioned I was going to be at Salem, so she planned on being there. She came up from a town that's a good 45 minutes drive from Ottawa and got lost. She arrived just as I was leaving and only one book remained. She told me about someone she wants to give the book to and I have promised to pray for that individual.

Find the Michael Harris show here. (Thanks to CFRA and to Tony Copple, who put it online for me!)

Pictures of the June 1 Ottawa launch of The Defilers here, a news release on the event here, and Pastor Doug Ward's remarks at the launch here. Doug, who pastors Kanata Baptist Church, was my M.C.

Next book events will be in Nova Scotia. I will be at Blessings Christian Marketplace in Halifax from 10:30 to noon August 19 and that afternoon at the Blessings Store in Dartmouth from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

The 'safe vs. good debate' heats up

Relapsed Catholic Kathy Shaidle has not only raised the ire of Protestants, she seems to have a number of Catholics incensed over this post and that one.

Some responses to her posts here led to a vintage tirade this morning about how people are missing the point.

Your obsession with making the world immaculately safe for your children is (ironically) ruining civil society by raising up a generation of risk averse, hyperallergic, conformist dimwits who've never been allowed to simply daydream or scrape their (heavily padded) kneecaps. We are living in a "Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids" world. Aren't you satisfied yet?

For the millionth time: Make your own damn movies and music if you don't like Hollywood's. Stop boycotting and criticizing movies and books you'll never read anyway.

If you think of the cinema as nothing more than the source of 90 minutes or two hours of respite in the warm glow of (someone else's) fantasy; if it is nothing more to you than "a good story" (hopefully one with a cute dog and a happy ending and no swearing)...

You DO NOT deserve the movies. You are beneath them. Amuse yourselves with bingo or bake sales or some other intellectually undemanding pastime. If you can't understand the concept of the physical integrity of another person's creative work, an artifact that embodies a part of themselves in some metaphysical sense, that may even be touched with Spirit, whether you like it or understand it or not... oh, forget it. I'm guessing you bought the Thomas Kincaide that matched your couch, right?

Yes, yes, I know: raising children is the most important job in the whole wide world. When you present yourselves to God at the End of Days, you are getting straight into heaven, while I, the childless arrogant artiste, is going straight to hell, shouting out, "'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of little old ladies" as I tumble into the sulfur.

On that we are all agreed.

Now: back slowly away from the moviola or I will kill you with my pudgy little hands.

Now, given the humorlessness of some of the people who prefer what is safe over what is good, (though granted there are books like Gilead by Marilynne Robinson that are both safe and good) I fear that some might think Kathy is actually making death threats.

She's joking folks!

But to the point she's making---there is a big difference if I as an artist decide to cut some scenes from a movie or a book for wider distribution and family viewing vs. having some third party do it without permission.

And the other point is this: what is perceived as safe may be far more pernicious than the odd profane word or graphic sex scene in a more theologically sound work of art.

"Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject."
—Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

I think the Left Behind series is bad art and consequently bad religion, though perhaps many people find they're prompted to say the Sinner's Prayer after reading one of these books about the End Times. And maybe some of those people are genuinely repenting. God can even make a donkey speak if He has to in order to reach someone, but that doesn't make the donkey anything other than a donkey.

God chose a book with some pretty mediocre writing aimed at junior high school level readers to turn my life around, so I can't deny that He sometimes uses the strangest means as a Shepherd's crook to hook someone.

I think there is great art that is also good but unsafe in the sense that it is disquieting, haunting, challenging, upsetting and illusion-busting.

Flannery O'Connor falls into that category. This is from an interesting essay about her I found online this morning.

She was writing for an audience to whom the incarnation had little meaning, and yet her fiction repeatedly showed common people encountering the terror, mystery and beauty of the Word made flesh. She might have predicted that many of her readers would be mildly puzzled, if not completely confounded.

That fiction contained truth was the conviction she lived with every day. The fact that this truth was sometimes odd or uncomfortable or violent, that it led often to the grotesque, O’ Connor faced unflinchingly. Quoting Robert Fitzgerald, she wrote, "It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth" (p. 343). What could be stranger than a God who decides to suffer with us? What could be more uncomfortable or more violent than the cross? What could be more comically grotesque than an individual trying to escape his own identity as God’s child and in his rush out the temple door smacking straight into the incarnation?

I believe there is also bad art that is unsafe and great art that has great merit in terms of skill, vision of the artist and so on, but is inherently evil and decadent.

Unfortunately, too often a lack of discernment will push what is good, great and unsafe into the great but evil category. So often that happens to the best writers who are not received as the prophets they are in their own times.

More on St. George from Get Religion

My British friends — who all thought the change was logical — thought there was no way it would pass. St. Alban may get bumped up a few notches in the public eye, they said, but there was no way the flag of St. George was going to be lowered for good. That would simply create too much heat among the masses.

Read it all. Via Kathy Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic, who always has several good posts and links.