Fred's Book Club: The Two Bishops.

Welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the book feature that always features writers, but never features humps. It's Hump Day, that's all, otherwise known as Wednesday.

And today is Ash Wednesday for Christians in most denominations, especially the Roman Catholic Church. On that topic, today's book is one of the most peculiar in my collection, a graphic novel that is, I think, an example of great writing paired with the right art, that could be told as well in no other format. It is The Grand Inquisitor, by John Zmirak, with illustration by Carla Millar.

Where to start with this one? It's a story about the first black African pope -- or is it? When we first meet the man he is in a madhouse in Rome, having arrived there following a mysterious call from a Ukrainian cardinal. But the bishop's race is only a part of the story -- it isn't all about being black, or even being a Catholic leader in a nation of Islamic extremists, as he was. It's about this man of faith and his grim experiences that led him to promotion in the church, but also into this madhouse following the death of the current pope. 

That leads us to the other main character, the other bishop. This elderly cardinal, Fr. Primo, is a behind-the-scenes church leader, a fixer, an intellectual, a man of faith decayed but of determination no less. At once the title becomes clear, for "The Grand Inquisitor" comes from the famous story in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, a fable about the returned Christ meeting the titular official. 

And yet this is not a story even about naive faith and cynical administration; it goes beyond that. John Zmirak, senior editor of The Stream and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, opens the book with this quotation from Pope Benedict XVI when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, an excerpt that I further excerpt here:

In the course of a dispute, a senior colleague, who was keenly aware of the plight of being a Christian in our times, expressed the opinion that one should actually be grateful to God that He allows there to be so many unbelievers in good conscience. For if their eyes were opened and they all became believers, they would not be capable, in this world of ours, of bearing the burden of faith with all its moral obligations. But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can reach salvation.... Since that conversation, I knew with complete certainty that something was wrong with the theory....

And this is really what the book is about. It's a tale of secularism and faith, of salvation with and without God, of Man storming the heavens under the banner of Good, with failure and damnation and everything else. The old man goads and taunts "Black Pope" (as he calls him) for his ambition, for the sacrifices others had to make for his confrontational actions in Sudan. He is like Satan in that regard -- Satan, whose name means Adversary or Accuser. And has has had ambitions of his own, worked out in silence through the decades.

It is not a long book, but it has a magnificent scope and sweep. The two main characters are locked in a battle to the finish, each in his way a man of the past and of the future; it is not clear how this will end. 

The story is told almost entirely in Shakespearean dialogue. The verse in which it is composed is blank, and yet mostly written in iambs, the short/long syllable rhythm, with unexpected rhymes popping in to remind you it is verse:

The Church was meant to service man!

                         It fails,

and works instead to foster an elite

of spiritual aristocrats. And they

soak up the benefits that ought to pour

promiscuously on every needy prole.

You lack the intellectual control

to maintain a consistent position.

One minute you're a Catholic, the next

a Marxist dialectician. 

The art is Boschian, if that artist had focused on woodcuts instead of paint (and Bosch does get a well-deserved name check in the dialogue). Every panel is compelling, symbolic, hard to look at. 

On the whole it is a dazzling display from both writer and artist. I first read it one Easter morning, having been at the long Vigil the night before. I found it horrifying, and depressing, but ultimately reassuring of faith and hopeful. That may seem crazy, but it's one of those books you experience, much like a stage play, rather than read. If you're going to check out a fictionalized tale of two strong clerics and the papacy, then prefer this one to that other piece of fiction from Netflix. Fake pews!

I would recommend The Grand Inquisitor to modern Catholics, but maybe to each one for a different reason. One person might appreciate the art, another the writing; a third might need to look at the course of secularism; a fourth might want to ponder how engagement with the world affects faith, or vice versa. And one might just want a powerful Church story. Zmirak and Millar have achieved something worthy of note with this story, and I hope it continues to find readers. It is set "ten years in the future," but is a story for our day.