The cover suggests a Ludlum-like thriller with a new Pope who recognizes that
global power has shifted from nations to religions. The hook is that the
new Pope was once a teenaged Nazi given a new identity through the Vatican.
How this all happens spans a period from 1945 to the present with a series of
cardboard characters moving through implausible schemes that involve looted
funds in a Swiss account, various murders staged to protect secrets that cannot
be made known, and a young Jew’s search for truth and
vengeance.
Erich, the teenager who once used the cover of an altar boy to locate Jews
hidden by sympathetic parishioners, turns up as a priest and then a bishop in
California, and he is as ugly a character as they come—a murderer who uses
an image of a concern for social justice to manipulate his way to celebrity and
advancement in the church. Yes, he will play the game well
enough to become top dog in the church, but, wait, there is something about
expensive pens rigged to deliver a lethal dose of Zyklon B and a predictable
ending.
Corruption in high places has long been a staple of thriller fiction, and any
group that is at all secretive—always the CIA, while in The DaVinci
Code Opus Dei has come to replace the Jesuits as a source of clerical
skullduggery—is fair game for a writer’s imagination. Pereira,
however, seems to be ambitioning something more than a rather far-fetched plot
allowing a one-time Nazi with a forged identity to become Pope. From the
first presentation of Erich as the orphan befriended by a pedophile priest and
then through him introduced to the Nazi elite, we are to see the church as
interested only in power. He pursues the theme relentlessly,
especially in depicting how Erich, now Bishop Fitzgerald (!), whets the appetite
of Vatican insiders with the concept of how the church could increase its
secular power with a religious smart card that would become a new type of
passport.
There are numerous tangled subplots that aim at one surprise twist after
another, but after a short while it is hard to care about any of the characters
or about what happens to them.
Doug McFerran was a Jesuit from 1952-62. He taught philosophy in the
Los Angeles Community College District until his retirement in 2003. He is the
author of IRA Man: Talking with the Rebels and is currently the editor of
ARCCLIGHT, the newsletter published by the Association for the Rights of
Catholics in the Church.