By MAIKE HICKSON
Casaroja by Michael Morow. WingSpan Press: 2014. Available at amazon.com: hardcover $26.37; paperback $13.05; 192 pp.
“Death, Andre, the prior [Fr. Matthew] thought, as he buckled up his saddlebags for a long journey, and not the sort of death unleashed here [in the village of Casaroja], either. Death in the very oldest Catholic sense, as in St. John’s Gospel and the Didache: death of the soul as opposed to the road of Life. For there are only two ways, dear Fr. Andre…but did anyone ever actually teach you that?”
These are the deep reflections of the American prior of a Benedictine Mission in Guatemala about one of his own mission priests, Fr. Andre, whom he had sent out to a small village, Casaroja, and who seems to have wrought havoc there with his erroneous and revolutionary Marxist ideas, as they were condensed in the doctrines and methods of liberation theology. In turn, it was Fr. Matthew’s duty as prior to now investigate the ambiguous case of this priest himself, as rumors had it that the military junta had finally come into the village only in order to wipe out the nest of Marxist subversion.
Throughout his dangerous and long journey on horseback, Fr. Matthew reflects upon his own culpable negligence and even the shallow indifference with which he sent Fr. Andre out to the important mission station that had been the first foundation of the whole missionary effort originally launched by U.S. Benedictines into the Guatemala area in the 1960s. Now, nearly 30 years later — it was now the year 1988 — it seemed that all the work of that lengthy period of time had been destroyed, and Fr. Matthew had now to rebuild it from the ground up. Reflecting upon the subversive revolutionary priests throughout this country, he then says to himself:
“They were that subtle, studied and practiced. They had a terrible worldly wisdom, plus the advantage of an entirely integrated and whole view that explained everything, made action easy. They had everything we on the other side had, in the good old days, except Christ.”
When first arriving in the village of Casaroja together with two companions who were sent to be his aides, Fr. Matthew is confronted with a completely desolate and destroyed place: The church and its buildings were in ruins, surrounded by mass graves and deserted and destroyed houses.
For security reasons, Fr. Matthew has only two days’ time to put God’s grace and good order back into the place, by ordering the building of a cemetery, by digging out and identifying the corpses, by giving the souls of the departed a worthy traditional Requiem Mass, by hearing Confessions, baptizing, and sacramentally marrying couples.
By means of this depiction of both a desolation and a consolation at the same time, the author of this book, Michael Morow, is especially able to show forth the moral beauty and the indispensable importance of the priesthood. The priest was there to bring God’s abundant love and grace. He consoles, restores, rebukes, heals, and gives absolution. By depicting this zeal for souls, the author also shows the sharp difference between a Catholic priest like Fr. Matthew, who knows that God’s salvation is effected one by one, one soul at a time, and the distinctively different revolutionary agent who is himself a “coercive utopian” whose own “liberation theology” was much more more abstract and whose stunted ideological approach mainly attacks “the structures” and the purportedly “retrograde, reactionary ideas.”
In this context, the author Morow then shows Fr. Matthew himself candidly reflecting upon his own character and conduct, and doing it in such a way that it becomes an honest and searching examination of his own troubled conscience:
“And how many of these program guides have you even read yourself, Father Prior, before you send Mr. Whoever [e.g., Fr. Andre] out with them? Did you even take the time to sift through them, figure out what precisely any of it had to do with the salvation of the soul, and what merely with getting on board with the current fashions of the periti?. . . Forgetting that the Mystical Body only grows one soul at a time, as Abbot Henni taught. By grace, by genuine conversion.”
With these meditations, Fr. Matthew rebukes not only himself for his negligence, but he also castigates his own somewhat lax and even conniving superiors in the U.S. who, perhaps, ultimately have the larger responsibility and accountability.
He says to God: “You have sent me here to spread your kingdom, and in my monumental negligence I have connived at bringing hell to earth! Forgive me!” He knows that a prior like himself, and finally his own superiors, both have a grave responsibility before God for the care of souls. And, as he now unsparingly sees himself, he had indeed also failed by not forestalling and finally preventing Fr. Andre from wreaking havoc in Casaroja and thereby destroying what had so gradually been built up there, with the cultivated implanting of the faith.
Will Fr. Matthew now be able to restore things and once again gain the deep trust of the local villagers? That is to say, their trust in his Benedictine order and in its mission there, especially after the disaster of this recent massacre, a massacre which was perhaps even provoked and further incited by one of his own missionary priests? Who, after all, was behind the killing? Where is Fr. Andre now? With whom did Fr. Andre possibly collude and dangerously conspire? These are questions that Fr. Matthew must now try to answer during his very short stay in Casaroja. And, he must learn the truth also while he concurrently works very zealously and tirelessly as a sacramental priest.
This book captures the attention of the reader at once, and will even draw him into reading the entire text in one sitting. For, it is a fine composition and a fine contribution to a deeper meditation by the Church concerning her own foreign missions and their possible negligence and their false turns and self-sabotaging ideologies, and especially their disastrous effects upon the Southern and Central American countries themselves.
It also invites all of us individually to look back upon our own lives to see whether, and where, we may have been too inactive or too quietistic and slothful in resisting an evil, thereby contributing to the perishing of souls. It also reminds us, and in a beautiful way, of how a good priest should be and should act as a representative of Christ on Earth. (There is, for example, a beautiful description in the novel of a Requiem Mass in the Traditional Latin Rite, and it makes us remember and yearn more for the deep liturgy of the Church.)
“You Are My Brother”
Michael Morow, the author, depicts Fr. Matthew himself as a priest who has a healing touch with almost all the souls he encounters, both by virtue of his humility and because of his palpably fervent love for Christ. Impressive also is how Morow depicts, with deep respect, the landscape and vivid nature of the country, to include the Spanish roots and the local Mayan culture and customs (for example, in his recurrent reference to the Baile de la Conquista, a masque dance commemorating the historical victory of the Spanish Catholics over the initially resistant Mayan leader).
One will not likely forget how Fr. Matthew hears the Confession of a young Guatemalan man who had gone long astray, and how the priest thus helps the man to do penance; and how he later on also takes care of the persistent needs of his soul. One shall also not forget how Fr. Matthew is able to touch the soul of a woman of the village who was so deeply resentful in her justifiable mistrust, but who then, finally, near the end of the book, calls out to Father: “You are my brother through Jesus Christ and His Mother Mary in Heaven!”
These words had come, after Fr. Matthew, in his pure Christ-like love, had himself first said to her: “I wish you were my sister” — after which he reached over and made a mark of the cross upon her forehead.
We shall now more keenly look forward to reading Michael Morow’s other volumes. Casaroja is to be part of a longer sequence of novels, which taken together will be called The Long Exile. Those volumes will describe and follow the lives of two boyhood friends who had both grown up in Chicago, one of them becoming a priest, the other becoming a lawyer: Fr. Matthew himself; and another man who is named Christopher Gauthier. Nonetheless, the historical novel, Casaroja, stands by itself, and it vividly depicts many still-important, deep Catholic themes and memorable characters.
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(Maike Hickson holds a doctorate in French literature from the University of Hannover.)
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