Customer Reviews

Clerical Error: A True Story (Handbooks of Catholic Theology)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A very open and honest book of one mans life destroyed by someone that everyone trusted and loved.

I can imagine the author has carried this sadness and yes perhaps bitterness most of his life. The worst part of carrying something like this is the fact that no matter how good or honest or how well someone knows you, (even all of your life) someone else who is so charming and enthralling like Father Malachi, can convince others YOU are the one lying and they will doubt you but believe them.

Those are the tools a sociopath uses. Fr. Malachy Martin used others in any way or fashion to serve his own ends. From the church, to the women he abused, to the friends he deceived, to the loyal listeners or readers of he himself. Now none of what he said or wrote is believable to me.

I wasn't shocked about some of the goings on within the church, that's life, but to go as far as a mental institution for the author?? to go 'that' far? Let alone to find out who the main antagonist was, Fr. Malachy Martin; a well beloved (up till now) and well known priest and the dastardly deeds that lurked deep within him. THAT was the shock!

I've read most of Fr. Martins books and thought of him as this wonderful Irish grandfatherly type, a wise man figure who knew much of the interior workings of the vatican. I now believe that most of what he spouted definitely was his own political agenda. I guess I've been as duped as the author was and glad to have my eyes opened about Fr. Martin's true personality. This book shows how easily we can all be deceived.

What a tragedy Mr. Blair suffered, not only the adultery, the loss of his wife and children, but the horrendous loss of support from his own peers in the church who knew him so well, yet didn't believe him and chose to believe Fr. Martin.

I will say that the background of Blairs life in the seminary at times was just a little too long of tooth and drawn out, though I did find it interesting, but half way through is when it became fascinating and I couldn't put it down till I finished it. I know of one illustrious name in particular in the book that lent absolute credence to the whole book for me and I believe it to absolutely true, no doubt in my mind. Good book, good read, and if you want to know how a sociopath's mind works and manipulates, this is one of them from a personal viewpoint.

Robert Blair Kaiser, who brilliantly made his mark as the principal Time correspondent covering the First Session of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), describes his memoir as coming-of-age stories, his own and that of the Catholic Church at Vatican II. Sadly, as much as Kaiser has grown up, and moved on with his life despite personal tragedy, the institutional Church might be characterized as stuck in arrested development, still mired in sexual scandals that have bankrupted dioceses and tarnished the image of the priesthood and religious life. This book directs trenchant criticism of the Church on matters of sexuality.

The first two parts of Kaiser's book take enjoyable excursions, first through the life of a Jesuit novice and scholastic in the 1950s--considerably different, I can tell you, from my experience as a Jesuit novice in the early 1980s. Kaiser was a Jesuit for ten years, leaving before being ordained a priest. He describes what it was like to undergo Jesuit formation in the years before Vatican II, some of his experiences being quite humorous, and some of them darkly foreshadowing later crises. The second part of the book details Kaiser's post-Jesuit foray into journalism, eventually leading him to Rome as a Time correspondent just as Vatican II is called. Kaiser's religious background, social skills, and curiosity prepare him well to deliver the inside story of Vatican II to readers in the United States and United Kingdom; only The New Yorker's pseudonymous Xavier Rynne (Francis X. Murphy) had as much if not greater impact on the English-speaking world's encountering the revolutionary spirit of the Council.

The third and greater part of the book tragically recounts the dissolution of Kaiser's marriage. As Kaiser becomes increasingly absorbed with the Council and with his related personal successes (his book on the Council wins high acclaim), and so abandoning his young family for days and weeks at a time, his wife Mary turns to one of his friends, the Jesuit priest Malachi Martin, for solace and companionship. In time, Kaiser begins to suspect that Mary and Martin are having a sexual relationship. Some of Kaiser's other friends, however, feel that Kaiser is paranoid, that he has been overworking and is losing his grip on reality. They go so far as to direct Kaiser to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. In time, Kaiser (who, as the narrative makes clear, has his own moral failings) finds evidence that Mary has been using birth control pills during his long absences; later he obtains copies of Martin's scandalous letters to his wife. He is finally vindicated when Martin's superiors begin to accept, all too late, Martin's culpability in the affair.

If this sounds like a pot boiler, it certainly reads like one. The emotions are raw, and Kaiser's actions almost vindictive. (Mary, who is as culpable, fares better than Martin.) Indeed, if not for Kaiser's impeccable credentials as a journalist, and the independently raised concerns about Martin's morals and ethics in other situations, one might be tempted to shrug off this account as simply Kaiser's biased personal perspective at best and fantasy at worst. Kaiser's story rings all too true to let Martin and, for that matter, those who protected him, off the hook.

Apart from this sordid affair, Kaiser's account raises troubling questions about the institutional Church's ability to grapple reasonably and effectively with matters involving sexuality. From the tragic and harmful effects of repressed sexuality among some clergy and religious to its controversial handling of the birth control issue in the 1960s the institutional Church has been desperate to uphold its bulwark of moral certitude in matters of sexuality. Meanwhile, for decades, the People of God have largely been drifting from a Church that has been prone to just say "No" on most matters of sexuality while appearing widely and flagrantly hypocritical when it comes to the sexual failings of the clergy and religious.

In Kaiser's view, the institutional Church discourages the People of God from thinking for itself. It was his ability to recognize that for himself that allowed Kaiser to finally grow up. (The reader notes with caution, though, that Kaiser's view of women in this book has usually to do with their sexual attributes and not much more. This does a disservice to his claim.) But encouraging the People of God to think for themselves is only half the answer (and is happening anyway, with deleterious effect as far as religion is concerned); the other, more difficult challenge ahead for the Church is moving towards a more positive embracing of sexuality, to become a Church that says "Yes" on matters of sexuality and of love in a healthy and responsible environment. Ultimately this will mean deeply reexamining, in the light of contemporary science and the actual, lived experiences of heterosexual and homosexual men and women, basic questions about sexual orientation, sexual behaviors, and marriage and sexual expression in the context of faith and morality. The Church will also need to review current proscriptions that currently serve as barriers to people's exercising their faith in the context of the Church. Finally, the Church will need to do a better job at communicating its message, following up on positive statements made by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

"Clerical Error" contains a shocking expose of Malachi Martin, the defrocked or laicized Jesuit priest who died several years ago (hopefully having first made his peace with God via sacramental confession, prayer and repentance). I give this book 3 stars for its tabloid value of unmasking this popular character, but aside from that it is the sad story, pathetic even, of Robert Kaiser's misunderstanding of the Catholic Church, the sanctity of marriage, and sexual morality.

A backdrop for this auto-biography is the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1965) which Kaiser covered for Time magazine. For Kaiser, the Catholic Church at that time was antiquated and much like him, immature and misled, gravely in need of conversion. He found the Council to be an epiphany for the Church, something that would save the Church from its own dogma and make the Roman Catholic Church less Roman and more Catholic. This would come about by the Council's enthronement of human conscience. Here we see Kaiser embracing a profound error among many, since ultimately it is dogma that illuminates the truth, while conscience tends to obscure it, given that so few souls in this day have a conscience that is properly formed.

Lacking spiritual vision, Kaiser was too caught up in subjectifying sin to realize that the Council's mandate--to formulate the Church's teachings in a pastoral way so that they could be more readily received and understood by the world--created a quagmire of ambiguity which seems to have led to a christening of the Great Apostasy. Indeed, the fruit of the Second Vatican Council was the abandonment of the Church by thousands of priests and nuns, not to mention millions of lay people. Instead of teaching faith, the Council seems to have destroyed it. Kaiser gladly absorbs the buffet of available errors, more than once referring to the Holy Spirit as a "She" and praising the Council for its newfound acceptance of "religious freedom" which somehow will lead all religions to the heavenly kingdom, despite their contradictons. The problem with the formula of religious freedom is that no freedom exists without a consistent definition of what that word means. Since the term is ambiguous (at least in modern usage) it leads to hell. By eschewing dogmatic definitions, the Council pulled the plug on the thrice defined Magisterial teaching "Outside the Church there is no salvation".

Kaiser likes to extol his Jesuit training whenever he is bragging about his intellectual accomplishments for Time, but he doesn't hesitate to turn and blame the Jesuits for his moral failings. Despite his Jesuit background, he is not qualified to report on the Council because sin and immorality blind people and he whose vision is not sanctified by daily prayer and penance is never fit to write on spiritual things like the Second Vatican Council. It was the Fathers of the Church who taught that personal holiness was essential to correct knowledge of truth.

The drama of Kaiser's story is the stealing of Mary, his wife, by Malachi Martin, and the painful trauma which this caused Kaiser as he struggles to get her back, only to ultimately reject Mary in the end when he falls for a comely college senior.

In the end, Kaiser and Martin were birds of a feather, abandoning the teachings of the Church to live by their own failed consciences. Without adherence to Catholic dogma, one's eternal destiny is in peril. Neither Kaiser nor Martin had the desire to recognize their infidelities to the Mystical Body of Christ and that is a shame indeed.

Clerical Error is a very interesting book. There is not a single Catholic interested in Vatican II that would not love it. Kaiser either met or knew every person of note involved in Vatican II.
He tells all about himself as a young pre-Vat II husband and he admits to being somewhat less than noteworthy. Indeed, he was a wretch. His knowledge of how to love and how to show love to the beloved was sorely lacking. He was pitiful. He does not deny this fact. It is no wonder that his wife, Mary, took up with the odios priest, Fr. Malachy.
Kaiser was undeniably naive. He was also undeniably self-confident and cocky. His note-worthy friends were equally naive regarding the feminine gender. How pitiable it is to realize that men such as they rule the Catholic Church and they are the ones who make the rules for the rest of us to live by. What a farce. They preach as though they know the mind of God. Yet, they know nothing of love, in depth love, intimate love. And they do not even realize that they know nothing except what they read. How scary that is!
I do not know how much Kaiser has learned over the ensuiing years. I would enjoy discussing his present beliefs
regarding love and marriage with him.

In "Clerical Error" a Time reporter starts off slowly relating the story of seminary days. He finds love and the story peaks with a kaleidoscope of famous names and fascinating people in a setting of the Church and the city of Rome. It culminates in fascinating revelations of naivete and pathological intrigue. You can tell the author was a Time reporter, since you cannot put the book down.

From The
History of Vatican II by James Hitchcock:

Time magazine, which was a much more influential journal then, than it is now, was represented at the Council by a reporter whose name was Robert Blair Kaiser. He had been at one time a Jesuit. He was not a priest but he had been a Jesuit, had studied for the priesthood, and was therefore somebody who knew something. He wasn't an ignorant man who had to learn it all from scratch; he was fairly sophisticated in religious matters. But Robert Blair Kaiser's reporting was very much along the same lines as that of Xavier Rynne, the good-guy liberals versus the bad-guy conservatives. Every day there was a shootout at the O.K. Corral over some issue or other. Fortunately most of the time the good-guy liberals managed to disarm the bad-guy conservatives. They shot the guns out of their hands. But unfortunately the bad-guy conservatives kept getting more guns, and so there would be another shootout maybe a week or two later.

As it turned out in some of the autobiographical things which he later wrote, Kaiser had a very clear agenda from the very beginning. One major part of that agenda was birth control. He had been poking around in that area and making contact with certain theologians who were privately or secretly supportive of birth control before the Council. He had made contact with certain influential Belgian and Dutch theologians. When he went to the Council he understood that there was a liberal agenda, the modernist agenda as we've called it, and he was going to use his magazine, Time magazine, to push it. And he did so, and very effectively. Unfortunately the average American Catholic, and this includes most priests and most nuns, learned what the Council was all about more from Time magazine and The New Yorker than from any other source.

There is a massive failure of education here on the part of the Church. One would assume that given an event like the Council that the hierarchy would have put into gear a massive educational project. They would have been lining up books, they would have been training teachers, they would have been announcing schools, workshops in every parish, whatever. And they would have insured the fact that what was presented to people as the authentic teaching of the Council really was the authentic teaching of the Council. To an amazing degree this task was neglected. There was, in fact, as far as I can see, practically no systematic effort to educate Catholics as to the meaning of the Council. They were left to discern its meaning in just about any way they could. And if they were reading the New Yorker they got it from Xavier Rynne, and if they were reading Time magazine they got it from Robert Blair Kaiser. Some variation on the views of those two men appeared in most of the secular press. So not only did there persist a good deal of confusion as to what the Council was all about, but there was even a completely skewed, even false notion of what it was all about. Victories that could not be won on the floor of the Council itself, victories that could not be ratified in the Conciliar decrees, were won after the Council in terms of what people thought the Council said as opposed to what it actually said. The obligation of obedience was used over and over again to get reluctant people to go along with the Council's changes, until such time as obedience had outlasted its usefulness and then the shift was to independence and freedom.

Svengali, Rasputin, Martin. If what Mr. Kaiser says in this book is true, then it's too bad that Malachi (why does Kaiser spell it Malachy?) Martin died before INTERPOL, and whatever other law enforcement agencies should be interested, got to him.

I'm not Catholic and I don't think the story in Mr. Kaiser's book is Vatican II at all. The story is about a master con-man and even a cult master of international proportions.

Malachi Martin is connected so much like a spider to so many people and "things" that someone ought to do a really IN DEPTH rundown on the man. I live in a little, out-of-the-way midwestern state, I'm not Catholic, and even I know of people connected in a bizarre, almost cult-like way to Martin and perhaps a mysterious, grissly, unsolved murder or two.

I don't think that Martin was incapable of it, assuming that what Mr. Kaiser says in this book is indeed "a true story."

I agree with the previous commentator---I could not put the book down. Tolle et lege.

This book is well worth the read. In view of the fact that it was written prior to the breaking of the current scandal, it seems almost prophetic at times. When the author gives his scathing critique of celebacy, however, he assumed that the indescretions of the clergy involved adult men and women. Even Kaiser could not imagine the depth of horrific betrayal of trust in the abuse of children that so many clergy would be capable of.

This book is a "must read" for anyone seriously interested in reform in the Roman Catholic Church. It so speaks of its systemic abuse and misuse of power.

One more reason for RCs to get out of our pews and take back the church.

I just finished reading Clerical Error after making copious notes throughout.

As a sedevacantist his book validates my position held by a growing group that the vatican ii council has produced untold damage to the faith of millions of souls.

By recounting the idealogy of many liberals to attempt to change the unchanging doctrines of God's Church Kaiser has unwittingly pointed out that fruits of vatican ii and the new religion (novus ordo) has decimated the true faith throughout the world and brought the full impact of satan and his minions upon the soul of the Church.

I also bought the book to validate some other sources concerning Malachy Martin. I admit being duped into buying Martin books especially during my novus ordo days as a "conservative". Now I will be trashing or burning any books that I still have of his.

Martin, if he did not repent before his death, will be burning in Hell along with the last 3 antipopes and another Martin (Martin Luther).

This book should bring to those Catholics of good faith still trapped in the novus ordo religion that the purpose of vatican ii was to CHANGE Jesus' teaching as well as impose a new religion.

The Fruits of vatican ii are evident: widespread apostasy, priests shortages, homosexuals in the seminaries. The devil couldn't be more proud of his handiwork.

There are two websites I would recommend to give a better understanding of the new religion and its antipopes:

http://www.novusordowatch.org/archive.htm

http://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/