Customer Reviews

Voice From The Desert

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"Voice from the Desert" is a deceptively-simple, slight volume, in which Bishop Jacques Gaillot chronicles his "resignation" from the see of Evreux, France; and his "appointment" as Bishop of Partenia - a North African wasteland, now defunct. With remarkably little bitterness, this extraordinary man outlines his beliefs and the actions which eventually led to his dismissal. His resilience was such that he established a cyber-diocese on the Internet, and thus can reach millions of souls, where before he only reached thousands. One can only mourn for an institutionalized church which prizes doctrine, authority, and image over the true, all-embracing and eternal love which Gaillot embodies with every word. My only regret is that he does not address the ordination of women and the position of women in the Catholic church. A beautiful, inspiring and radiant book.

The Bishop having been sacked by Rome attempts to tell his story to an imaginery people in the desert his new see. We get a lot of insight into his thoughts and what led to Rome's decision. The Bishop thinks his stand is absolutely right but like so many others before him and currently has no chance against the church with its archaic man made rules.

Toward the beginning of "Voice," Bishop Jacques Gaillot compares JP2 to Joseph Stalin, immediately estranging himself from this reader's sympathy. He recovers somewhat to give a sporadically engaging but under-informative essay on papal authority: Is the Catholic Church over-bureaucratized and over-centralized?

Condemning the authorities as vicious, meanspirited, intolerant, insensitive (stop me if you've heard that one before), Gaillot really doesn't tell us what made him fall under the scrutiny of the Holy See. This particular pontiff is famously patient, not having excommunicated whole raftloads of dissident theologians, but issuing restrained admonitions when something's amiss. (I think he's excommunicated two [2] theologians, one of whom has already been restored to communion.)

The book is brief, and Gaillot does not tell us how, in the hypothetical diminution or absence of papal authority, the Catholic Church would be able to stop itself from splintering as the Anglican Communion has done in the last quarter-century. An Eastern Orthodox theologian might have insight into this question; Gaillot proffers not insight as much as self-justification and the occasional baseness of name-calling.

We learn that Bishop Gaillot considers himself the eparch, if you will, of a cyber-diocese, where persons who might be inclined to sympathize with his views of ecclesiology & moral theology can gather, refresh themselves, and lament the alleged immitigability of JP2, Cardinals Ratzinger & Gantin, and other figures more representative of the main stream of Roman Catholicism than the soi-disant progressives. This cyber-diocese has an interesting if not quite memorable name which begins with a P.

Persons who parrot the National Catholic Reporter might be inclined to appraise Gaillot's slender and breezy account more highly than this reviewer (indeed, the book carries a preface from NCR editor Thomas Fox).