What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Paperback)

by Jack Fritscher (Author) "Falling into the liquid of time, born, he worked his way into reason..." (more)
Key Phrases: other seminarians, seminary life, Rector Karg, Hank the Tank, Father Gunn (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Author Jack Fritscher is a schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston--famous in the priest sex-abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church. This memoir-novel tells a tale of boys "touched by angels." That the narrator, Ryan O'Hara, is ironically flawed subverts the tale told to the reader in this 'Catholic Catcher in the Rye'.

Catholic or not: What you should know about What They Did to the Kid. Vivid as a screenplay. Villains will make you throw the book across the room. Heroes will make you pick it up. Fun. Accessible. And as true as fiction gets. If you, or someone in your family, grew up in a seminary, or you just want to know exactly how priests are trained as boys, this novel tells all you need to know, without being offensive or stereotypical, about adolescent boys, recruited by the Church, and trapped in claustrophobic seminaries. Chosen by CNN: "Top 100 Books You Are Reading."

In the 1950s, the Catholic Church in fact actively recruited 200,000 boys into seminaries. This is the story of those boys and their families, and the women who would have married them. Strong characters and snappy dialog propel the fast-moving plot.

In the secret 1950s' world of "Misericordia Seminary," Ryan O'Hara, from age 14 to 24, narrates the adventures of 500 boys trapped by the imperial Rector Karg; the militaristic disciplinarian, Father Gunn USMC; the tart, and suicidal, Father Polistina; and the rebel-priest, handsome Chris Dryden "who knows Fellini and JFK" and also teaches seminarians how to love their bodies "the way Jesus loves their bodies."

The author, with twelve previous books published, gives each diverse character--hero or villain, student or priest, man or woman--a rich back story. Black civil rights of the 1960s and three interesting women characters open this boys-coming-of-age story out of the seminary and on to the hot streets of Chicago.

In this fictional memoir, Jack Fritscher--who won "Story Teller of the Year" Book Award for this novel--inhales experience and exhales fiction. Against the dramatic tension of Vatican II, he oxygenates his panic-stricken novel with mouth-to-mouth comic dialog that breathes irony into this coming-of-age novel in a seminary where no boy can grow up.

In times of Catholic scandal, this is what readers need to know about the secret education of boys-who-would-be-priests--without offending reader sensibilities.

"Survivors of Catholic education" will identify with the 1950s' roots of 21st-century "recovering Catholic" panic and angst.

Readers outside the Catholic Church will gain an insight to the hidden psychology of the education of priests.

This coming-of-age story is "a novel of the closet" in which boys' personal, intellectual, and sexual identity is always on the line. This novel is the pre-quel to the best-selling memoir-novel, Some Dance to Remember.

About the Author
Jack Fritscher is the deeply established author more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Some Dance to Remember, The Geography of Women: A Romantic Comedy, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot, and Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories, featuring "Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way." He has also written two produced plays and two current screenplays. His writing, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, has received many awards and grants, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, University of California, Berkeley. At the national American Book Expo in New York, 2002, What They Did to the Kid won several awards including "Story Teller of the Year," "One of the Top 10 Books of the Year," and the ForeWord Award, "Best Fiction Finalist."

From 1953-1963, he was educated at the prestigious Pontifical College Josephinum which is the only Catholic seminary in North America directly subject to the Pope in Rome. He received his PhD from Loyola University, Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation, Love and Death in Tennessee Williams. He completed post-doctoral study at Oxford University, Christ Church College. At university, he has taught creative writing, journalism, literature, and film. He is a founding member of the American Popular Culture Association, whose press published his best-selling nonfiction book, Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch?s Mouth. He serves also as literary advisor to the American Erotic Authors Association.

A prolific contributor to magazine culture, his writing and photographs have appeared in more than forty periodicals, journals, and newspapers. He is a working scholar of American popular culture, noted particularly for his controversial nonfiction memoir of art and Catholicism, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.

He is the founding San Francisco editor of Drummer magazine and is currently writing and editing The Queering of America: EyeWitness Drummer, A Memoir of the Gay History, Pop Culture, and Literary Roots of the Best of Drummer Magazine.

Detailed information can be seen at his website which is Jack Fritscher spelled as one word followed by dot com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 375 pages
• Publisher: Palm Drive Publishing (August 26, 2002)
• ISBN-10: 1890834378
• ISBN-13: 978-1890834371
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #188,949 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law, April 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Hardcover)

The author is a schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law, and so am I. Consequently, I found Jack Fritscher's novel to be as much memoir as fiction, as I was also a student at the Pontifical College Josephinum with both Law and Fritscher, and found the fictive parallels to my memories to be evocative of how we as young seminarians were taught and trained "to be pure and avoid scandal at all costs." That, I suggest, is the innocent essence of the secrecy the media now calls "cover-up." Don't all groups--from firemen and cops to Marines--close ranks around their own?

If one is at all analytical, one thinks that this "scandal of priest sexual abuse and priest molestation"--driven by media terribly hungry to fill 24/7 programming--is just another part of the fundamentalist religious war to destroy Western Civilization: i.e. Christianity, and Christianity's oldest bastion, Roman Catholicism.

At any rate, Fritscher's novel, despite its media-juicy title, is a gentle, yet eye-popping read about the rigors of seminary life as lived by the thousands of young men recruited by the Catholic Church in the 1950's. His insight lights up the seminary culture that produced the priests of a certain age who now stand--rightly and wrongly--accused.

The story is human, engaging, and quite literary, and never exploitative or graphically embarrassing even when confronting a variety of behavior including a Jesuit spiritual director distributing prescription drugs--without a prescription--to depressed seminarians at the fictive "Misericordia Seminary."

Actually, the novel is a credit to both the PCJ and to Monsignor Leonard J. Fick who was, apparently, so much a mentor to Fritscher that he dedicates the book to Msgr. Fick. (Anyone conjecturing about the seminary culture of Bernard Law's life might well enjoy this parallax story.)

What a good writer! What an entertaining book! One suspects Fritscher kept notes hidden under his bed, because he remembers minutiae I had long ago forgotten, but--reminded by this wonderful book--remember, with nostalgia, as true.

I think a "novel" like this--better than can nonfiction--brings out a truth of how we young seminarians were trained, particularly by priests who, as returning veterans of World War II, set very high standards for priestly masculinity in the adolescent world of young seminarians. Those standards' inherent flaw froze many an adolescent emotional life at 14-years-of-age, perhaps later causing some of them to seek others also at 14-years-old. Author Fritscher even writes, "What happens to a boy when he is 14, marks him for life." If this novel, which is never about the obvious, is at all autobiographical in its experiences, what a wonderful life for an author to have led!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks I Needed That: A walk down memory lane, November 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Hardcover)

I am a former seminarian, not an ex-seminarian. Former seminarians got over the 1950's seminary experience. Ex-sems didn't. So as a former seminarian, I am eternally grateful for the seminary education I received. Even if I did not become a priest, the seminary experience put a permanent mark on my soul. So I truly enjoyed this well-tuned novel that brought back the emotions of my adolescence. The book made me cry a bit and laugh more identifying with its crises of spiritual life mixed with boarding school strife. Despite the rather provocative title, the book is not at all about what you'd think it's about. So anyone with an intellectual curiosity regarding what were the thought processes of boys who really believed they heard the voice of God calling them to a priestly vocation, this book is, frankly, a gem. Perhaps, finally, our generation, touched by angels, is beginning to express itself about our youth and how we got the way we were, and are, and forever will be. Amen.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For wives, & priests working with ex-priests & sems, July 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Hardcover)

I saw this novel in the National Catholic Reporter and was skeptical that it might be tasteless. Actually, this memoir, thinly disguised as a novel, is in fact an exellent novel treating coming-of-age inside Catholicism of the 1950's and 1960's. Well done! Well written, at times funny and touching, this book gives insight into the boys and men who subjected themselves to the intensity of seminary life in the last years before Vatican II. The author knows whereof he speaks, and he writes exceedingly well--actually far better than one might expect in this coming-of-age genre. The book is entertaining on many levels. In short, as a seminarian who became a priest, and who remains a priest, I am glad to experience the (to me, pastoral)light this book throws onto a class of men (former seminarians and former priests)who to this day sit in our parishes, carrying still the echo of the vocations they once thought they had. This novel--memoir or not--sheds light on the SPEICAL NEEDS of men who for whatever reason did not follow (in some cases, their very real) vocations to the priesthood. What do we say about and to men like that? What can be said about their spiritual and psychological condition as they themselves age and leave their 50's for their 60's and 70's? What are these SENIOR Men supposed to think about their youth spent in rigorous seminary training? This book has as a MAIN THEME the recurring question of "what is a vocation supposed to be" as the hero of the book looks at his fellow-seminarians and wonders how so many boys could have so many kinds of motivations for vocations, including social mobility. This book can give an insight into why so many priests ordained before Vatican II burned out, left the priesthood, and married. In this theme, the book should also be of interest to any woman married to a former priest, or to relatives of former priests. In addition to these men who sit oftentimes unidentified in our pews, the book raises the spectre about the former priests and seminarians who actually fear going back into a Church. Whoever taught the author taught him well about psychology, spirituality, and written expression. I could see and feel the time, the place, the characters and their conversations. Well done, indeed!