Religion booknotes.

One could sink a ship with the books that have been written about the Vatican. There are the appallingly melodramatic novels peopled with cliche-ridden characters and implausible plots, which are only a tad worse than the Vatican exposes by "serious" journalists. Even the polymath Garry Wills has tried his hand at Vaticanology with his error-riddled Papal Sins, which was devastatingly skewered by Justus George Lawler a few years ago. It was a relief, then, to read John Allen's evenhanded description of the Vatican. Allen is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and longtime resident of Rome. In sober detail, he tells us how the Vatican is structured, how its functionaries are paid, how it sees the world, and how it reflects the complex Catholic world it governs.

All the Pope's Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Works

John L. Allen Jr.

Doubleday, $24.95, 256 pp.

In one of his most interesting chapters, Allen refutes five myths about the Vatican: (1) "The Vatican" is some sort of organism, rather than a bureaucracy with its own lines of agreement and disagreement. (2) One person is in charge. In fact, there are many sources of authority within the Vatican, and the right hand sometimes doesn't know what the left hand is doing. (3) The Vatican is excessively secretive, "byzantine," "mysterious," and so on. Allen rightly points out that it is only those who do not know the "language" of the Vatican who are in the dark. (4) The Vatican is wealthy. Only if one includes art treasures (which are preserved as humanity's patrimony) can the Vatican be considered wealthy; in reality (Allen gives facts and figures), those who work in the Vatican, from the residential cardinals on down, make much less than most of the faculty and staff of my own university. (5) The bishops and cardinals who populate the Vatican are shameless careerists. Sure, many who work in the Vatican would like to move up, but Allen provides interesting information about how personnel are actually graded and how they advance, if at all. On this last point, though, he does not spend much time on the odd (and somewhat theologically dubious practice) of appointing bishops to non-functioning sees.

Allen is no Vatican apologist. He cites a number of critics of the Holy See, including some who work in the curia. He laments the fact that many major newspapers depend heavily on the Italian press for information because they do not have a full-time Vatican correspondent; as a result, they often report speculation for fact. Allen also notes that while the theological vision of the Vatican's leaders is "conservative," many in the curia believe that some changes are needed and certain procedures (the mostly toothless episcopal synods come to mind) need updating.

In his final two chapters, Allen chronicles major clashes between Roman and American authorities on two recent flash points: the sexual-abuse crisis and the (then) impending war in Iraq. Written in almost diary form (likely culled from his dispatches for NCR), Allen is less concerned with taking sides than he is in showing how each side approached the issues. At times, the constituents seemed like ships passing in the night; at others, their divergent perspectives were illuminating. One of the themes Allen repeats is worth remembering: the Vatican believes that the American church often sees matters from a self-centered, narrow perspective--with the converse, inevitably, also being true.

Two decades ago I achieved momentary fame for taping a promotion broadcast on our local public radio station. On it, I sketched out my idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon: watching our local college football team (this was before I began teaching at Notre Dame) on television with the sound off while listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. The opera quiz aired between the acts was a much anticipated treat, and one of the commentators was the immensely charming polymath and classics professor, Fr. Owen Lee of the University of Toronto.

A Book of Hours: Music, Literature, and Life

M. Owen Lee

Continuum, $35, 288 pp.

Lee has now written a memoir of sorts: an account of his year spent teaching classics a generation ago at the Rome campus of a Chicago university (presumably Loyola). Lee reconstructs his classroom lectures and his weekend trips (thanks to his Eurail pass) to Germany and Switzerland to attend the opera. By structuring the book this way, Lee is able to discuss literature, music, and his life as a religious priest (he is a Basilian). The end result is a wonderful book which will give enormous pleasure to any person who still believes in the inherited high culture of the West.

Among the book's riches is a survey of Greek and Latin classics and a lesson on poetry culled from a class Lee team-taught with a Polish priest. Lee also expatiates at length on his class's visits to Roman sites. His wonderful description of the architectural differences between the domes of the Pantheon and Borromini's St. Yvo is as brilliant a lecture on art history as I have ever read. His reflections on music, in particular his beloved German opera, are also a treat. He almost persuades me to listen to Wagner again even though I much prefer Italian opera.

Of course, Lee is also a priest, and his commitment to his vocation comes across vividly as he muses about the meaning of his religious vows, the Catholic tradition, and his profound empathy for his questing students. He sees his students as a kind of substitute for the sons he, as a celibate, would never have.

Lee takes his title from Rilke's Book of Hours (Stundenbuch), which argues, at least implicitly, that God is diminished by the death of a person--an idea which is, as Lee says, a "devout blasphemy." If there is a least grain of truth in Rilke's insight, it follows that part of the human task is to enlarge one's life to the fullest, to live as humanly as possible since that gives God glory. Lee thinks that engagement with what has endured--in poetry, music, theology--makes such fullness possible. His memoir is the testimony of a kind of Christian humanist who is a rarity today.

Stalking the Divine

Kristin Ohlson

Hyperion, $23.95, 256 pp.

If Lee sets his book in a far-away place, Kristin Ohlson's beautifully wrought book is firmly centered in the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio, where she discovered, in a somewhat shabby neighborhood, the monastery of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. A fallen-away Catholic, Ohlson went, almost by fluke, to Mass at the church adjoining the monastery one Christmas Eve. She became fascinated by the nuns separated by a monastic grill who prayed and sang at that Mass. By some instinct (I would not hesitate to call it "grace"), she kept coming back for Mass and eventually got to know the Capuchin chaplain, the regular congregation, and, slowly, the community of contemplative sisters.

A freelance writer, Ohlson decided to write about the church and the religious community for the local newspaper, despite the shy resistance of the sisters. That article triggered the idea for a book, which would require the cooperation of the community. The nuns were initially hesitant. Unlike their most famous former member (EWTN's Mother Angelica), these sisters believed in living apart from the world. In time, some of them opened up to Ohlson and granted her interviews. The book lovingly presents their varied stories without the patronizing air that one sometimes finds in such works.

If this book were solely about the Poor Clares, it might have seemed (to some) just another account of the odd life of enclosed religious. What makes it so moving, though, is the parallel story of Ohlson's struggle with her own faith. Over the course of the book, Ohlson looks back on her life (like Augustine, she "roams the spacious halls of memory"), trying to make sense of her journey. She recounts her days as a Maoist campus radical, her marital vicissitudes, and her resistance to the church which she had shrugged off early in life. Slowly though, she begins to ask the "big" questions. What is it like to pray? What or whom do we adore? Why does she keep coming back to Mass? And why does she take her turn at adoration?

I would love to report that the book ends with the writer's triumphant return to the practice of the faith, but such was not the case. At one point, she tells a priest at the shrine that she would like to return to the Catholic Church but wonders if the church would accept her. After all, she says, she has questions about the infallibility of the pope, the church's teachings on personal morality, and she is not even sure she believes in God. The young priest offers a wise answer: "Keep coming."

In the final pages of the book, Ohlson talks with the mother superior of this aged community as she is looking with some envy at photographs of the large community Mother Angelica has attracted to her rather palatial monastery in Alabama. The nun wonders whether her order can survive on the sisters imported from India and the few who come to try out their life. Mother Angelica's community probably does not subscribe to this magazine, but someone should get the word to them: send some sisters to Cleveland. As Ohlson wrote in her first newspaper profile of their community, "They're praying as you read this, no matter when you read it, because it's their job to cast a night-and-day mantle of prayer over the world from their tiny enclave in downtown Cleveland."

I have more than once observed in these pages that some of the finest contemporary spiritual writing comes from women, who bring a certain critical edge to their work, along with a deep appreciation for the Catholic tradition. I am thinking of writers like Kathleen Norris, Patricia Hampl, Annie Dillard, and the late Denise Levertov. To that number I would like to add Kristin Ohlson, who has given us a powerful account of the faith of the Poor Clares and her own honest search to connect to that faith.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.