The Red Hat.

Ralph McInerny

Ignatius Press, $21.95, 581 pp.

Need to brush up your Spengler? You can with this novel about an emerging African and Asian. Catholicism and its corresponding Western dissipation. The main characters are Archbishop Thomas Lannan of Washington, D.C., who's campaigning to be a prince of the church. He craves the honor so that, with ambition at last behind himself, he can be humble. Another is James Morrow, Lannan's seminary friend who's now a widowed University of Notre Dame author of a history of American Catholicism's decline.

In much earlier novels, like The Priest (1973) and Gate of Heaven (1975), Notre Dame's distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny was funny and timely in dissecting the inane manifestations of modernism abounding in his fictional diocese of Fort Elbow, Ohio. With The Red Hat, he's a long way from Fort Elbow and targets heftier clerical prey. There's much to value in this novel. It's worth anybody's time, even though in his depictions of post-Vatican II progressives McInerny, cofounder of Crisis magazine, forsakes the scalpel for a baseball bat, and plausibility loses.

The action is, you might say, headlong. In 2004, modernist U.S. bishops, theologians, and seminary rectors await the death of John Paul II, whose pontificate they view as having thwarted what they think Vatican II really meant: ordaining women, easing out celibacy, muting, if not ending, all church prohibitions and negatives, and stressing Christian love. Meanwhile, Lannan, who had earlier supported the White House in a dispute over a lesbian Supreme Court justice, calls in the favor and gets Morrow appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican where he is to lobby for Lannan's red hat. John Paul II names Lannan a cardinal but dies before the consistory. Lannan and the twenty others named along with him are excluded from the conclave, which elevates another conservative, the frail Pope Benedetto. The Americans grumble about the conclave's legality and clamor for a new conclave, but Benedetto dies, conveniently, they can't help but think, in a plane crash. To their consternation, the succeeding conclave elects another conservative, the Tanzanian Pope Timothy who sees the church's future as more with the growing, devout African and Asian masses than with the decadent, affluent West. With tinges of racism and pique at feeling shut out of the game by the third worlders, the Americans engineer a schismatic conclave at Avignon, France, which elects an Italian and their kind of progressive, Pius XIII. The schism collapses and Pius XIII repents before Timothy. This is followed by a round of excommunications that brings the recalcitrant American bishops, for now, back into line.

Caught your breath? There's more. The subplot features Julian O'Keefe, an ultramontane jettisoned from the seminary by gay and liberal elements within its administration. Seeking vengeance on all hypocritical progressives, Julian investigates a rumor that Archbishop Lannan fathered an illegitimate daughter while a seminarian. The mother surprises O'Keefe when he breaks into her home looking for evidence and she ends up murdered. Later in Rome, he kidnaps and drugs Lannan, Alberto-Moro style, and draws a blood sample for the DNA evidence that will ensure disgrace. While on trial for the murder, O'Keefe produces the surprise DNA evidence, but the tests turn out negative. Lannan, who earlier and for once in a fence-sitting career, had sided against the schismatics, is again vindicated.

McInerny is often compared to J. F. Powers, a comparison inaccurate and unfair (though Red Hat incorporates playful allusions to Morte d'Urban). McInerny's artistic focus is the priest as agonized academic. The results are a series of beautiful, troubling interior monologues on the part of Lannan, his secretary Father Wales, Pope Benedetto, even Pius XIII, men fearful and alone on what Yukio Mishima once termed the battlefield of the spirit, on the edge of unbelief.

But Red Hat's American heavies are another matter. They personify Pius X's definition of modernism as the summation of all heresies, trail clouds of what Paul VI called the smoke of Satan. McInerny's modernists come off as nothing-human-is-alien-to-me caricatures bent on turning the City of God into Los Angeles. They're a surreal lot who dither at Roman synods about altar girls while bishops from India worry about their countrymen killing off female infants. Like renegade theologian Frank Bally, they're media-savvy as stage managers of discord at any cost. Mentally locked in the postures of 1968 and with meringues of 1990s political correctness, they misguide the American church into gradually and imperceptibly becoming Protestant. At the height - or nadir - of the schism, they impose an astounding New Order with homosexuals of both genders in the hierarchy, euthanasia defined as a sacrament, and the Feast of the Holy Innocents celebrating the courage of women who abort their children rather than subject them to life in an overpopulated, underfed, patriarchal world. The secular and religious journalists, laden with Restoration comedy names like Nathaniel Patch, Ben Trovato, and Della Boca, are either theological amateurs or boozy, opportunistic hacks.

The novel ends with an exordium to eternity and the ever-renewed riches of Christ, one of many such moving paragraphs that McInerny crafts. But the pervasive Manichean voice McInerny brings to The Red Hat finally disables the novel. That may not matter to one segment of his veteran readership which will relish the book precisely for its absolutes. Other readers might feel underestimated by the novel's too neatly served eschatology and conclude that it overtaxes the faith readers extend to novelists.

John Christie teaches in the Department of English at Indiana State University.