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Twenty-nine years old, newly married, and fresh from the Society of
Jesus, where he had spent ten years as a novice and scholastic, Bob
Kaiser was picked for one of the most exciting jobs in journalism
of his era: Time's reporter at the Second Vatican Council. In the
words of Michael Novak: "No reporter knew more about the Council;
had talked with more of the personalities, prominent or minor; had
more sources of information to tap. Sunday evening dinner parties
at his apartment became a rendezvous of stimulating and informed
persons. In the English-speaking world, at least, perhaps no source
was to have quite the catalytic effect as Time on opinion outside
the Council and even to an extent within it." Much of inner story
of the Council-its personalities, machinations, maneuverings
between progressive forces and the old guard-was told in Bob
Kaiser's bestseller of the early sixties Pope, Council, and World.
This is a different story, one so raw and personal that it could
only be told some forty years later in a very different church and
by a much matured Bob Kaiser. The heart of the story is how Bob's
wife was seduced by his friend, the Jesuit priest Malachy Martin,
and how Martin ("a man who could make people laugh in seven
languages)" persuaded Kaiser's other clerical friends (including
notable bishops and prominent theologians) to send him to a
sanitorium. The story is at once hilarious (Martin was one of the
great clerical con men of all time) and sobering. The "clerical
error"--the refusal to see what Martin was up to--was as much
Kaiser's as that of his older clerical friends who defended their
fellow priest simply because he was a member of the club. Their
naivete and their blindness only mirrors the church's inability to
deal realistically with any issue touched by sex: birth control,
remarriage after divorce, priestly celibacy, clerical child abuse,
or the ordination of women. Bob Kaiser did eventually grow up. He
knows the official church has a long way to go.
Headstrong Jessica Burns inherits the sorry, ever-losing New York
Jets and vows (against the advice of her father, a winning high
school coach in Colorado) to bring more fun and less violence to
the NFL. She does this despite the opposition of the other owners,
and the disbelief of most of the media, by finding a coaching
genius in a wheel chair in the Arizona desert, falling in love with
him, and hiring him to bring his revolutionary new razzle dazzle
offense to New York. Win Markey was an offensive coordinator at the
St. Louis Rams until his Porsche crashed on a snowy highway and
left him a paraplegic. Now, given new life and a new love in
Manhattan, he coaches with heart and a wit that surprises the
football world and takes the Jets--and Jessica Burns--through a
wondrous, record-breaking season all the way to the Super Bowl.
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