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PROVE ME WRONG UPDATED

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You remember the story, illustrated here from the Nurembergchronicles, which has it that the false prophet couldn’t get his stubborn donkey to move ahead. The donkey could see the angel of God forbidding him to continue, but the false prophet could not. But then the donkey spoke, rebuking the false prophet.

If I am a false prophet, listen to your angel and start braying to let me know where I’m wrong. As it is, I’m thinking I’m a donkey, and a jackass at that.

INTRODUCTION

May 2008
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Both Judas & Peter betrayed Irony Incarnate

This trilogy, this ecclesiastical thriller, is a disclaimer of religion for Jews, Christians and Muslims, who are angry with the world’s violence, angry with their inability to stop it, angry with their own revelling in aggression, even using children, but angry most of all – though unbeknownst to them – that some Catholics have sheathed the double-edged sword of Truth, sparking violence with half-truths of niceness, appeasement, false compromise. The interreligious mix of hell and heaven found in these pages provides a paradigmatic shift for understanding religion, peace, children... Novels can do that.

Jesus spoke of tying millstones to the necks of those scandalising youngsters so as to drown them in the sea. Self-defence contributes to justice. Violence is not always evil. John the Baptist advised soldiers. That’s reasonable. This trilogy confronts religious violence difficult to understand, like past and present conquests of Jericho, with children being ‘religiously’ killed. Diversely, there is the spreading by the sword the faith one preaches, with, for instance, a poll-tax for infidels who are unable to pay, perhaps because of the number of their children. The list goes on.

Politically convenient misperceptions of this trilogy may incite violence, but witnessing to love – whatever the cost – remains good, even while seeking martyrdom is stupid, hateful.

For atheists and agnostics — You will enjoy the trilogy more than others. Intrigue will help you glut yourselves on difficulties that will, however, be regurgitated later in the trilogy for a nutritive chewing of the cud. This is aggressive language, to be sure, but good things happen by falling headlong into the rubbish trough of ‘noble atheism’, amid things that were first tossed into the self-affirming magical bin that is transparent for everyone except the one scrapping inconveniences into it. Read what awaits Catholics below. Nervous bitterness is no excuse.

For homosexual activists — Your ‘right’ to obligate others to bless your activities doesn’t mean this trilogy contains homophobic hate-speech. Don’t fear what is a critique offered in love! And, don't worry. There's no double-standard of criticism in this trilogy!

For Muslims — An incisive critique of Islam’s central religious event – Ibrahim’s would-be sacrifice of his son, without which there is no Islam – is found in these pages. Hardhitting, it is not disrespectful. The purpose is to put the brakes on violence by an honest appraisal of Islam.

For Jews — Abraham’s would-be sacrifice of his son is also appraised, seeing it in its proper context centuries before the ‘common (read Catholic) era’. The trilogy is not anti-Semitic, nor does it lose sight of the Shoah. It is critical of any ethnic cleansing of non-Jews.

For (non-)Catholic Christians — The Sacrifice of Jesus, Son of David, Son of Abraham, is considered. One Catholic reader thinks this trilogy is a travesty, written by a Judas-priest, the most incisive bigotry against Catholics ever published: "The author hates the Church, handing over on a silver platter the best arguments against the Church to those who hate the Church." He didn’t finish reading, rejecting, it seems, the Pope’s call for "self-critical dialogue." Enter Hilaire Belloc [with words that faithful WDTPRSers will have read on previous occasions]:

To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have a quality of something evil, and so it has, for [...] it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used – nay, can hardly exist – save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. [...] It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument. [...] The mere truth is vivid with ironical power. [...] The mere utterance of a plain truth labouriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. [...] No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.

Hilaire Belloc, Selected Essays (2/6), ed. J.B. Morton; Penguin Books (1325): Harmondsworth – Baltimore – Mitcham 1958. See the essay "On Irony" on pages 124-127.

If not happiness, irony brings blessedness, living life on the edge, marginalised as obscurantist, cut down by the sword for reflecting light. As for me, without grace, I am not ironic, but self-affirmingly trample on others, claiming a moral high ground swamped by my weakness. Given the circumstances, and without grace, I would be more evil than the worst monsters in the trilogy. Nice circumstances do not justify, but tend to delude. Anyone saying differently is a liar. Any irony in the trilogy is, then, most ironic, for, with Peter, I learn not from any failure, but in being forgiven for culpable ineptness by the One I have often betrayed, Irony Incarnate. Irony is not diablerie. He who said – "One who talks does not know; one who knows does not talk" – spoke of nirvana, not religious politics. To remain silent would be a travesty.

On the one hand, some might feel disgruntled if they think that words similar to their own may occasionally be found on the lips of a character who may not be a hero. Aspects of a character are not to be attributed to any such person. No attack on a person is ever made. The characters are who they are for the sake of the plot. Sound-bites, jettisoned into a maelstrom of fictional characters, reflect reality. There is no need for paranoia. Such words are commonplace.

On the other hand, if a reader thinks to have found the original context for any given statement, and thinks again that it may be difficult or impossible to see any justification for the statement as originally intended, they can take consolation in the fact that error, or even heart stopping ambiguity, which promotes violence, has no rights, and is rightly crushed in these pages. Yet, they may well be wrong about the provenance of any statements. See the first hand, above.

Characters, situations and plots are fictional and ridiculously exaggerated, making analogies with reality painfully recognisable. A vision or two, an outrageous trial, etc., merely speak to the urgency of the matter. Villains can say exceptionally good things; heroes need help to shine.

The story is set in the immediate future, but is woven with threads that can be verified, whether in history, modern controversy or on the street. To protect the innocent, mistakes are intentionally made regarding the location of an apartment, ‘cultural’ incidents near a village in Africa, the policies of an Apostolic Nunciature, what is taught in a seminary, membership in a religious order, and so on. I beg the indulgence of the institutions, Nunciatures, Episcopal Conferences and dicasteries of the Holy See (the ‘Vatican’) that are named, and especially of those who now hold offices which are specifically named, including that of the Bishop of Rome.

On a personal note, I must thank my father and many others, who, through the decades, urged me to write an autobiography, not any Cartesian "I think, therefore, I am" self-aggrandisement – neglecting the One writing the Book of Life – but rather, something akin to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, about the One who makes us restless until we are face to Face. But my unwieldy protestations would be unhelpful. Even if one must write about what one knows, I have revealed only my limitations in becoming all things to all men, in understanding the difficulties which many face, but for which, because they are so grave, I have tried to make myself available. Pop-psychology rejects irony as satire, a projection of self, an autobiographical laxative. Before such obtuseness, a disciple of Saint Francis described irony as understanding willingly at risk of being misunderstood. God ironically brings others to heaven by way of us. That is my hope.

APOLOGIA/DISCLAIMER

An apologia/disclaimer before starting 2008 January 18 by Fr Renzo di Lorenzo

WAVES: A Cardinal recently said that if we wait until we do not make waves until we do what is right, we are preparing the conditions for a bound-to-be-misunderstood tsunami. This book simply makes waves.

SEX & VIOLENCE: This book does not shy away from purveying some of the horror of hostility and sin, without ever wallowing in violence, without ever being pornographic. Regarding this last point, no sex is portrayed, even though, for instance, one knows that someone has just been raped. As far as violence is concerned, it is my conviction that unless it is seen for what it is, it cannot be resolved.

HARSH LANGUAGE: There is little by way of offensive language. Some of the characters are wont to say "Damn you!" when under pressure. This language sets up a situation whereby the condemnation of Savonarola - who was burned while hanging at the stake - is critiqued by the Pope himself. It is not that damnation is a ‘bad' word. It is the theological usage of it which people find offensive. For those of make-pretend piety, many other words are offensively incriminating: ‘sin', ‘judgment', ‘hell', ‘forgiveness', ‘mercy', and the like.

THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Reading the signs of the times cannot be done through the imagination of an author telling anyone what these signs are. That is why we see such problems in the first place. This novel merely points out the only Way in which the signs of the times, the wounds still borne by Him who is Truth, can bring one to Life... so that each of us might be a good jackass for the hour.

SERENDIPITY: The amount of serendipity in the book will be aggravating to some readers, for it might seem to them that it is not a reflection of real life that so that many things just happen to come together in the most impossibly wonderful or horrific ways, depending on which side of justice and mercy one is on, and there are sides. Emphasising Divine Providence is my thanksgiving for what I have seen in my own life and in the lives of so many other believers. The Lord always, but always treats us with absolute justice even while he brings the absolute in mercy to us as well, Himself. The result, the Cross, is ironic paradox, the normal course of affairs. This experience is beyond non-believers. They cannot admit the obvious, that the Lord is Lord of all, of history, of our lives, though we are free. Believers rejoice at fever pitch, but not without trepidation.

READING THE TRILOGY AS AN ACADEMIC THRILLER

On a basic level, you can read the story as a pass-time, the reward of which is a wonderful unease. Despite the distraction of some humour, and then of the plot jumping unexpectedly from one place to another, from Rome to Syria to Egypt to Haïti to Benin to Louisiana, and so on, I was repeatedly told by my test case readers to make the ‘disclaimer' that this is not always a fast moving trilogy, but more of a look into the spiritual, academic and political aspects of the largest religions in the world. Some of the jumping about is meant to give the reader a break, while at other times an analogy can be drawn - according to the ingenuity of the reader - between an intervening scene and the main line of the story. In the same way, the reader can almost be entrapped into a false judgement of a character. But that is part of the reading experience. The more one knows, the more one will see.

On a second, more academic level, you may want to read the accompanying endnotes, look up things on the internet, and do some further reading, though the main text is sufficient.

For the third level, there are some thousands of people in the world who have the background necessary to carry out research in various specialised libraries in order to ascertain what, even today, can be readily verified regarding some of the more refined points in the trilogy. They know who they are and where these libraries are to be found. Some, chagrined, will defensively shout, "Obscurantism!" even while others exclaim, "Finally! The truth is no longer obscured!"

Moving on among these rather humourous ‘super-scholars', if you want to call them that, are some, who, whether they are academics or not, have the ex officio authority to move on to a fourth level. They may do so (again), setting out to verify some matters in the Vatican Secret Archives, even in those sections which have been locked away until the recent time periods involved in the trilogy drift away into the past. Although I give these ecclesiastics an opportunity to do damage control - which I regret - I am also giving them a chance to do the right thing. I don't recommend damage control. It always betrays the perpetrator.

FINALLY, HOW NOT TO WALK THE FINE LINE: It has been said that at any moment we can be a betrayer or a Christian because of walking on a fine line that we do not see clearly. To that, I say "RUBBISH". We always have free will. That's true. But by the end of the trilogy, I hope that all readers will be able to join me in speaking of the strength of God's love with us, even those who have started reading as athiests or agnostics.

I wish all the readers a good read!

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