Clerical Error

The memoirs of Robert Blair Kaiser's teens and twenties in the Jesuits, and of his early thirties as a star correspondent at Vatican II. 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 as "Time" reporter at the Second Vatican Council. Much of inner story of the Council - its personalities, machinations, maneuverings between progressive forces and the old guard - was told in Bob Kaiser's book of the early sixties "Pope, Council, and World". This is a different story, told some 40 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 persuaded Kaiser's other clerical friends to send him to a sanitorium. 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 mirrored 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.