Love Beneath the Mighty Dome

The basic draft of the trilogy, Love Beneath the Mighty Dome, was begun in 1990 and completed around 1995, years before the brutal sex scandals involving pedophilia among clergy (and its accompanying cover-up by the ruling clergy) broke in the archdioceses of Boston and New York. There is no attempt here to take advantage of such tragic and horrific events. But, aside from these matters, the work of fiction presented in these three volumes is merely an attempt to depict the clergy in a fair and just manner-the heroes and the villains. Any seeming imbalance is due to the reality of the subject and not any injustice on the part of the author. The underlying question here is, does the Roman Catholic Diocesan Clergy truly fulfill the plan Jesus of Nazareth had in mind when he chose his most trusted followers-the wealth, the glamour, the pomposity of it all? After all, wasn't it highly placed churchmen who, in effect, put a contract out on this Jesus of Nazareth, a contract haltingly accepted by a particularly savage militaristic occupying power? And would it be so cataclysmically devastating to allow the clergy to marry-to live in a manner consistent with the rest of humanity? Why not allow women to enter programs of priestly formation? Why this on-going exclusion of women? Is it fear? Loathing? Contempt? Clumsiness? Is it really because Jesus chose only male companions or is there something else at work these two millennia later? Are women still thought of as a defilement of the sanctuary? As long as the high priests refuse to reform the inner sanctum of the Catholic Church (the priesthood, those indispensable dispensers of the sacraments) there will forever and always be these needless and destructive scandals-scandals that are gravely damaging to the moral authority of the entirety of the Catholic Church. For the clergy are not the Church. They are a tiny part of it-its servants, no less. When a child's life is destroyed where is the love? What happened