Consider how art - fiction, for example - could possibly do more to address the issue of power abuse (both clerical and lay) at the parish level than essays and treatises, chapters in a book or angry letters to Catholic Newspapers.
"Fictional characters are more alive and real than people," said a guest-writer on Minnesota Public Radio not long ago. Imagine, if you will then, fiction that would
> tell a story true-to-life for hundreds and hundreds of Catholics who no longer volunteer in church or serve as parish staff, overwhelmed by ineffective, oftentimes uncivil leadership;
> offer insight and even healing, perhaps, for many thousands of Catholics still in the pews who no longer trust the Church and for thousands of others who have left it, disillusioned;
> foster parish leadership formation for the majority who remain;
> seize the attention of parish study groups and book clubs;
> engage an insightful and intuitive audience in academic circles, including seminaries.
The Catholic Church has shaped the history and fortune of a good part of the world for more than 2,000 years. Waiting for Mozart addresses reform - not in a long treatise or with dogmatic proclamation but, uniquely, in an art form.
Why Now?
The current clerical sexual abuse scandal and the crisis it has caused in the Catholic Church suggest an unanticipated niche and reason for Waiting for Mozart. The novel was not written with this in mind, however, nor is it a story about clerical sexual abuse.
Fr. Joseph Burns, the pastor in Waiting for Mozart, is not a pedophile nor is he ever unfaithful to his commitment to perpetual chastity. His life and work as a priest, however, are laced with discounting, manipulative behavior that is, in fact, a perpetual abuse of power and is at the heart of his ineffective, disruptive clerical leadership. It springs from the same pitiable righteousness and arrogant use of power that led to the sexual abuse scandal that is rocking the Catholic Church today.
