A murder mystery spun for and about traditional Catholics

Despite the fact that "all the characters and plot situations in this novel are completely fictitious," one gets the distinct feeling he’s met the sort of characters that people William L. Biersach’s first novel, The Endless Knot.

Biersach, an accomplished rock musician and a self-described traditional Catholic, has attracted media attention from CNN and Rolling Stone for courses he teaches on The Beatles and "classic rock" at the University of Southern California. But it is traditional Catholicism—not rock and roll—that pervades this murder mystery. Or is it an ecclesiastical thriller? Well, try to imagine Dorothy Sayers meeting Malachi Martin with J.F. Powers looking on.

Here’s the setup: One by one, the auxiliary bishops of Los Angeles are falling victim to a ritualistic serial murderer with apparent ties to the occult—or worse. The Archbishop of Los Angeles enlists cop-turned-priest to get to the bottom of this nasty business, a business that encompasses a whole lot more than just the deranged workings of a lunatic.

On the way, Biersach aptly portrays the kind of perennial characters one finds in and around parish life—the domineering rectory housekeeper, the cranky jack-of-all-trades, and the oddfellow whose wisdom stuns. More amusing and also spot on are his portrayals of the kind of real-life characters one finds stuffed into chancery offices across the land: the somewhat dopey hail-fellow-well met big city auxiliary bishops (in the mold of a Thomas Gumbleton, Gambino Zavala, or Carl Moeddel), the rigidly-liberal ex-nun, the fussy gay cleric, and a host of other crackpots who contemplate their own navels for spiritual edification.

Rather than depicting a quaint rectory run by Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracey, we are introduced to Father John Baptist, a hardboiled cop-turned-priest—one who somehow has been granted his own personal parish that caters to understandably embittered traditionalists. You know, the kind you find in nearly every diocese. The kind who cross state lines to get their kids confirmed by a bishop who isn’t leading a double life as a transvestite. The kind who drive for an hour or more to get to a Mass on Sunday that at least resembles Catholic worship.

John Baptist is a man’s priest, with the sensibilities of a homicide detective and the sympathies of a cleric who understands the beleaguered laity. Educated amidst a gaggle of twerps, he faked his way through seminary by remaining aloof to their errors of his mentors, and "came out of the closet" as a Traditionalist after ordination. "I was kicked out of my first three parish assignments for preaching about Hell," he explains. Few will find it improbable that Fr. Baptist is persona non grata at the archbishop’s downtown sinkhole.

We come to quickly understand this cleric’s character by the kind of notes he leaves posted about in St. Philomena’s rectory, both as a reminder to himself and as a word of caution to others. Consider St. John Chrysostom’s, "I do not think that many priests are saved, but that those who perish are far more numerous"; or this gem from St. John Eudes: "The most evident mark of God’s anger, and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world, is manifest when he permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds."

Ouch!

Narrated by a layman sidekick in the mold of a Dr. Watson or Captain Hastings, The Endless Knot is colored by the observations of Martin Feeney, the huffing and hobbling parish gardener who spends as much time complaining about diocesan politics as he does grumbling about his spinal arthritis ("…if I don’t keep my swollen joints moving I’ll freeze up like a department store mannequin…"). The genius of Feeney is that he takes in a whole lot more than clues as to what’s happening in the investigation. He reads deeply into each situation with all the prejudiced cynicism of a seasoned bigot—and not merely for the sake of gratuity. This "gardener" (he doesn’t seem to do much gardening) has been around the block a few times and isn’t afraid to let his ecclesiastical misanthropy poke through on each page. After all, in his pre-arthritic days he was a maintenance guy who was forced to remove the communion rail from his own church.

This sort of thing wouldn’t be funny if Catholics couldn’t so readily identify with the absurdity of it all. Take, for example, Auxiliary Bishop Brassorie (the first of the Los Angeles bishops to be murdered), who served as pastor of St Philomena before Fr. Baptist came out of the closet. We hear how Feeney caught the archbishop’s fair-haired boy hauling off the statue of St. Rita in a wheelbarrow by the light of the moon: "He had decided that statues of saints were passé. He said they had to go."

Feeney describes how then-Msgr. Brassorie single-handedly pulled down St. Rita from a side altar, dumped her in the wheelbarrow and rolled her right down the aisle and out the front door. "I followed him all the way to the Hyperion Bridge," he says. "It was there on the bridge, under one of those bright new street lamps, just as he was about to throw St. Rita over the side, that I broke cover, got up close, and used the flash… I told him if St. Rita isn’t back in her proper place at Mass next morning, I was going to give the story to the Times. After that, he never crossed me, the innovations dwindled to a trickle, and he and I spoke as little as possible"—a brief moment of justice.

Other brief moments of justice—they appear in little vignettes like this throughout the story—are nearly worth the price of the book. The most enduring moment of justice is when the archbishop stoops to the level of asking his most detested priest to take up the investigation into who murdered his bishop pal. It’s an investigation, by the way, that takes Father Baptist and his sidekick into the underworld of the occult, an underworld that—surprise—leads right back to that same dreaded chancery.

There’s more than a hint of Malachi Martin’s type of ecclesiastical intrigue throughout the book (one is tempted to translate the fictional characters into real life ecclesiastics), but Biersach has his own style, a unique voice. The Endless Knot, at least for the knowledgeable Catholic reader, seems to owe even more to the noir humor and morbid irony of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950’s and 60’s fare than to the ecclesiastical whodunit genre refined by parlor mystery geniuses like Agatha Christie (Murder at the Vicarage), Dorothy Sayers (The Nine Tailors) and G.K. Chesterton (Father Brown).

Works such as The Endless Knot risk coming off as little more than churchy nonsense or pious cant. Biersach, however, is able to move beyond that. Thankfully, well beyond. His is a self-deprecating snapshot of the cynical world of Catholic traditionalism forty years after the close of the Second Vatican Council. One can feel the post-conciliar tremors on every page.

The world of Martin Feeney and Father Baptist is a world wherein Catholics have been beaten over the head with Modernist mantras and New Age gobbledygook. Parish schools are closed. Statues have been removed. Christ has been hidden. The liturgy is abused. The parishioners bicker. The rats are promoted ("If collections were falling off to the point where they were gonna shut this parish down, why did Brassorie get promoted to bishop?"), while the faithful are scourged. In other words, it’s a hyper-realistic post-conciliar landscape peppered with moral minefields and temptations to despair. What better place to set a 21^st-century murder mystery!

The book will resonate not only with Catholics from the Mahonyland dioceses of Southern California; Catholics from all over the U.S. and beyond will hardly be at a lost to draw parallels to their own local situations.

Certainly the book is a bit irreverent at times—and decidedly so—but at least the author doesn’t cosset the Church with an over-functioning politeness or shy away from the stark realities that can make chanceries appear to be places of ill-repute. William Biersach is to be applauded for taking up the challenging task of producing a novel that is steeped in the culture of traditional Catholicism, without ignoring its warts and pimples.

Michael S. Rose is the author a several books including the New York Times bestseller Goodbye, Good Men. He is an editor for the New Oxford Review.