The Bishop and the Missing L Train: A Blackie Ryan Story (Hardcover)

This untimely disappearance of a prince of the Church causes no little embarrassment for the Cardinal of Chicago with his superiors in Rome. So, as is his wont, the Cardinal turns over this dirty affair to his fix-it auxiliary bishop, Blackie Ryan. That Ryan is a bishop is itself a mystery: he eschews popery, as they would say years ago, ministers to teenagers [his rectory is full of mouthy girls answering phones and violating confidentiality], and spends considerable time making sick calls-when is the last time your bishop visited you in the hospital?-wearing a Michael Jordan jacket, no less. He is so well connected to every ranking cop, judge, reporter, doctor, and psychiatrist in Chicago that solving crimes for this bishop is more a matter of managing his cell phone than rummaging with the CSI unit.

The art of reading Greeley novels used to be deciphering the author's ecclesiology du jour, or what he thought about the American Catholic Church at any given time. There is still some element of that challenge in this work. Here the ugly nemesis is the annulment process-Quill had made a career of mismanaging annulment appeals in Rome-but there are other Greeley signatures as well: spiritual healing through sexual encounter, the failure of priests to visit the sick, whiskey, powerful women professionals, interminable pedigrees of Chicago neighborhoods, and angry feminists come to mind.

But age is beginning to tell. Father Greeley, I fear, describes a church life that passed away a generation ago. Blackie's rectory reeks of clerical hospitality, the days when the priests gathered for nightcaps to recount the day's adventures. Today one priest frequently pastors several parishes, and usually alone. In Father Greeley's Chicago the fix is in for the Church: a Roman collar will make a parking ticket magically disappear. No such coziness exists anymore in the present atmosphere; "the Meghan" [Ryan's teen employees] would all be fingerprinted and subjected to background checks.

Greeley's church novels are becoming less mystery and more timepieces. No greater evidence is needed than the heart of the kidnapping plot itself in this book. In the real world of today's Church, the motive would be totally irrelevant.

An auxiliary Bishop and the Chicago Transit Authority L train in which he was riding have gone missing. The missing Bishop is Bishop "Idiot" Quill - a pompous puppet of all the sillier positions of the Roman hierarchy. The nickname is a wink and an opportunity for Father Greeley to take literary potshots at Rome - a lighthearted continuing illumination of his theological and sociological convictions as revealed in his works - including _Furthermore!: Confessions of a Parish Priest_.

This morally uplifting tale interweaves the lives of clerics and parishioners along the way of solving the mysterious matter of Bishop "Idiot's" disappearance. This reader will admit that I uttered an agonized moan upon the mention of Cindasue (see my previous review of _The Bishop and the Three Kings_) but, "Hallelujah!" she never surfaces enough in this book to open her mouth ;-)

I laughed out loud during an interchange between Bishop Blackie and the former chairman of Bishop "Idiot's" parish council: "He (Bishop "Idiot") told us that we had no canonical powers and no right to meet except at his request. He warned us to leave or he would call the police. We left."

"And went not gently into that good night?"

"I beg pardon?"

"You all were quite angry and so you raged against the failing of the light?"

The parish functionary still doesn't "get it" - but we do, Father Greeley. You are an American treasure whose intelligence and wit bode well against the failing of the light.