The Children's Crusade

The Children’s Crusade

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Sample Readings

Chapter One

History professor Dan Harrington and Sister Frankie Latrobe, a feisty African-American nun, uncover allegations of child abuse involving Pope Clement XV. Liberal Archbishop Mark Doyle, a continuing thorn for the Vatican for his liberal ideas and a romantic relationship that produced a love child, joins Dan and Frankie to their search for evidence.

Their investigation takes them to Frankfurt where Pope Clement taught in the mid-seventies. Leads uncover a middle-aged brother and sister from a prominent German family who claim to have been abused as teens by the man who is now Pope.

With support from Mark, Dan, and Frankie, the siblings go public, provoking an explosion of worldwide publicity. A right-wing Catholic group, Ordo Novus, traces the Archbishop’s connection to the child abuse controversy, and stalks Mark, Dan, and Frankie in order to shut them up.

Pressure mounts on the Pope, as demonstrations around the Vatican and elsewhere intensify, calling for him to resign. Clement wrestles with his conscience and chooses a drastic action to solve his dilemma.

Review

“Once I got into it, I could not get out of it. All 440 pages of this heavy tome, zipped by me when it was not in my carry-on over the Atlantic, between flights in Vienna, in my ship’s cabin on the Black Sea and all the way up the Dnieper up to Kiev. If you read, and are Catholic, you will recognize, (some by name) many characters who populate this yarn about the machinations and politics in the RC Church. Bianchi pulls from his rich experience as a former Jesuit himself who hobnobbed with various clerical players in real life and then inserts their proto-types into this fast pace adventure. They are all there, the married priests, the philandering and fatherly (literally) Archbishop, the SNAP activist, the Opus Dei types, and many more. In a surprising clever and serious way Bianchi works in the current-day ethical, spiritual, political, and practical dilemmas that face the Church, and he does a good job of defending both sides of the issue. One is caught at times asking,” Well, what would you do under these circumstances?” While the reader may be able to remain a spectator in the action packed plot, but then becomes deeply involved from personal experience in the resolution of situations that involve the common good, individual conscience, articles of faith, long standing traditions and the very survival of the Roman Catholic Church as many grew up in and know now. It does get carried away in spots, as it is fiction, but at the same time it poses lingering questions that perhaps this is what life is really like in the hierarchical strata of the Roman Catholic Church.”

–Robert Schutzius, PhD, secretary for ARCC (Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church)

Move over, Dan Brown. You have serious competition in the religious thriller genre. Eugene Bianchi, himself once a Jesuit priest and afterward a respected academic, knows how to write a sexy, fast-moving piece of fiction. In an intense sequel to The Bishop of San Francisco that is ripped from the headlines, Bianchi’s maverick hero puts his life on the line to confront the deadly consequences of the clerical abuse of children and the conspiracy of silence that has allowed it to continue.