Unexpected Death of Father Wilfred , livre ebook

Pneuma Springs Publishing - Julius Falconer

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

98 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

One February evening in the year 1968, Fr Wilfred, the parish priest of the Sacred Heart Catholic church in Droitwich, tumbles out of his confessional, stabbed to death. His older sister demands the best detective in the force, and Stan Wickfield is appointed to the case. Unfortunately he cannot identify either the means or the motive of the murder, much less the perpetrator.His investigation leads him through the highways and byways of tensions in the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and brings him face to face with anti-Catholic sentiment in the local population. His suspects include an eccentric and learned septuagenarian spinster who quotes d'Azeglio every time they meet, a school technician rejected for the priesthood because of his sexuality, the custodian of Kenilworth Castle and a bookmaker with a taste for anti-papal sentiment. Motives for the priest's death waver confusingly between contempt for his office, disapproval of a teenage indiscretion, personal hatred and suicide. Wickfield is at his wits' end until his wife's reading - a novella by Nicholas Montserrat - prods him towards a triumphant solution.The story comes to a dramatic climax in two sermons preached by the dead priest's curate, Fr Gabriel.Julius Falconer never fails to write serious and stimulating stories with humour, a wealth of researched detail and subtle plots.Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

Thriller

Informations

Publié par	Pneuma Springs Publishing
Date de parution	09 septembre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782281429
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The
Unexpected Death
of
Father Wilfred

Inspector Wickfield Investigates

Julius Falconer
Copyright

First Published in 2009 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
The Unexpected Death of Father Wilfred Copyright © 2009 Julius Falconer
Mobi eISBN 9781907728709 ePub eISBN 9781782281429 PDF eISBN 9781782280545 Paperback ISBN: 9781905809714
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: admin@pneumasprings.co.uk W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.
Dedication

To the Clergy
of the Archdiocese of Birmingham

in appreciation
The Novel
One
T he two priests sat opposite each other, at either end of the breakfast table. Fr Wilfred was in his late sixties, a priest of many years’ experience, with fingers stained by nicotine, white hair and a slightly stiff manner. He sat stooped in his chair, peering through his heavy spectacles, one of the old school used to the respect of the laity and the immutability of his religion. What did the Second Vatican Council mean to him? It was much ado about nothing. Since nothing can change, as popes and councils had iterated for centuries, why spend three years and a lot of money discussing it? His companion was a young priest in his mid-twenties, with clean, dark features, slender hands and a serious manner. Perhaps his superiors, which is to say principally the archbishop, guided by the comments of the seminary rector and the rural dean, regarded him as a firebrand who would benefit from the steady, case-hardened guidance of his parish priest. His zeal and theological exuberance would be tamed and properly channelled if he spent a year or two with Fr Wilfred; perhaps not so much tamed as crushed out of existence, which would be even better. (This comment is not intended as a criticism of the authorities’ good faith.)
Fr Wilfred was engaged in his daily perusal of The Times , which he read with apostolic commitment as a religious duty. The priest had a duty to be unworldly, but his parishioners were of the earth, earthy (as St Paul has it), and the priest could not minister with effectiveness if he was totally unaware of the laity’s problems and circumstances. With the paper folded several times and propped up against the tea-pot, Fr Wilfred munched his toast and slurped his tea, punctuating his modest meal with comments or exclamations on the themes of his reading: ‘disgraceful’, ‘well, I never’, ‘what’s the world coming to?’. Fr Gabriel, denied the paper until later in the day, sat reading a book – Leo Trese’s Tenders of the Flock : spiritual but not too heavy for so early in the day – occasionally dabbing spots of tomato sauce from the pages as he consumed the bacon, egg and baked beans which he had cooked for the two of them. The room in which they took their meals was one of the two front rooms of the presbytery, the other being the sitting-room. The dining-room and sitting-room gave out on to the Worcester Road in the centre of the small town. Neither of the priests minded the noise of the traffic very much, as their central position was valued.
When the meal was concluded to the satisfaction of both parties, Fr Wilfred asked his junior what plans he had for the morning.
‘My usual study hour, Father,’ the younger man said, ‘and then I’ve got the Mass at the school. On my way back, I thought I’d drop in to see old Mrs Buller: I don’t think she’ll last much longer, and although she’s had all we can give her by way of spiritual nourishment, I think she might appreciate a quick visit.’
‘Good, good,’ Fr Wilfred said, ‘and don’t forget to tell her she can give us a ring any time – or more likely get her daughter to ring us any time. We mustn’t let the dying slip away unnoticed, must we?’ Here he looked hard at Fr Gabriel, as if the latter had expressed complete disregard for the dying. It was all part of Fr Wilfred’s plan to inculcate the essentials of parish ministry in his young curate whom he suspected of high-flown ideas that would sap the Church’s heart’s-blood. Prayer, the administration of the sacraments, Holy Mass: what need was there for more? Fr Gabriel sighed inwardly at the inevitability of his superior’s comments but was too sensible to give utterance to his thoughts.
In 1968, the year in which the events of this case took place, the Roman Catholic parish of The Sacred Heart and St Catherine of Alexandria, on the Worcester Road, Droitwich, affectionately known as the Pippet Works, after the artist who designed the mosaics in the 1920s and 30s, numbered some 620 permanent Catholic souls, including the Catholic pupils at the two schools, as well as the shifting populations of two hospitals and a nursing home. It was considered a comfortable parish in the archdiocese of Birmingham, a sort of reward for older priests who had demonstrated the virtues of staying-power, conformity and pastoral efficiency. Curates were parachuted in according to their needs – it was taken for granted that all newly ordained priests required further practical training which the seminary years, spent in purdah at Oscott College in Sutton Coldfield, were ill-equipped to provide. A spell at the Pippet Works, as at other similar parishes in the archdiocese, was designed to curb excesses of zeal or innovation and to instil proper observance of sacerdotal conventions. This work had become even more urgent in the wake of Vat II (‘VatTwo’, as it was almost universally known in Roman Catholic clerical circles), which, according to many, had unleashed diabolical and dangerous forces into Mother Church. Only firm handling would enable the Church to ride out the storm.
Pope John XXIII, patriarch of Venice, a rotund figure in his late seventies, was elected pope in 1958 as a stopgap to keep the papal seat warm until somebody more suitable could be found. His pontifical gesta could be considered contradictory. On the one hand he issued the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia (‘VetSap’ to many of its clerical readers) which urged the recovery of Latin as the universal language of the Church and which many regarded as a retrograde and in any case Canutian step, and on the other he announced the convening of the Church’s twentieth general council, at which the world’s bishops would assemble to discuss matters of importance and urgency – although there was much dispute as to what should be considered important and urgent. For three years, off and on, bishops, up to 3000 of them at any one time, came and went, assembled in small groups and in plenary sessions, discussed and argued and debated, and eventually they published sixteen documents, with such grand and resonant titles as Apostolicam Actuositatem and Unitatis Redintegratio , ranging in length from a little over 1000 words to more than 16,000 words. The world yawned and carried on with its business, but for Roman Catholics the globe was tottering on its foundations – or so some, including Fr Wilfred, thought.
The five seminaries of England and Wales could not ignore the council, much as some members of staff might have wished. The various lecturers felt obliged, partly by the bishops themselves and partly by the atmosphere amongst the laity, to feed into their teaching at least some of the insights and sayings of the council fathers, but they did so with various degrees of enthusiasm. No one was exempt from at least appearing to pay respects to the council: the dogmaticians, the moralists, the liturgists, the Church historians, the ecumenists, the pastoralists, the biblicists, all had to read the council documents and take on board whatever it was they were deemed to be purveying. In most cases the innovations were intangible and imponderable, with plenty of scope for variety of opinion and interpretation and fervour, so that some lecturers skimmed over the documents with the briefest nod in their direction, while others took the trouble to sift through them carefully and extract what they regarded as interesting, even dramatic, novelties. The poor students were to some extent caught in a pincer movement, or perhaps tug-o’-war would be a better analogy, pulled towards ever more entrenched tradition fighting for its existence on the one hand, and towards unfettered novelty on the other. Fr Gabriel was the result of this unseemly tussle, to which there did not seem to be an easy solution. Students left the seminaries buoyed up by a sense of change and fresh air and new ideas, and yet unsteady when the props of traditional piety and spirituality were being eroded. Some seminary lecturers might have been guilty of a lack of caution; some might have been guilty of resistance to change. The result was, so Fr Wilfred thought, a mess, and for his part he was determined that none of what he had learned as a seminarian and practised assiduously as a priest for over forty years should be lost, either in his own ministry or in that of the young priest entrusted to his charge.
It was not that Fr Wilfred deliberately flouted the bishops’ combined will or took positive steps to reverse conciliar suggestions. It was simply that his way of thinking and his ideas of what was proper in ritual and worship were conservative, and he was afraid, irrationally if the truth be told, of letting go of what worked in favour of untried methods, even at the behest of the world’s bishops. There is nothing new in this: the tension between tradition and change is age-old, but it was an attitude not designed to set Fr G