You have issues...
On the walk into work this morning, I was pondering my Wrath story, and how I've been toying with extending it to a longer story - the central character, denied the chance to extract revenge against the person who hurt him in the past, enacts his revenge against a variety of cyphers (in this case priests), each kill an attempt to purge the desire for revenge from his system, and each attempt failing to do so.
Julia said to me "you really do have issues with Catholicism don't you?"
Not really. I don't have "issues" any more than the next Catholic, or indeed any person who retains nominal allegiance to a particular religious viewpoint has issues with their religion. Do I agree with everything the Catholic church teaches? Absolutely not (I'd be a hypocrite of the highest order to claim so), and my disagreements with the Church are a matter of record in my personal blog, where I've taken issue with the Doctrine of Limbo and the Church's reckless decision to ask Catholics to stop supporting Amnesty International. But as for deep rooted issues, there are none. However, religion (specifically Catholicism) does feature heavily in much of my writing.
Wrath has a priest being wrongly murdered. Best Served Cold opens in a confessional, with a priest taking the confession of a murderer. The Long Watch is set in the Vatican, and is about a group run by the Church. One of the characters in the London novel is a priest. Several of the stories in The Major Arcana unavoidably deal with religion, and indeed one of them is a prequel to The Long Watch, the events of which directly impact on the storyline.
Why? Because I'm Catholic and writing what I know? Maybe. The truth is, out of all the Christian religions, I think Catholicism has the best scope for fun in fiction. Despite the heavy reliance on literal interpretation of the Bible that some branches of the Protestant churches display, they seem to shy away from miracles. From apparitions. From relics. From the stranger, more unusual aspects of religion, things that seem more akin to pre-Christian religions. The power of words, and symbols, and items. Catholicism seems more "magic(k)al" than the other Christian religions. There are saints, and relics, and stigmata, and bi-location, and transubstantiation, and complicated theologies of angels and demons. Not always endorsed, but always in the background.
I can't imagine too many non-denominational schools falling victim to the mass-delusion of a Marion apparition the way my school did. Nor could I envisage a Baptist minister leading a team of angels and demons fighting to save the world. There seems to be more tension in having a murderer confess to his deeds in a confessional, than over a cup of tea with the local Presbyterian minister. And no other branch of Christianity has the history, locations, organisational structure and political involvement to be able to hang complicated geopolitical or conspiratorial plotlines on. Despite my dislike of the book, I don't think The Da Vinci Code would have been anywhere near as successful if Dan Brown had made the villains Anabaptists, for example, rather than the Catholic Church.
So it's not so much that I have issues with the Church - but the structure of the Church raises some juicy issues that are fun to play with.
Julia said to me "you really do have issues with Catholicism don't you?"
Not really. I don't have "issues" any more than the next Catholic, or indeed any person who retains nominal allegiance to a particular religious viewpoint has issues with their religion. Do I agree with everything the Catholic church teaches? Absolutely not (I'd be a hypocrite of the highest order to claim so), and my disagreements with the Church are a matter of record in my personal blog, where I've taken issue with the Doctrine of Limbo and the Church's reckless decision to ask Catholics to stop supporting Amnesty International. But as for deep rooted issues, there are none. However, religion (specifically Catholicism) does feature heavily in much of my writing.
Wrath has a priest being wrongly murdered. Best Served Cold opens in a confessional, with a priest taking the confession of a murderer. The Long Watch is set in the Vatican, and is about a group run by the Church. One of the characters in the London novel is a priest. Several of the stories in The Major Arcana unavoidably deal with religion, and indeed one of them is a prequel to The Long Watch, the events of which directly impact on the storyline.
Why? Because I'm Catholic and writing what I know? Maybe. The truth is, out of all the Christian religions, I think Catholicism has the best scope for fun in fiction. Despite the heavy reliance on literal interpretation of the Bible that some branches of the Protestant churches display, they seem to shy away from miracles. From apparitions. From relics. From the stranger, more unusual aspects of religion, things that seem more akin to pre-Christian religions. The power of words, and symbols, and items. Catholicism seems more "magic(k)al" than the other Christian religions. There are saints, and relics, and stigmata, and bi-location, and transubstantiation, and complicated theologies of angels and demons. Not always endorsed, but always in the background.
I can't imagine too many non-denominational schools falling victim to the mass-delusion of a Marion apparition the way my school did. Nor could I envisage a Baptist minister leading a team of angels and demons fighting to save the world. There seems to be more tension in having a murderer confess to his deeds in a confessional, than over a cup of tea with the local Presbyterian minister. And no other branch of Christianity has the history, locations, organisational structure and political involvement to be able to hang complicated geopolitical or conspiratorial plotlines on. Despite my dislike of the book, I don't think The Da Vinci Code would have been anywhere near as successful if Dan Brown had made the villains Anabaptists, for example, rather than the Catholic Church.
So it's not so much that I have issues with the Church - but the structure of the Church raises some juicy issues that are fun to play with.
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