Author Talk with Ronald J. Wichers

Author of the Love Beneath the Mighty Dome series

Conversations about Books and the clergy

We asked Mr. Wichers to tell us more about his thought on his books and the Clergy. This was his response…

I think, in this matter, time will tell. But this trilogy of novels was not written with any desire to attack the Roman Catholic Priesthood. They were not written with an intention to merely expose muck or denigrate the leadership. The collection of characters I have created in the trilogy are an effort to show the heroic as well as the villainous.

Within this system priests wield enormous power, that is – no priesthood, no sacraments, no sacraments no salvation. How they use their power is the focus of these intricately woven stories over a span of about twenty-five years, from the 1970s to the 1990s. How it differs from other books I can’t say. But I can promise that it is a just and balanced look into the daily lives of priests; their works, their goals, their loves. Love Beneath the Mighty Dome is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes horrifying but always passionately honest.

Any seeming imbalance is due to the nature of an institution that stubbornly refuses to make what would amount to a few simple and basic reforms, principally the ordination of women, the termination of mandatory celibacy and a readjustment to a humbler, Jesus-like, attitude as to the use of power. As now constituted, it attracts too many of the wrong sort; I mean power mongers or those with a hidden agenda.

I love the Catholic Church. I think the world would be worse off without it. But the leadership ignores some of their own basic commitments to Social Justice. In too many instances there is evinced a blindness as to the type of person this Jesus of Nazareth was. The power that occupied that man’s soul was not that of an unfeeling tyrant but rather that which comes from a beautiful mind, a loving, kind and humble heart as shown, for example, in the Beatitudes of Matthew’s gospel.