A Catholic priest with questions. A penitent woman with a secret past. A jealous friend. The fourth in this lover's knot? God.
Father Rob Souza faces the forbidden desire of his own heart when Jessica, victim of a brutal assault, comes for counseling. Rob’s best friend, Lawrence, is a priest with an artistic temperament and trials of his own. A Greek chorus of gossiping priests, and church politics riddled with suspicion and battling for souls, force Lawrence, Rob and Jessica to make choices they didn't intend.
Tongues of Angels offers a peek behind the curtain of the priesthood, offering a funny, poignant look at Catholic angst and ambiguity. Based on a true story, Tongues of Angels is a canny, warm and surprisingly spiritual novel for our time. Now back in print for the 10th Anniversary Edition, through Indie-Visible Ink.
Prologue
On feast days he wore red, the
blood red of virgin martyrs and cardinals. His brocade chasuble, a heavy mantle
that draped him from his collar to his shoes, was piped with gold, curved at
the hem, with a slit for his head. When he walked he seemed to glide, and when
he held his hands out to consecrate the Eucharist, the chasuble shifted to
reveal his arms, cloaked in white from the linen alb he wore underneath,
exposing the narrow cuffs of his black clerical shirt beneath the alb, layer
under layer that ended at the naked brown skin of his hands.
Father Robert Souza was a Roman
Catholic priest, under the chasuble and alb, and clerical collar (size Pontiff
3) and the black shirt and slacks that are the uniform of the priest.
And under that, boxer shorts.
And under those, the man.
Rob had deliberated over the
boxers. For years he had worn bleached white shorts that his mother had ironed,
yes, ironed with a heavy hand and an ancient iron that she ran over paraffin
for a crisp sheen. When he was old enough to buy his own shorts, he switched to
tight, bright bikini briefs, which had amused his fellow seminarians and given
him adolescent moments in front of the mirror, admiring his physique, a
blue-collar Portuguese boy in Speedos, building muscles to lift a chalice. His
former girlfriend had once given him some black silk boxers which he still kept
but never wore; after ordination, Rob bought white briefs that somehow
conferred respectability with their simple, practical function, and suited his
position in the parish.
Then once, when Rob visited with
some parishioners who suffered infertility problems, the husband If tight shorts lower the sperm count, and lower sperm
count can affect fertility, then men should wear loose shorts to ensure
fertility. But when he added the x factor of celibate priesthood
into the equation, he faltered. He didn’t need a sperm count, high or low. Rob
stood before the underwear kiosk in a department store on his day off,
anonymous and average in his jeans and chambray shirt, and weighed his
decision.
When a man has a vocation to the priesthood, he must meet
certain qualifications to be ordained: be at least twenty-four years old, a
legitimate child, and of sound mind and body, although the Bishop could
dispense most impediments. Rob himself had received a dispensation from the
Bishop because he had been a few months shy of his twenty-fourth birthday at
his ordination six years before, and one of Rob’s classmates received a
dispensation because of an undescended testicle. St. Thomas Aquinas had
preached, long before the invention of the microscope, that each drop of a
man’s seed was like a tiny man, thus sacred, and despite more modern medical
understanding, the Catholic doctrine was the same. Although a priest must never
put his gift to use, the living seed must be cherished. Rob, sound of mind and
body, poised to choose between the guilty freedom of boxer shorts versus the
ball-crushing, sperm-killing snap of tight elastic, was glad to have worked it
out.
He had worn boxers ever since.
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