ARTICLES
February 2002 ARTICLES
Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Of Witches and Dead Bishops
Los Angeles Author Pulls No Punches
By Christopher Zehnder
At first it had seemed mere piety masquerading as literature. I had received a copy of The Endless Knot, a mystery novel by a Los Angeles writer named William L. Biersach. I did not open it with great expectations. I had read, and thoroughly disliked, books of this sort -- written by obscure authors, put out by ersatz publishing houses because no one else would publish them. Biersach's book seemed to fulfill all my expectations -- at first. But as I got into the book, the plot (a murder mystery) drew me in and affected me with its poignancy. Even the jolly, but bittersweet, rum-soaked triumphant Catholicism of the thing, which had bugged me so at first, became a source of particular enjoyment.
The story, which purports to be the chronicle of one Martin Feeney, takes place in "Los Angeles." (I use inverted commas, for Biersach at the opening of the book emphasizes: "Los Angeles is not the real scene for the book." Feeney is the arthritic gardener for Father John Baptist, "a cop turned priest," who is pastor of St. Philomena's church. Father Baptist, who had become a priest after a career in the police department, decided after ordination that he could in conscience only say the traditional Latin Mass. With his police pension he purchased from the archdiocese of Los Angeles St. Philomena's, and there began saying the traditional Latin Mass and administering the sacraments in the ancient rite. There he lives with Feeney and a domineering, somewhat maniacal, housekeeper named Millie.
Father Baptist finds himself, unexpectedly, drawn back into police work when one of the auxiliary bishops of Los Angeles is found murdered in a bizarre fashion. The archbishop, Morley Psalmellus Fullbright, enlists Father Baptist to do a private investigation. One by one, each of the three other auxiliaries are also murdered in what are clearly occult ritual killings. In uncovering the conspiracy, Father Baptist, Martin Feeney and their four lively friends who call themselves the "Knights Tumblar" descend into the dark underground of witchcraft and the occult only to find that's its tendrils have reached even into the inner sanctum of the archdiocese itself. The book's title, The Endless Knot, refers to the pentragam which, says Biersach, was originally a Christian symbol (representing the five wounds of Christ), but which had been perverted to darker uses.
The Endless Knot is an unabashadly Catholic work. Biersach entitles each of his chapters with saints' feast days. Traditional Catholic thought and practice pervade the book At one point, Biersach reproduces the entire Catholic meal prayer, including the invocation of saints! The book's secondary world is replete with Catholicism. The Faith is the central reality explaining all others.
Biersach told me that, with the exception of The Lord of the Rings, and the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton, he had "never read a book, at least written in the 20th century, that was written from a Catholic perspective and where all the principal characters assumed a Catholic perspective." With the Lord of the Rings, in particular, said Biersach, "one probably wouldn't pick up the author's Catholic perspective unless he knew that J.R.R Tolkein was a Catholic." It was, thus, that Biersach sat down to write The Endless Knot. I told him of my initial distaste for that very aspect of the book -- "the continual reference to religion seemed overkill," I told him. "But, perhaps, I am jaded."
"I think you are jaded," he replied. "I think if you sat down and blew the dust off the Canterbury Tales and started reading them, you'd have Catholicism rubbed in your face. But because it's old and past, it doesn't bother us as much. We're very unused to having the Faith rubbed in our faces now." Biersach said he knew he would get reactions such as mine when he wrote out the meal prayer and the act of contrition. "I even had two of my proofers say, don't write it out, we know it. They were both people my age," said the 48-year-old Biersach, "but I don't think someone who is 15 in a Catholic school, or 20, knows the act of contrition, or says grace in that form."
Biersach noted that if it had been any other religion but Catholicism, no one would complain of overkill. He said he drew his inspiration for the books from Tony Hillerman, who has written a series of detective stories that take place on an Indian reservation. "In order to explain the murders," said Biersach, "Hillerman has to explain the Navajo religion. He does that unabashadly. One of the Indian detectives in his books studied to be a medicine man; so, you cannot read his books without wading through Navajo religion. When we read that, we go, 'Oh, how culturally enriching!' But people get turned off if they read just the simple prayer of grace! I knew I would get flack for that, but in some part of me, my teeth just clamped down and I said, 'I'm not going to pull any punches.'"
And he didn't, which made for some problems in getting the book published. Though his agent was Lila Karpf, who had handled Malachi Martin's books, every publisher in New York rejected the book. "Some of the comments were that they didn't want to hear this," Biersach said. "One editor, as sort of a 'favor,' blue-lined the first 38 pages, taking out every Catholic reference. Using the feast days of the saints as chapter titles bothered publishers to no end -- and yet, that's how Catholics tell time, by the liturgical calendar. Again if we were discussing Navajo religion and it was the month of whatever and every day had significance, we wouldn't object. Those of good will if they experience angst over the religious aspects, might start asking themselves, why? Why do I not want to see my own prayers in print?
"We live in the cult of the seekers. It's perfectly fine to be a seeker of truth; the minute you find it, you're narrow minded and pompous. So nobody finds it. Like when George Harrison died, all these people were saying, 'Oh, he was a seeker of truth.' I would say, 'I hope he found it!' As long as you 're seeking, you're 'mystical' and 'noble' and all those far-off things. And nobody wants to deal with actually finding truth. It's like marriage -- 99 percent of the books and movies are about courtship; very few deal with the theme, now you're married, what happened?"
After being rejected by every publisher he approached, Biersach and a friend, Stephen Frankini, decided to go it alone. Frankini formed "Tumblar House" (the logo with cocktail tumblers forming the u's, and the subscript Bona tempora volvant -- "Let the good times roll."), putting out The Endless Knot as its first book. If the title evinces a slight irreverence, so does the mock ecclesiastical approval the book carries. "Nihil Obstat: Huh?" it reads; "Imprimatur: Are you kidding!?!?" The book exudes this somewhat tipsy, though jovial spirit. The "Knights Tumblar" are four young or youngish Catholic men who, decked out in formal evening attire, evangelize while bar-hopping. (The Knights Tumblar, said Biersach, were based on his own "Drones Club" -- "We'd put on tuxedoes and go bar hopping. It was so amazing to see my friends explaining the sign of the cross at a bar to someone, over a beer.") Martin Feeney makes deft, though irreverent, comments about the degraded state of the archdiocese -- for which Father John Baptist, at least a couple times in the course of the story, says he must visit the confessional. Yet despite this irreverent mood, the book whispers a sense of melancholy for the goodness and beauty that the Church and the world have lost.
It is the melancholy rather than the joviality that seems more in accord with Biersach's Latin-rite traditionalism. "I don't consider myself conservative, at all," he said. "I'm a traditionalist -- tried, true, all the way. I would go so far as to say I'm a reactionary. I don't just want the Mass restored, I want Church dogma restored. I want the Catholic sense of life restored." Yet, said Biersach, he could "have written a book about all the horrors happening in the Church, and just left it at that. But that wouldn't be accomplishing anything -- because everyone else is telling about the horrors."
Biersach, too, is not one's stereotypical traditionalist. "I have shoulder length hair and a beard and a lot of people think I look like Jerry Garcia's younger brother," he said. "I can't go to SSPX [Society of St. Pius X] chapels because my hair is as long as that of the statue of Christ." But it' s not long hair alone that makes Biersach an odd trad. For the past 28 years, he has taught courses on recording engineering, audio acoustics and other technical courses at the University of Southern California's school of music, but he is known most for the courses he developed on rock 'n roll and the Beatles. He is also a rock musician. "I realize that some trads get very upset when they realize I teach those courses," said Biersach, "but I would rather it be me teaching them than anyone else I could think of. I don't idolize the Beatles," he said.
In The Endless Knot, Biersach doesn't treat traditionalists as a noble remnant of true believers, but as anyone who has dealings with them knows them. As soon as Mass is over at St. Philomena's, the parishoners bicker and fight -- and then go to a local eatery to bicker and fight some more. At one point in the story, Martin Feeney is asked by one Henry Folkestone why he wears a Tyrannosaurus Rex pin on his lapel. Replies Feeney: "It's a Tradosaurus. Tradosaurus Rex to be precise."
"I don't understand," says Folkestone. "Why do you wear such a thing?"
"I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper," says Feeney. "'Because Trads are the most obnoxious people in the world.' Mr. Folkestone blinked. Then he blinked again. 'But these people here, we're Traditionalists.' 'Yup, ' I nodded. 'My kind of people.'"
Biersach, who himself sometimes wears a Tyrannosaurus Rex pin, echoed Feeney's words. Yet, since he himself was once one, he expresses compassion for other angry Traditionalists. "They're a beaten, broken people who have had everything they loved thrashed, and they're bitter about it," said Biersach. Biersach, himself a "revert" to the Faith, said that when he first returned to the Church he was "as furious as the worst in the book. I was seeing my confessor about every other week, and mostly I would pound the table and froth. He took that for about six weeks; then one day he just said, 'Bill, it's really good to know why things are the way they are, but now it's time to start paying attention to your devotional life.' That is probably the most important thing he's ever said to me, because that's when I began to realize that being angry doesn't do any good. But, boy, a lot of other people haven't realized that yet. When I am with them [other Traditionalists], I try to make the point that, ultimately, we can't do anything about what's going on. What all Catholics have a responsibility to do is go to heaven. I guess that's also what this book is about -- first of all, how to save your soul."
Rising like a rock of stability in this sea of traditionalist passion -- and amid the madness of the archdiocese -- is Father John Baptist, whom Biersach describes as "the kind of priest I wished I had met sometime in my life." A wise pastor who displays a gentle charity towards both his idiosyncratic flock and the erring diocesan priests and bishops he comes across, Father Baptist is yet no cookie-cutter pious priest. He is a real man aware of his own weaknesses. When he agrees to return to detective work, he hangs a plaque in his office with a quote from Proverbs -- "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so is the fool that repeateth his folly." Another plaque displays a quote from St. John Chrysostom -- "I do not speak rashly, but as I feel and think. I do not think that many priests are saved, but that those who perish are far more numerous." Though a man of prayer, Father Baptist desires companionship, as when, he enjoys the wine "Lacrimæ Christi," the "Tears of Christ," with Feeney in the peaceful garden, with the statue of St. Thérèse, between the church and rectory.
One character that came as a pleasant surprise to me was Mrs. Magillicuddy. One of Father Baptist's parishioners, she is a homeless woman who lives in the virgin oak wood that surrounds the Del Agua Mission. Sometimes coherent, sometimes not, Mrs. Magillicuddy nevertheless comes across as a woman who has discovered a deep wisdom. When Archbishop Fullbright proposes to tear down the ancient oaks to build a new cathedral, Mrs. Magillcuddy strikes him on the head with a heavy pair of binoculars. Where did Biersach get this character?
"From reading lives of the saints," he said. "One tells of a friar who was so penitent and so hard on himself that he smelled so bad from not bathing and from tying a rope around his waist so tightly it ate into his skin and festered. The brothers ushered him from their midst, only to have an angel appear and say, 'bring him back, he's better than all of you combined. The Faith is universal; it reaches to the lowest denominators. That's why I gave her the delightful task of whacking the archbishop on the head, because she can do it with impunity."
The fact that Archbishop Fullbright is called archbishop of Los Angeles and that he wants to build a new cathedral leads one to wonder how much he is patterned after Cardinal Roger Mahony. Biersach is emphatic that the plot "doesn't happen in Los Angeles; I tried to make that clear in my introduction, which nobody seems to take seriously." Archbishop Fullbright could not be Mahony, said Biersach. "Fullbirght is a gruff, loud-voiced man whom Martin Feeney compares to Godzilla walking through Tokyo. You've got to compare that to Mahony, who is not like that. Also, I know for a fact that Cardinal Mahony hates having his ring kissed; Fullbright loves it." Biersach said he drew his archdiocese by just looking around. "Certainly I have drawn on things that have happened here in L.A., but I've drawn on things that have happented in other cities, too. For instance the church Martin Feeney calls 'St. Fallopia's' -- the one shaped like a uterus with ovaries -- that's in Australia. There is such a church there; I've seen pictures of it."
Whatever one calls The Endless Knot -- a "murder mystery" or an "occult thriller" -- the book's real point, said Biersach, is not the allure which the plot certainly possesses. "The point of the book," he said, "is that, in the midst of the horrors, there is this small group of people, a handful, that actually keep the Catholic faith, and find joy in the midst of all this muck. That's all I was really trying to say. I hope the book will bring people back to the Church, that the people who have lost all joy might find it again. The ordinary channels of evangelization are closed to us, so we have to find other ways. This book was one way."
One can order The Endless Knot from Catholic Treasures, 135 W. Foothill Blvd, Suite A, Monrovia, CA 91016, (626) 359-4893; or from the publisher: Tumblar House, PMB 376, 411 E. Huntington Dr., #107, Arcadia, CA 91007. The cost, $25.60 includes shipping and sales tax.