Peter De Rosa

Whew, those popes get up to all sorts of eye-opening, unpleasant things, don't they? I'm not religious but not militantly so I came to this with no axe to grind with the Roman Catholic Church, and came away from "Vicars of Christ" having raised my eyebrows in surprise at the antics of past popes so much that my eyebrow raising has turned into a full-on tic that probably needs medical assistance.

If you ever needed a resource to back up your argument for the eradication of religion, this book show more would be handy, as it lays out two thousand years of papal misdeeds, including the "Golden Age of Bastards" and "The Jousting of the Whores", where Medici and Borgia popes saw no problem siring children to various mistresses, then placing those children in prominent church positions. And the less said about the child molesters parading as popes the better.

De Rosa also writes well, with a streak of dark humour. Well worth a read. show less

This one (again) fits into that comfy-wumfy warm-sweater space of moderately drôle tales that keeps one happily turning pages while sipping whiskey or whatever by the fireside on an autumn evening. Ah, the good old days of yore in small-village England.

There are several episodes in the book, each episode being a few chapters long. In one episode Neil has to teach little schoolers about the birds and the bees. (This is Catholic stuff, remember, so you can probably guess how that might go.) show more In another episode the two fathers have to perform a burial at sea... All the tales are absorbing, but I particularly liked the whole thing about the neighbor's pigs. Not to mention the "back-to-front" wedding adventure, oh my.

I bought the almost-omnibus five-volume set of these books (on sale, btw, for not much more than a pound in today's dollars), and there are two more books to go, so I'll devour and report on them in due course. show less

(Over the last few years I've read all 5 books in the anthology of the first Father Neil books, and this is the last one of the five-book set.) I enjoyed it on a par with the other volumes in the series. This has some less funny parts, including a holocaust story across a couple of chapters. There are also a couple of chapters about "mixed-up marriages". (Of course in this context that means across religious lines.) Anyway, I found it absorbing and worth reading. Someday perhaps I'll get to show more the other books that aren't contained in the big anthology. show less

Yes, even though I'm not a religious person, I have a soft spot for priests, especially if they're amusing or solve mysteries. The author of this book, and a handful of sequels, was at one time a priest and theology prof, back in the 1950s. So he has a great deal of first-hand experience in the milieu.

Briefly, the narrator is a young English priest, freshly ordained, who is assigned to a parish with an older and rounder Irish priest (Fr Duddleswell) and the housekeeper (Mrs Pring). (These show more two are constantly sparring and sniping like the proverbial old married couple.) The book is nicely episodic with each chapter constituting a more-or-less stand-alone short-story. Thus, it lends itself well to reading in short sessions while standing in the queue for the bus, train, confession, or what have you. It didn't strike me as utterly hilarious, but was generally pleasant and drôle throughout. The humor is all rather clean-cut and mild, centered around goings-on in the parish community, and basically suitable for all ages. (Definitely not like the Vicar of Dibley.) Thanks to Open Road Media for bringing out the digital omnibus edition of Boyd's works.

I liked this well enough to keep the sequels on tap. show less