Till Death: A Father Koesler Mystery

by William X. Kienzle

Book Overview

The priesthood or Lil? It would be a gut-wrenching decision for Rick.Sixty-year-old Father Rick Casserly, the much loved, socially conscious pastor or St. William of Thierry church, and Lillian Lil... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0449007138
• ISBN13: 9780449007136
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Fawcett Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Good Guys and Bad Guys

I have only begun reading the Father Koesler series a few weeks ago, after stumbling upon them in a used bookstore. I agree with the previous reviewers that this volume is less of a mystery than a study of Canon Law. However, I still found it interesting. As a Catholic born just prior to the close of Vatican II, I find this whole series interesting as a revelation of what was on the minds of the priests and sisters of those days. I had Sisters for my teachers until high school. I was an altar boy during the transition phase; ie the Latin was gone but we still had the Communion rail. Soon after, the Communion rail was gone and the guitars arrived. Now, in some Catholic Churches, the Tabernacle is gone. People generally stopped genuflecting before the Tabernacle even before it was removed. In our zealous quest for "accessibility", the baby has been discarded with the bath water. As Father Koesler progresses in life, he identifies himself as a liberal; he counsels an abortionist in "The Greatest Evil" that "somewhere in abortion is serious sin." As he tells her, she has thoughtfully informed her conscience, so therefore her own conscience is the supreme authority. The characters serve as representatives of different camps within the Church. In every case, the priest who is not necessarily enamored of Vatican II is always portrayed as the "bad" guy, the villain, the jerk who makes peoples' lives miserable. The priests who ignore Canon Law or apply it in a looser fashion are the good guys. Koesler himself, I believe, represent the Church as a whole. He has nothing against the priests who leave, or even Father Casserly who lives a double life with Lil for years, yet he himself never has a dalliance with a woman. He quietly applauds priests who marry un-annulled couples, yet he never does so himself. He still loves (rightly so) the priests who leave the priesthood, yet he himself soldiers on. He notes everyone else hardly ever wearing clerical clothes, but he always wears a cassock and Roman collar. From a demographic perspective, how would the 80-something year old Father Koesler feel about present day Detroit? He frequently worried in the past about the "population explosion"; the global warming-type scare of the 70's. Whites and Catholics dutifully listened to the liberals and birth-controlled and aborted the birth rate down to bare replacement rate. But the followers of Mohammed didn't get the memo. Today in Dearborn, the Muslim call to prayer is recited much more frequently than the Rosary. All in all, the series is an interesting memoire of the Church in the last 40 years, encapsulated by a lovable central core of characters.