La Guadalupana: A Comic Novel

"La Guadalupana" is a book for non-Catholics (especially Jews) and Catholics alike. Priest abuse scandals are not unique to the Roman Catholic Church. But Our Lady of Guadalupe is. And She provides a kind and loving solution to the problem by convincing Pope John Paul II to ordain celibate women and celibate, openly gay men as priests.Readers of any persuasion who love Francis I, the current Pope, will welcome this book. We know that John Paul II was a saint with a special devotion to the Patroness of the Americas, Our Lady of Guadalupe. However, he had a serious flaw: he failed to deal promptly and effectively with the Church's abuse scandal. "La Guadalupana" imagines what would have happened if Our Lady of Guadalupe had brought her gentle, patient sense of humor to bear on a man as courageous and as stubborn as John Paul. It is set in the tiny Catholic village of Guadalupe, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Stretching from 1956 to 2000, it tells the coming-of-age story of two young women, Maria Mondragon and Maria Barela, who eventually become the first women ordained priests in the Church.Our Lady of Guadalupe appears to these hopelessly ugly girls on their Confirmation Day in 1956. She promises them anything they want in return for their commitment to remain celibate until their ordination. The desperate girls take the deal. They trade their pledge for the beauty, brains, and bravery required to navigate a Church hierarchy traditionally hostile to women.True to their vow, in spite of all temptations, the girls thrive in a small-town high school setting of cars and guns and sports. Then the Marias leave Guadalupe after high school to become nuns. But they leave having been convicted of attempted murder and mayhem committed in a graphically described battle between the people of Guadalupe and the thugs working for a wealthy Anglo landowner, Malcolm Fortune. Exploiting the tangled history of Spanish land grants and crypto-Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, Fortune gains title to the common lands (the ejido) of Guadalupe. He plans to develop and market downstream on the Rio Grande the ejido's valuable water that flows from the melting glaciers high above Guadalupe in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.Fortune is profoundly Catholic and openly gay. Like everyone else in Guadalupe, he is aware that the local priests are abusing both boys and girls. He takes as his penance for his silence the task of raising the billions of dollars needed to settle the Church's priest abuse lawsuits. His ally in this effort is the conservative Catholic lay organization Opus Dei.As the year 2000 approaches, La Guadalupana brings the Marias back to their hometown to face their enemies. She also brings Pope John Paul to a town where another pitched battle is occurring over the rights to the ejido.It is in this dramatic setting where the Pope and the Marias must settle the Church's problems in the best way available: by relying on La Guadalupana's divine joke--Her way of bringing a happy ending to the mismatch of an immortal soul embedded in mortal flesh.