by Frank X. Gaspar

416 pages

Counterpoint Press

Reviewed by Natalie Seabolt Dobson

 

Frank X. Gaspar’s new novel, Stealing Fatima, tells the revealing story of Father Manuel Furtado’s search for faith, redemption, and peace. Father Manny has returned to his New England home town as a parish priest. As he struggles with past injuries, both physical and emotional, he faces judgment from the diocese that has sent a spiritual director to investigate him and his work in the parish. Father Manny is himself seeped in the history of the town and its collective memory, connected through his Portuguese family and their Catholic roots. Even the name of his Parish, Our Lady of Fatima, recalls the famous miracle of the Virgin Mary appearing to three Portuguese children in 1917. 

 

On the night of the Vigil of the Saints, Halloween, Father Manny discovers his childhood best friend, Sarafino Pomba, in the parish church. The two have not seen one another for years, and the priest has heard rumors that Sarafino was dead. Sarafino stands before Father Manny, disturbed and needing. He is ill with AIDS and spiritually troubled. As the novel unfolds in beautifully woven layers, Father Manny must come to terms with his love and anger at his long-lost friend, as well as with his sister and friends in the parish community. 

 

Gaspar relates the priest’s struggles through his nightly journaling: “[H]e opened the ledger and wrote the events of the day, the records of conversation, the workings of his mind. After a time, the familiar tides began to rise in him. He sat over the open book. Its vistas were without limit…He thought of Job, calling out to God, and God answering with his withering sarcasm. And when did that stop any man or woman from crying out to Him, calling Him out, asking for His accountability? Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” As we see him rage against pain with medication and alcohol, we also see him trudge through his memories and follow him across the landscape of the town and the life which has brought him face to face with his greatest search—“Where is God?”

 

Father Manny’s problems are intellectually complicated as he moves through bouts of faith in God and disbelief in certain doctrines of the Catholic Church. The novel leads us through a labyrinth of human questions, all leading to the divine. When confronted with Sarafino’s holy visions, Father Manny does not believe the Virgin has appeared, but we see, as we walk with him, that signs are not always miraculous, and suffering always redemptive. Gaspar’s characters reach out with the flesh of strong hands, beautiful ones, and they breathe the life of their small town into us. What is uncovered through the pages of Stealing Fatima is a story resonant with the admirable, honest, human search for the divine and how we are to live out that discovery in this world. 

 

October 2009

Natalie Seabolt Dobson