The Priest

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The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994) is Thomas M. Disch's third Supernatural Minnesota novel. It depicts the destruction of its main character, Catholic priest Pat Bryce, by a bizarre revenge scheme due to his molestation of teenage boys, and also by a mysterious force psychically connecting him with a 13th-century bishop in the Inquisition.

All notes refer to the 2010 University of Minnesota Press edition. The introduction by Gregory Feeley in that edition makes some interesting points about the book's themes, imagery, and slippery genre—but also gives away a major plot development toward the end, so be aware of that.

Major characters

• Patrick Bryce, a priest in Minneapolis. His medieval counterpart Silvanus de Roquefort, a bishop in Montpellier-le-Vieux, France.
• Wilfrid Cogling, an older priest, Bryce's mentor, covertly running an anti-abortion kidnapping scheme.
• Gerhard Ober, a zealot working for Cogling along with his sister Hedwig. His medieval counterpart Durand du Guaga, Legate of the Inquisition.
• Bing Anker, a casino worker in Las Vegas, formerly of Minneapolis, blackmailing Bryce.
• Father Mabbley, a priest in Las Vegas, Bing's friend and occasional lover.
• Wolf, a tattoo artist. His medieval counterpart Abbé St.-Loup, de Roquefort's half-brother.
• A.D. Boscage, former science fiction writer, founder of the Receptivist cult.
• Clay, an agent of the Receptivists, also blackmailing Bryce.

However, it's sometimes hard to say what counts as a major character in this novel; quite a few are described in detail and appear to be important to the plot, but may be killed off without warning at any point (see below), or may turn out not to have existed.

Epigram

Kill them all. God will look after His own. —Arnald-Amalric, Abbot of Citeaux, at the Massacre of Béziers, 1209

Later popularized as "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" (which Disch also quotes as a second epigram), this is a paraphrase of Arnaud Amalric's alleged response to the question of how to distinguish Cathars—the sect in southern France that his Crusader army had come to Béziers to root out—from loyal Catholics. Whether Amalric gave such a command or not (he later claimed that the attack had happened without his orders), the result was the same: after negotiations had failed to convince the city to give up specific leaders, a brief skirmish grew into an indiscriminate rampage by the Crusaders and their mercenary allies.

The destruction of Béziers is referenced as a recent event within the medieval storyline in The Priest, but Amalric's historical role as a legate of the Inquisition is filled by the fictional Durand du Guaga.

The epigram is arguably also appropriate for Disch's entire Supernatural Minnesota series, in terms of the author's willingness to dispose of both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters in large numbers—often long before one would've expected based on the typical conventions of horror thrillers. The series also departs from those conventions in terms of how many characters who seemed to be important can die unexpectedly offstage, in between chapters; this happens in all four books, but especially in The Priest. The Businessman, which takes place partly in the afterlife, is the only one where there's evidence that God does sort them out; otherwise, that task falls to the reader.

Chapter 1

an entire Sheehy family who'd all died on the same day in the late Seventies

The Sheehys were background characters in The Businessman who were murdered by their demonically-possessed son, but the continuity between The Priest and the other books is not straightforward. At least one historical reference in The Businessman places it in the 1980s rather than the '70s, and The M.D. depicts a speculative 1990s that can't fit with the other books; Disch said he intended the books as variations on shared ingredients, rather than a continuous story.

The other familiar character who will show up here, Bing Anker, is technically possible to see as a carry-over from The Businessman, but it's a stretch. At the end of that book, Bing seemed to be in a fairly different situation: living in Minneapolis in a house he had inherited, and keeping an evil ghost prisoner in his bathroom. Could Bing have simply got tired of that, moved back to Las Vegas, and decided the ghost wasn't worth talking about? Probably not, but I enjoy thinking so.

Chapter 2

Étoile du Nord Seminary on Leech Lake

This seminary is fictional, but anything in Minnesota could plausibly be named "l'étoile du nord" (star of the north) since that's the official motto of the state. Leech Lake would be a remote location for the school: it's halfway from Minneapolis to the Canadian border, in between two large Ojibwe reservations.

the blessed Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer

The founder of Opus Dei, who officially achieved sainthood in 2002. The posthumous allegations that Escrivá had privately supported Hitler were not yet known when The Priest was written, but he was already widely thought to have been sympathetic to the fascist regime in Spain, and Opus Dei has been accused of secretive involvement in far-right politics in many countries and decades.

Mater inviolata

The perpetual virginity of Mary is, as this scene illustrates, a confusing concept to get across to anyone in the modern world. It combines several distinct ideas: that Jesus was conceived supernaturally; that Mary had had no sex before that; that Mary also had no sex after that, and no other children; and that giving birth to Jesus had no effect on her virginity (which, to the early theologians who took this position, and to Father Cogling here, was defined physically in terms of the hymen). These arguments were generally driven more by a perceived need to reinforce certain assumptions (Mary was as pure as possible and anything having to do with sex or childbirth was impure) than by the content of the Gospels, and remained controversial in the early Church, but eventually became a firm part of Catholic tradition.

As Cogling hoped for, Pope John Paul II did formally reinforce this doctrine in 1996. Cogling's statement that "most Catholics" believe it in every detail may be wishful thinking; surveys of Catholics on specific points of doctrine are scattered and inconsistent.

Saint Bernardine of Siena

Bernardino's 15th-century sermons included strong and very specific opinions on the proper conduct of every area of life, including sex. In that area he was heavily focused on the evils of sodomy—which he defined as any non-procreative sexual act.

Chapter 3

Final Exit

This nonfiction book, subtitled "The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying," had been a bestseller a few years before The Priest was written.

Some guys got no problem drinking and inking

Bad advice! Alcohol is well known to increase bleeding and interfere with healing; its effect on the quality of the tattoo is less well studied scientifically, but it's common for tattoo artists to warn that it's bad for the ink, and (for all those reasons) to advise against drinking within 24 hours of a session. Of course there's also the increased chance of getting something while under the influence that you'll regret later (which, besides being common sense, has been studied scientifically), although in Bryce's case that's not an issue. Finally, inking a drunk person is against Minnesota law. Disch, whose author photos sometimes prominently featured his tattoos (including a large chest piece), was probably aware of all of the above; this remark is just the first of many clues that Wolf's shop is not a wise choice for your tattoo work.

the Weekly World News for April 7, 1992

While Disch might not have expected that readers would one day be able to easily access a huge archive of that publication, this is such a specific reference that it certainly invites them to look it up—and anyone who did so would find no such cover, nor anything about a Satanic eruption in that issue.

However, it was certainly a type of thing they did. Other Weekly World News covers about huge Satan faces appearing over various locations, both before and after The Priest, include May 25, 1993 (the Branch Davidians fire); Feb. 1, 1994 (West Texas); Oct. 18, 1994 (Port-au-Prince); Jan. 4, 2000 (US Capitol); May 30, 2000 (oil well in Mexico); April 3, 2001 (miscellaneous disasters)... not including any other Satan stories that may have appeared inside. The artwork for these covers was never quite as vivid as what Disch describes; it was usually more "smoky snarling monster face" than a cleary identifiable Satan caricature.

Knightriders, which is not because of the movie

A 1991 film by George Romero, about biker gangs in Pittsburgh.

Chapter 4

the cavalry in their armor and the routiers in their rags

Routiers were mercenaries who served in many medieval conflicts in France. While they would not have been as well equipped as the cavalry, Silvanus is probably exaggerating their dishevelment; it would have been in the Church's interest to describe them as wild and unprofessional, since the official story was that the routiers, not the Crusader army, had initiated the horrific sack of Béziers.

his famulus ... who had acted today as thurifer

A thurifer is anyone who prepares and carries the incense burner for a Catholic service. Famulus is not a specific religious role, but refers generally to a personal assistant or secretary.

Chapter 6

Psychology texts? That's just another kind of bullshit

Boscage and Receptivism are parodies of several things, but chiefly of L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology. Two of the core beliefs in Scientology are that all mainstream psychological and psychiatric practices are evil, and that mental illness is a myth.

A Prolegomenon to Receptivist Science

Prolegomenon means a critical essay that is presented as a prologue to the book it's about, so calling an entire book by that name suggests that Boscage is an awkward and pretentious writer; at the same time, it works as a parodic reference to Philip K. Dick's Exegesis (since "exegesis" also refers to a critical interpretation). But it's also appropriate in the sense that this book, like Hubbard's Dianetics, was a preliminary effort before the author worked out a full religious system. Dianetics introduced some of Hubbard's pseudoscience ideas that were later incorporated into Scientology, and from the fairly brief summaries we get of Boscage's work, it seems like the Prolegomenon introduced his UFO mythology but did not get into the later details about "transmentation."

Disch wrote at length about Hubbard in his nonfiction book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. This wide-ranging and controversial critical work focused on his belief that, in spite of science fiction's philosophical aspirations and real literary potential, the SF tradition is also inseparable from tall tales, immaturity, and sensationalism: "America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend to believe." In his overview of Scientology, Disch argued that Hubbard's background as a science fiction writer was relevant not so much because he had any great skill in that regard, but because he understood how to adapt the cult-like aspects of science fiction fandom, and the pseudoscience themes of other SF writers, to his purposes.

regressed back to his identity as Gaius Lucius ... talked in Latin

This is reminiscent of several claims made by Philip K. Dick: that he had recovered memories of another life as a first-century Christian in Rome, and that he had temporarily been able to speak New Testament Greek (while in a trance state) and Latin (while on LSD) without having studied either language.

Chapter 8

blocked all my teenage memories of abduction

The UFO aspect of Receptivism is not really elaborated on, since the "transmentation" idea is more important to the plot, but it serves to bring in another target of Disch's satire: Whitley Strieber. Originally a horror writer (e.g. The Hunger, which I liked a little bit of), Strieber is now better known for the bestselling UFO abduction "memoir" Communion and its sequel Transformation. Strieber's books repeated many details from the earlier story of Barney and Betty Hill, but were more influential in some ways: for instance, the "anal probing" theme did not really capture the public imagination until Communion, and the most popular version of the common "grey" alien design is now the one from the book cover.

Disch covered Strieber in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of more briefly than Hubbard but no less harshly, concluding that there was evidence of a deliberate strategy of adapting previous fictional works, making Strieber a con artist rather than sincerely in distress. A specific characteristic of Strieber, as opposed to Hubbard, that will become relevant in The Priest is that he repeatedly retconned previous false statements by claiming they were false memories created as part of the alien conspiracy (even when they had no apparent connection to aliens).

Prior to writing The Dreams, Disch reviewed Communion as a book critic for The Nation—a long, savagely comedic dissection that starts by describing some of the unacknowledged likely sources of Strieber's ideas, summarizes some angry phone calls he received from Strieber, and then turns into an elaborate parody in which Disch improvises his own abduction story.

Chapter 9

he's a lot like Philip K. Dick

With the previous references to Hubbard and Strieber, Disch left it to the reader to make the connections; he did the same with the earlier Philip K. Dick references, but here he just openly drops Dick's name. Dick was the only one of the three that Disch had a personal connection with, of sorts: they met only briefly, but after Dick tried and failed to convince Disch of his alleged religious experiences, he integrated Disch into his paranoid belief system and accused Disch (in letters to the FBI) of being part of an elaborate Nazi conspiracy. Like Hubbard, Dick wrote a voluminous explanation of his mystical ideas, but his Exegesis (which Disch described as an act of hypergraphia) was published only posthumously, and was too long and disorganized to appeal to a wide audience.

Disch admired much of Dick's writing, including some of the later works that increasingly focused on those mystical experiences. But, as expressed in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, he firmly believed that none of the material Dick was presenting as nonfiction was genuine—except in terms of having genuinely experienced some hallucinations—and that Dick was on some level consciously lying, playing with ideas as a storyteller without admitting it. Still, unlike Hubbard, who persisted in his con and gained power from turning it into an actual cult, Dick was ultimately content to be seen mainly as a writer:

With a little more help from his friends and a little less intellectual integrity, Philip K. Dick might have been the L. Ron Hubbard of the 1980s. It is greatly to his credit that he finally declined to wrap himself in the saffron robes of guru-dom, but it was a near thing.

Of course, like many of Disch's strongly-expressed critical opinions in The Dreams, this is speculative and contentious—and the relatively sympathetic side of his opinions on Dick there is hard to reconcile with the vitriolic parody in his final novel The Word of God.

Anyway, in this scene, Peter's description of Boscage is similar to the mix of sympathy and cynicism toward Dick in The Dreams: "He certainly was a bullshit artist whose bull got out of control, but I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt as to his being sincere." Later material about Boscage will both support and complicate that judgment.

Other reading

• University of Minnesota Press page for their edition (Internet Archive link, archived October 27, 2020)
• Review and discussion by Ron Hogan on Reactor
• Crowley, John (April 1995). "The gothic of Thomas M. Disch". Yale Review, 83(2). Reprinted in SF Commentary, February 2003.
• Disch, Thomas M. (1989). "The Cardinal Detoxes: A Play in One Act". The Hudson Review, Spring, 1993, 46(1). This reproduces the full script, with an afterword written by Disch in 1993.