Father Joe

Description

A key comic writer of the past three decades has created his most heartfelt and hard-hitting book. Father Joe is Tony Hendra’s inspiring true story of finding faith| friendship| and family through the decades-long influence of a surpassingly wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow.

Like everything human| it started with sex. In 1955| fourteen-year-old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England| where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and Graham Greene bestsellers| Tony was whisked off by the woman’s husband to see a priest and be saved.
Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests he’d known at Catholic school| where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead| he met Father Joe| a gentle| stammering| ungainly Benedictine who never used the words “wrong” or “guilt|” who believed that God was in everyone and that “the only sin was selfishness.” During the next forty years| as his life and career drastically ebbed and flowed| Tony discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life–the relationship that| in the most serious sense| saved it.

A startling departure for this acclaimed satirist| Father Joe is a sincere account of how Tony Hendra learned to love. It’s the story of a whole generation looking for a way back from mockery and irony| looking for its own Father Joe| and a testament to one of the most charismatic mentors in modern literature.