Friar Beniamino reaches his breaking point. His priestly vocation no longer makes sense to him—not in the face of endless quarrels among parish staff, not after his own clumsy and unsuccessful attempts to call people back to the heart of the Gospel message.
Even the Bishop summons him. The bishop seems deaf to his very human career ambitions. One day, Beniamino leaves a note, his phone, and his car keys on the desk, throwing his parishioners into chaos. The surprises keep coming—each one making us smile at the plainness of our own weakness.
Jean Mercier—a religion correspondent for the weekly magazine La Vie, and a first-time novelist whose debut became a publishing phenomenon in France—has crafted a genuinely enjoyable story. Set in a distinctly French world, yet speaking to the universal Catholic experience, it explores deeply personal spiritual and human themes with remarkable simplicity and unexpected depth.
What makes the novel even more striking and moving is a passage from Jean Vanier—a man so often able to name and understand the wounds of every human heart—that appears near the heart of this brief book: "You do not really know what it means to love until you have had to love difficult people, even very difficult ones, perhaps even impossible ones to love."
Cristina Tersigni, 2017