A Catholic Soap Opera:Sensationally Erotic and Agapic, Theodramatic, Communally Liberational, Pnuematically Sacramental, and Romantically Mystical

This melodrama looks into the lives of Catholics in a modest but enlivened suburban parish. Blessed with a series of gifted, holy pastors and a variety of renewal movements, these folks are passionate about their faith: everyone seems to be going to bible study groups, prayer meetings, adoration, confession, retreats and pilgrimages. But all of this piety does nothing to dampen the fires of eros, which are burning contagiously, in all their enflamed, random, spontaneous, chaotic polyformity. Everywhere there is the agony and ecstacy of sexual passion: the young priest in love with the older divorcee he is counseling; the happily married tennis coach infatuated with his star player; the bright, homosexual adolescent in love with his literature teacher; the promiscuous college student; the professor-internet-porn-addict; the two couples, stalwart parishioners and friends of many years, who discover that they have mutually fallen out of love with their own and in love with each others' spouses; the super-competent school principal who is frigid with fear of tenderness; the parish council president whose homophobia, misogyny and ideological rancor veils his own masculine insecurity and desperation for paternal tenderness. The list goes on. But the key protagonist in all of this is Father Joseph Luigi Karol. Approaching retirement age, Father Joseph radiates an extraordinary holiness: gentle, confident, humorous, intelligent, and madly joyous. With doctorates in clinical psychology and theology (expert in the nuptial mysticism of John of the Cross), he had left the academy many years ago to minister to the broken hearts, minds and souls of the penitentiary and the insane asylum. (Sidebar: casting for the role of Father Joseph is the key to the entire production. This role demands a seasoned, older actor: think vintage Alec Guiness, Paul Newman, or an older and wiser Jeremy Irons, a Daniel Day Lewis, an Anthony Hopkins or a sanctified Al Pacino.) He himself is under a cloud of shame as he had been "outed" by the media as the longtime confessor of a notorious pedophile priest. Not known to the public is the degree to which, operating under the seal of the sacrament, he had lessened the damage inflicted, even finding discrete ways to protect and heal the victims. Additionally, the maverick priest is under the disapproving gaze of the chancery where anxious, suspicious bureaucrats are unnerved by the joyously free-spirited holy man. But most important for the drama: Father Joseph has an extraordinary gift: an inerrant sense for the ennobling, sacrosanct seed that is the heart of every human desire and longing. Intuitively and effortlessly, Father Joseph cherishes, protects and guides each specific human love in all its fragility, vulnerability, delicacy and disguised nobility. And so, regardless of the immorality, illegality, or even perversity of the erotic longing, Father Joseph does not condemn, scold, prohibit or dictate. Quite the opposite, he presses the desire deeper: he pushes it forward, recklessly, unveiling its profundity. He enables the Lover to move fearlessly towards the Beloved, allowing that desire to open to its truest identity as the longing for God.