Synopsis "Apparition"
"Fr. Jason Clay slumped exhausted into the front pew beneath the high dark arches of St. Sebastian Church, an old blue collar parish in north-east Jersey. He'd been awake most of the night, worried about the sensational events which had of late so unsettled his newly assigned parish. And he was bothered by a galling pain in his left side just below his ribs, marked by an eye-shaped pink welt two inches long and resembling a fresh scar." So the story begins. It was Ash Wednesday in the year 2000 - Fr. Clay's fifty-eighth birthday. The parish unrest had begun a few months earlier when parishioner Anna Vidici, an elderly convert from Judaism and a refugee from Nazi Germany, told her pastor that the church's statue of the Blessed Virgin had "come to life" and spoken urgently to her about the need for people to repent and pray more. The pastor dismissed her story as the delusion of a pietistic old woman. Then, just before he retired and was replaced by Fr. Clay, the statue of Mary began to shed tears. From there the action accelerates through a series of extraordinary events and mysterious phenomena. Woven into the main story line are reflections by Fr. Clay upon his post-War and pre-Vatican youth striving to find himself in God's mercy, and in time as a priest. Within ten years of his ordination, however, Fr. Clay had begun to succumb to the "liberated" spirit of the seventies and to lapse in his priesthood. It was then that the great trial of his life came in the allures of the young but cunning, lovely Evelyn. Twenty-five years later, she has returned, beautiful as ever, to insinuate herself again into his life - now for more enigmatic purposes. Fr. Clay's ordeal is acutely exacerbated by the cynically pragmatic Bishop Mondale, who stubbornly disbelieves that God's Mother is miraculously appearing and who scoffs at the possibility that the wound in Fr. Clay's side is a stigma. Fr. Clay is, however, heartened and guided through his tribulation by the wise and wry Abbot Justin Hart, his aged spiritual father, who believes in Fr. Clay - in the apparition of Mary and in his afflicted friend's holy stigma. Encircling Fr. Clay is a small band of devoted friends, each of whom the priest has touched in spirit: canny visionary and Holocaust fugitive Anna; dutiful church sacristan José, an exile from Castro's Cuba; spirited Gloria, José's young widowed daughter and mother of four; pious John, enduring Parkinson's disease and watching with faith; gifted and sensitive Gabriel, the parish music director fighting a tortured battle with same-sex attraction. Each of their stories is told in testament to the saving grace of Christ, and to the generous heart of their pastor. Finally, the evil forces Fr. Clay confronts converge, starkly, in the malignly driven and grotesquely possessed Emil, from whom Fr. Clay attempts to exorcise a demon - and who comes furiously against the besieged priest as the story reaches its climax.
