Joshua’s Flock : Novels Help Father Joseph Girzone Reach the Faithful--and Nonbelievers

Standing at the lectern at St. Timothy Roman Catholic Church, Father Joseph Girzone was telling the story of how Jesus performed the miracle of turning water into wine to save the wedding party at Cana the embarrassment of running out only three days into the eight-day marriage feast.

“It makes you think,” the soft-spoken priest said, peering owlishly at his mostly teen-age audience through large-framed glasses. “There were probably an awful lot of people at that party who were more than three sheets to the wind.

“I would have thought twice about doing something . . . and here the Son of God gives them another 150 gallons of wine.”

It is Girzone’s view of Jesus--open and caring and having an “uncanny ability to accept human nature as God fashioned it”--that has made the retired parish priest from Altamont, N.Y., a publishing phenomenon. He is so much in demand as a speaker that he jokes, “I now live on USAir.”

Girzone, 60, the author of “Joshua” and “Joshua and the Children,” two best-selling religious novels that place Joshua (Jesus in Hebrew) on the contemporary scene, can barely keep up with the nearly 200 lecture requests a year.

Girzone, who retired from the active ministry in 1981 for health reasons, is an unlikely literary success story.

Girzone wrote and self-published “Joshua,” the story of a mysterious woodcarver who shows up in an eastern U.S. village and captivates the townspeople with his simple and loving ways, in 1983.

By the time Girzone had sold the paperback rights to the Gospel-oriented novel in 1987, he had already sold 40,000 hardcover copies, largely by word of mouth. Since then, “Joshua” has sold 750,000 paperback copies, and the novel has been translated into five languages. And, according to his publisher, it is still selling an impressive 20,000 to 40,000 copies a month.

“Joshua and the Children,” a sequel that places Joshua in a fictional country similar to Northern Ireland where people are warring in the name of religion, was published by Macmillan in 1989. The sequel, which addresses the question of forgiveness, spent 11 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, landed on the Publishers Weekly list of the top 25 hardcover fiction best-sellers of 1989 and has been optioned for a feature film.

Now, Girzone has combined a cross-country publicity tour with his lecture schedule to promote “The Shepherd” (Macmillan; $15.95), the latest installment in his Joshua series.

“The Shepherd” is the story of a newly ordained bishop who has always adhered strictly to church rules. But after praying for guidance the night of his ordination, he has nightmares about the damage his rigidity has caused in parishioners’ lives.

In this one, Joshua plays a supporting role, serving as the bishop’s mentor as he makes decisions to do things the way he thinks Christ would do them.

Among the contemporary issues “The Shepherd” addresses are:

* The shortage of priests: “We will in a short time be faced with a priestless church, at a time when people need good priests more than ever.” The fact that a qualified person is married, the book contends, should not be a barrier to the priesthood.

* Celibacy: “It is a clear violation of a basic human right. Even Jesus made celibacy optional: ‘Let him who can take it, take it.’ He himself picked married men as his first priests.”

* Confession: “When people stop accepting forgiveness in traditional form, it expresses a clear message: That form has lost meaning for them. The whole Christian world can’t be wrong. Find another way.”

* Homelessness: “If people starve, it is because others don’t care. Do you think it will go well on Judgment Day with those who have built their casinos and their castles and amassed their riches by shutting their hearts against the hurting masses of humanity?”

“The Shepherd,” Girzone acknowledges, is his hardest-hitting novel yet.

“It addresses practically all the issues we’re not supposed to talk about,” he said in an interview before his talk. “It’s sort of a blueprint for the radical reconstruction of the church.”

It is radical, he added, “but not in the bad sense of the word: There’s nothing in it that is against the Catholic doctrine, but it hits very, very hard at archaic laws and an archaic way of doing things in the church.”

Girzone, however, does not consider himself a radical.

“I’m very rational,” he said. “If anything, I tend to be more conservative. But in working with people, I’ve always tried to be very realistic, and to have laws that are archaic and no longer work and not to reconsider those laws to me seems to be totally irrational.”

Of the small number of successful priest-authors, Father Andrew Greeley is probably the best known. (The best-selling Greeley writes far more secular, some say steamy, novels.) Among writers of contemporary religious fiction, industry sources say, Girzone is one of the most popular.

“I think Father Girzone’s deceptively simple novels have succeeded for the same reason their source material has succeeded,” said Bill Rosen, Macmillan publisher and Girzone’s current editor. “All Father Girzone is really saying is pretty much what Jesus said and what people said about Jesus. And that seems to have an awful lot of power.”

And it’s not just Catholics who are reading Girzone’s simply written tales of a compassionate modern Christ. The books have had extraordinary interdenominational appeal.

Girzone has been invited to speak to groups of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians and even Jews who have read his books. “Usually,” he notes, “they develop Joshua clubs--Friends of Joshua they call themselves.”

Girzone also has been told that a Hindu swami in New York, believing “Joshua” to be divinely inspired, urged his disciples to follow Joshua’s teachings. And psychiatrists, observing the calming effect “Joshua’ has on many readers, have given the book to troubled patients, he said.

Girzone’s fan mail attests to the profound effect “Joshua” has on readers, many of whom say they were so deeply touched by the book that they now live their lives more simply.

A Texas millionaire who was suicidal, for example, credited “Joshua” with having given him a reason to live: He moved to Washington, D.C. to help build homes for the homeless.

“I’m sort of flabbergasted by the way people respond to it,” Girzone said. “I think the underlying thing is what some Southern Baptists once told me--that the reason they loved the book so much is because I give them a Jesus that makes sense, a Jesus they can fall in love with.”

Even non-believers have been affected.

“I get letters from people saying, ‘I really don’t believe in God, but I read ‘Joshua,’ and it gave me such a tremendous sense of peace that it was the most powerful argument for faith that I’ve experienced.”’ Girzone said.

Such testimonials, he said, “make me feel my retirement, my ill health, was worthwhile.”

Girzone, who was born in Albany, N.Y., and ordained in 1955, spent his early years working with Bronx street gangs, counseling Pennsylvania coal miners and teaching high school before being assigned as pastor of several parishes in the Albany diocese in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Then the stress began to mount.

At one large parish, Girzone was in charge of organizing religious education for some 2,000 children. Also during that time, he was made head of a local Human Rights Commission, and when there were riots in the jail and public school system he was put in charge of both investigations.

When he completed that assignment, he was transferred to another parish “where they had a big crisis going on, and then my last parish was a place where the people were extremely depressed and disillusioned with the church and I had to try to get them all back in shape.”

“All that pressure,” Girzone said, “was just devastating.”

In 1981, Girzone discovered that he had a high cholesterol count, high blood pressure and a dangerously elevated red blood cell count, a deadly combination resulting from stress.

His doctor warned him that if he continued working at the parish, he could be dead of a stroke within a year.

The more relaxed lifestyle of a writer seemed the perfect antidote. Girzone already had written one book, “Kara, the Lonely Falcon,” an allegory on human beings’ search for peace, which was published in 1979 by a subsidy press.

Girzone worked out an agreement with his diocese for an early retirement in which he would support himself. Then he moved into a sparsely furnished house provided at low rent by a friend and began writing.

During the first two years of his retirement, Girzone wrote two religious books--”Gloria: A Diary,” about a popular teen-ager who gets cancer, and “Who Will Teach Me?” a religious handbook for parents. Both were published by his own small publishing house, Richelieu Court, named after the 17th-Century cardinal who used the press to shape public opinion.

His retirement also gave him time to do something he had wanted to do for years: reread the Gospels.

“I was able to see things that I didn’t see before.” A whole new Jesus jumped off the pages, he said.

He used the Gospels as the basis for his story of Christ in modern setting, and coupled that with the idea that people have not changed much since Christ’s time. Girzone “just let the book take its course,” he said. “It’s almost as though God wanted this image of Himself out.”

Girzone’s straightforward, unadorned prose has been criticized as “simple and childlike.” Girzone says he has taken his “lumps” for that but that the style is intentional.

“I never looked upon myself as a writer,” he said. “I just had a lot of ideas I wanted to get out to people. So I tried to write as simply as I possibly could because I wanted everybody, even little children and old people losing their powers, to be able to read the books and get something out of them. And so simple, ordinary people love Joshua.”

Girzone’s substantial income from his books has allowed him to buy a 21-room mountaintop house outside Altamont, where he occasionally holds informal retreats. He also has bought land on a mountaintop in Northern California where he plans to build his first Joshua House, a retreat for people of all denominations.

Although he still must take blood-pressure medication, and although his hectic lecture schedule prevents him from spending much time at home relaxing, he has no intention of slacking off.

Says Girzone: “I reach more people and have done more priestly work in the past eight or nine years than I’ve ever done in my whole life.”