Catholic Conspiracies II: Revenge of the Vatican Ninjas.

Last week, I mentioned that the vast, massive conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church amuse me. I discussed some specific issues and theories, but I find them all funny, almost no matter the details. Why?

Dear God in Heaven, where do I start?



The theories are so ludicrous, I hardly know where to begin.



SECRET SOCIETIES



One running theme of most of the conspiracy theories is that there is a “conspiracy of silence” running around within the Vatican, the hierarchy, an order, pick one or all. This pops up in almost any fiction where a Catholic priest appears.



Given the news of the last decade, anyone should see an immediate problem. Not only does the Church of Rome write everything down, they never throw anything out. This is a bureaucracy that has held onto the divorce petition from Henry VIII of England, written in the early 16th century.  We've held onto it for nearly five hundred years, and we haven't thrown it out yet.



If there were a conspiracy in the church, there will likely be paperwork to document it, and they'd hold onto it with their dying breath. Bad habit for a conspiracy.



But, the way I look at it, the Vatican is essentially the world's biggest marble office building, complete with Dilberts and the occasional pointy-haired boss … or pointy-hatted boss.



In the current day and age, any bureaucracy can keep a secret for a few years. But two thousand? Really?



My major problem with that idea isn't so much a matter of my religious background (Catholic), my educational background (history and Philosophy), or anything of the sort. Bureaucracies tend to leak like a sieve. Even the army and law enforcement.



The FBI spawned Deepthroat—a loser who got passed over for promotion.



The Pentagon—Pentagon papers, anyone?



Most intelligence agencies have politicians in the mix somewhere, so that'll screw over practically anyone …



You can have whistle blowers in practically any organization...



The Catholic Church is also a bureaucracy. One disgruntled employee is all you need. End of secret.



Last week, I mentioned that one organization in the Church people like to pick on is the Society of Jesus, a.k.a., the Jesuits.



The Jesuits started as a missionary order, and tended to go out to new worlds, seek out new civilizations, boldly go where no man had gone before … and sometimes get eaten by the locals. Now a teaching order, they've spawned more stupidity than orthodoxy in the Church. If you look up Liberation Theology, Jesuits had a hand in spawning that steaming pile of theological gruel--a gruel that has been banned by every Pope since its inception.



The other order that conspiracy theorists like to shoot at is the Opus Dei … Where do I start? According to reporter John A. Allen, all you need to do to get the Opus Dei to open up is buy them a few rounds. Then the trouble becomes trying to shut them up.



And the biggest problem with using them in a conspiracy: Opus Dei is primarily a lay organization. Of it's nearly 90,000 members, only 2% are priests. I'm sorry, a Catholic organization of civilians are going to be privy to ancient secrets and conspiracies? There is a disconnect here.



THE MUSCLE



Also, I have another problem, one that has great big flashing red lights. All of these big secrets, threats to the Catholic Church, maybe even all of Christendom, are being eliminated. Lives are snuffed out, voices silenced.



Depending on who you ask, Catholics killed President Lincoln and JFK, and we're pulling the strings behind President Obama.



With the tinfoil helmet brigade, the Vatican is so scary, covers up so much, silences so many, controls so much of the planet even in THIS day and age.  Then we have to have muscle men.  We must have kneebreakers  This must mean that the Pope has his own personal assassination squad. People to kill at the nod of his pointy hat … wait.



Matt's Vatican Ninja rendering

Does this mean … that the Vatican has Ninjas?



Hmm, Vatican Ninjas … I wondered why all of those ancient Soviet leaders dropped dead after John Paul II was shot.

I can see it now. Dark, shadowy figures clad in the blue and gold colors of the Swiss Guard. Each of them either Swiss with Special Forces background, or former soldiers who join the priesthood. Once they join the shadowy ranks of the Papal hitmen, they are taught to kill up close with a rosary-garrote. When you turn your back, they smack you over the head with a halberd.  For longer distances, a boomerang shaped like a cross comes out of the darkness and takes down armed guards (It worked in the video game Castlevania).

 

And maybe, just maybe, they can have Throwing Stars of David for every time they worked with the Mossad.

Vatican Ninjas would be awesome!

I want my Vatican Ninjas!

Sigh … I guess I'll have to write my own.

How would I do it?  Simple: the Catholic Church has a screening process to weed out psychos, pederasts, etc.  That's why the majority of bad priests were ordained before the new screening process was installed (I say "new screening process", but it came out in the early 90s).  If I wanted to create actual Vatican Ninjas, I would forward all of the "psycho" pile to a special division, where they can weed out the "special" ones, ones that can be sent to training to Kill For the Lord!  Muahahahaha! 

Problem: who wants a psycho as a hirling?  Seriously?  While the priesthood MUST, statistically, get some nutjobs applying to their ranks, who'd want to bring in a crazy who's impossible to control?  I mean, that's as out there as having an assassin who is a psychotic albino monk with a bad limp ....



Oh, wait, nevermind.

The biggest problem: back to the pointy-hatted Dilbert boss, and the Vatican bureaucracy.  If there were Vatican Ninjas, there would be enough memoirs from them by now to fill a library.

End of the day, the vast conspiracies around and about the Vatican are laughable. In America, our Bishops don't have the charisma to lead a pack of vampires to a blood bank.  Trying to get people to actually teach the faith correctly seems to be impossible (my Catholic schools were nothing to write home about). We can hardly get Cardinals to line up in a row, or organize halfway decent public relations, yet the Vatican is supposed to be leading the charge to take over the world.

Right now, I would sooner believe in a "conspiracy" once jokingly suggested to me by R. Hendershot: that Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer are in a plot to overhype their books to the entire universe.

However, if there is someone out there in charge of accounting for this vast, Roman Catholic conspiracy, I want a paycheck. Thank you.

 

And this is my rendering of a Vatican Ninja.

This is why I'm grateful to Matt.

And what am I going to be doing tonight?

Why, what I do every night …

TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!!



On paper.

With my Vatican Ninjas.

Muahaha.

Bonus blog. Pimping for our friends Tuesday: Masks

Constant readers of this blog will have noticed several posts that link back to the Masks blog. 



News items and essays she dealt with have inspired a few blog entries, and even a few stories .... my story "God Hates ... Superman?" is actually stolen from her original blog title of the same name. 



Masks has appeared all over the blog, including: “So, you want to be a writer?” and Disasters to Marvel At: A Comic Discussion, and others.



Madam Hendershot inspired Writer's Rules For Villains; and The Masks Blog beat up on Fred Phelps before this blog did.



Masks also made a brief appearance in one of the first stories on this page, Boys of the Old Brigade.



Now, what the hell is Masks?



Masks is a novel series written by Rebekah Hendershot, who has been a friend of this blog and its supporting pages since day one.  Seriously, she provided the first comment on the entire blog.



Masks is, essentially, what would happen if you had someone who wanted to seriously write an original novel about superheroes.  She's it.  Unlike some novels, like Soon, I Will Be Invincible, or other novelists who spend more time making fun of the genre than actually enjoying it, Rebekah is having fun with it.  Imagine if Jim Butcher wanted to write an original comic book, you get Masks. 



Masks also tries to make superheroes "real"-- rule one, NO SPANDEX.  



It's a book written for those people who want something more edifying than Twilight, and without a retarded fanbase... Rebekah is far too polite to beat up on Twitards. Obviously, I don't have that problem.



Her premise:  Something killed off the superheroes of Los Angeles.  And it's still there.  Cue Dracula theme. 



Now, the only thing standing between the civilians of LA and supervillains is .... a sixteen-year-old girl with a snark function permanently set to "kill."  When she sees a "real" hero from out of town try to assassinate a second-rate villain right in front of her, she rides to the rescue -- and is now a target.  She has allies ... after a fashion.  She's aided by a screwed up Tim Drake meets Winter Soldier, she has a demon coyote who's stalking her, and a cowboy grim reaper seems to have an interest in her as well.



And that's the first sixty pages.



There's a love story in there as well, but I can only cover so much.



Over the last year or so, she has supported gamers, comic books, and Young Adult fiction that men can read (YA fiction that isn't Twilight.)



When you check out her blog ... and what are you still doing here reading mine? .... you might notice some common themes between her blog and this one.  A lot of writers are similiarly warped. We're weird that way. 



Like all good comic books, she's on the forefront of writing.  She has managed to take all the right things and blend them together, throwing in science fiction and magic in a way that I haven't seen since David Weber's "Hell's Gate" series, or even his recent novel "Out of the Dark."  And Lord knows that any fantasy elements in Masks is about ten times better than any fantasy used in Star Wars recently.



One day, Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden will come up against a mad scientist, and it'll look a lot a Masks novel.  Or, Butcher, or even Laurell K. Hamilton, will try to write something that is a solid mystery, and it may be as good as the Agatha Christie-like Zephyr Street.



All in all, it's a fun ride.  If you have the time, you might want to get on. And buckle up.

Catholic Conspiracies: The Illuminati Polka and the attack of the Vatican Ninjas.

 

I have decided to make this a comedy posting. Why?



Recently, I went looking for a book on one end of the crazy spectrum. The book had been (loosely) based on an episode during World War II, and it was supposed to “prove” that Pope Pius XII could not qualify as “Hitler's Pope.” Instead, this conspiracy theory had Pope Pius XII using the Jesuits to assassinate Adolf Hitler in World War II.



It was called Vatican Assassins.



On the one hand, it really covered an actual incident during the war: where German Generals who wanted to kill Hitler had expressed a desire to use Pius XII as an intermediary. The Generals thought that Pius XII could be a neutral party when talking to the British, laying the groundwork for a truce after they had assassinated Hitler. Obviously, the plan didn't work, since Hitler killed himself years later.

Vatican Ninja, by Matt

On the other hand ... Vatican Ninjas?  Are we serious?

Okay, Vatican Ninjas would be cool, but that's next week....

Or I can show a very well done photo by Matthew Funtime, for extra gratuitous coolness....

As for Vatican Assassins, I had originally stumbled across this work six years ago, when I first researched the entire matter of “Hitler's Pope” for a graduate paper. This was a few months before I even started writing A Pius Man. Perhaps an entire year before the book.

Recently, I wanted a laugh, and I wanted to see if anything had happened with this particular nutjob and his Vatican Ninjas.



So, I put Vatican Assassins into an Amazon search, and then Google …



Oh my dear God, the results I got…



Eric Jon Phelps: Vatican Assassins: Wounded in the House of my Friends. This, um, interesting work exposes THE TRUTH, about how the Jesuits killed President Lincoln on the orders of the Pope. They also assassinated John F. Kennedy. (paging Oliver Stone, someone is stealing your plot).  It includes a "History Of The Jesuit Order" … I don't even know where to start on this one.



Vaticanassassins.org: which discusses “Obama's White Papal Masters.” Apparently Rome has taken over the White House; I didn't know that we supported the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.



Thewatcherfiles.com: “Vatican Assassins Ordered Attack on WTC World Trade Towers.” Again, the head of the Jesuits is to blame here. The dark, mysterious figure of “The Black Pope,” who everyone knows about (the colors of the Jesuits are black … and black … he lives in Rome, hence “Black Pope”). Proclaimed as welcoming “the New World Order,” a catchphrase of nutjobs for, at a guess, longer than I've been alive.



Also in books, I got: The Entity: Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage.  The "Entity" is supposed to be the Vatican spy service.  The description?

"The Entity has been involved in the killings of monarchs, poisonings of diplomats, financing of South American dictators, protection of war criminals, laundering of Mafia money, manipulation of financial markets, provocation of bank failures, and financing of arms sales to combatants even as their wars were condemned, all in the name of God. The contradiction between God’s justice and Earth’s justice, Christian beliefs and Christian power all fall before the motto of the Entity: With the Cross and the Sword."

Nod very slowly, and back away.  Someone here is a little crazy.

Another book: The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia.  Obviously, written by someone who saw Godfather III



WTF?



And, a classic: a 1983 “Secret History of the Jesuits.”   In this book, we are apparently not only responsible for one, but two, count 'em, two world wars.

I'm going to give you one guess, and only one guess: what is the ONLY offensive thing I have found in all of these crackpot conspiracy theories, strange, delusional fantasies, and utter comedy routine?  If you have guessed that it is the image on the right, you guessed correctly

So, at the end of the day, instead of finding a ludicrous conspiracy theory based (very) loosely on an actual event (and that hit every branch of the crazy tree on the way down), I found a whole bunch of borderline schizophrenic theories, brought to you by the tinfoil hat brigade.

Now, it might be me.  It might be I'm strange.  For the most part, I find these people funny. Then again, the theories are so ludicrous, I hardly know where to begin.



At random, shall we start with the Jesuits assassinating President Lincoln? I don't know why the Catholic Church would want to kill him, but before even reading the book or the rest of the book's description, I'm already laughing. Why? Because President Lincoln requested that the Vatican create American Cardinals, moving the United States out of missionary status. Lincoln wanted the Catholic Church in town as an actual establishment. Considering that this was within the decade before Thomas Nast's anti-Catholic propaganda were popular, I can only think this is the closest a non-Catholic like Lincoln could get to being supportive of Rome.



Or, we could look at President Barack H. Obama's "White Papal Masters"..... how anyone can say it with a straight face is beyond me.  As a Democrat, last time I checked, Obama supports abortion in America. He supported the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Funny, I didn't know that Rome supported either of the above.



So, let me get this straight: the Vatican kills people who support us (Lincoln) and controls people with principles that are the opposite of what it publicly postulates …



And, of course, the Vatican started World War II .... a war that tore apart and butchered six million Polish citizens, half of whom were Catholic.  Because, after all, it's an institution that's been around for soooooo long, it can afford to lose three million people like that.



I'd continue, but I'm too busy laughing.  The authors of these various works might have had less than savory motives, or they might even believe this drivel.  If they believe it, they have my condolences, and my suggestion that they see a good shrink. These are almost as stupid as Godfather III, where the theory was that Pope John Paul I, who died within a month of being elected Pontiff, had been assassinated by the people involved in ripping off the Vatican Bank. (Let's completely ignore that Albino Luciani, before becoming John Paul I, had a crappy medical history; if anyone knew what sort of shape he had been in, he would never have been elected. But you can't talk some people out of a good conspiracy.)



And you thought people had a lot of conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.



This is so bad it's laughable. Not to mention that the Jesuits, the root of all of the conspiracy theories, have basically been running amok with “Liberation Theology”-- a concept that had been condemned by the Pope. So, the Jesuits, “the spooooooooky Vatican assassins,” have been at odds with the Popes for at least thirty years. Maybe forty.  And, somehow, the Popes of that time period were not, and have not, been assassinated. Hmm, funny that.



As my friend Jason noted, when I first told him of this blog idea, “[T]he only [C]atholic conspiracy I can buy is that 'Yes, we want Notre Dame to win in the NCAA'. But that goes without saying.”



UPDATE: Part 2: Revenge of the Vatican Ninjas.

Writer's Rules For Villains

Rules for Antagonists, Villains, etc.





A long while ago, the friend of mine who writes Masks came up with a contest for Rules for Superheroes. It was cute, and genre-specific.



But I always like a smart enemy to go with my protagonists. Preferably, someone who thinks ahead.  So, I have Rules for Antagonists.  Be they killers in murder mysteries, archvillains in comic books, or your basic takeover the world types in science fiction and fantasy, this should be their playbook.





Rule #1: NEVER. TOUCH. THE GIRLFRIEND.  It only pisses them off.



Drazen's Corollary: While abducting the significant other / close relation of your archrival in order to lure him/her into your sinister trap, it will only serve to piss them off.  Your normally docile hero, who tends towards nonlethal force, will seriously consider thrashing you to within an inch of your life, and--if no sidekicks are there to enforce restraint--might go three inches beyond that.



Parker's Corollary on Drazen: If you MUST lure them anywhere, use the standard busload of children chosen at random--it will typically serve to get the required effect, especially with a note to the local media sources and/or police agencies.  Should you do this in a city with a high protagonist population (eg: Marvel's New York), be certain to request the hero of your choice: otherwise you get all of them.





Rule #2. Don't gloat. The amount of time it takes for you to boast, and threaten, and deliver your well-practiced maniacal laughter, someone you overlooked will have unplugged your weapon / unlocked the handcuffs on the prisoners / otherwise screwed up your plans.  Gloat after you've won. (Also: See rule 7)



Fletcher's Corollary: Overlook no one. Seriously, if you're going to take over the world / kill someone / unleash a diabolical scheme, no one is unimportant. Witnesses will provide evidence. Just because it's some nobody in the background asking questions doesn't mean there's no threat—people in the background tend to observe a lot.



Goldfinger's Corollary: Never use the line, "Because you are all about to die anyway, I will tell you all about my evil plan."  This includes all variations on this theme.





Rule #3: Avoid patterns. No matter how comfortable you are with a certain places / style / or MO, repeating it on a constant loop will only serve to have the authorities find you.







Rule #4: Wear gloves during your crimes. If possible, wear a full body suit to prevent fingerprints, hairs, or skin cells from being left behind.



Grissom's Corollary For Killers: This includes keeping souvenirs.







Rule #5: Don't let ideology govern your tactics. Just because your ideology says that your enemy is inferior doesn't make them stupid.



Tarkin's Corollary. Underestimating your enemies will get you killed.



Thrawn's Corollary on Tarkin: Underestimating your allies will also get you killed.





Rule #6: Suicide bombers have never won a war, or even a battle. It only wastes experienced soldiers. Even disposable foot soldiers are not infinite. Minions do not grow on trees.



Zahn's Corollary: Unless you have a cloning unit for disposable foot-soldiers.



Von Doom's (PhD) Corollary on Zahn:  Or you build your own.





Rule #7 (or Rule 2, Expanded): If you have a chance to remove the adversary from the playing field on a permanent basis, do so. Do not lecture them, explain your scheme, or toy with them. Shoot them in the head, and move on.



Stark's Corollary: Also, do not wound them so they can still be useful to you. If they can be useful to you, they can also hurt you.



Ming's Corollary on Stark: Your enemy can be useful to you – dead. Examples are usually better that way.







Rule #8: If you cannot see the hero, worry.



Murphy's Corollary: If you cannot see your adversary, s/he is behind you.







Rule #9: No self destruct mechanisms, unless they are password protected, and require the passwords of at least three of your closest allies.  And confirmed by you. Twice.







Rule #10: Plan ahead.  You have all the time in the world to unleash your deadly plot on the world, or execute your crime.  Take appropriate precautions, and don't assume that everything will go according to plan.  If your plan is perfect, you're missing something.  Murphy is always right.



Palpatine's Corollary: If you are going to invite your enemies to come into range of your ultimate weapon, make sure that it's finished first.







Rule #11: No time travel. You don't have enough aspirin in the world to deal with the headache it will cause.



Doctor's Corollary: Unless you have a blue box.

 



 

Rule #12: Whatever psychological problems you have, make sure that you utilize them well.



Wilson's Corollary: Don't suffer from madness.  Enjoy every minute of it.







Rule #13: When your adversary is incapacitated, on the floor, at your mercy, it is not the time to (a) exercise your creativity in designing Rube Goldberg-esque death traps (b) write your monologue or (c) start gloating.  The answer is (d) shoot them in the head and move on.

What Do You Mean There's Philosophy in A Pius Man?

I'm a simple fellow. Simpleminded, at times. Which is why there are a lot of people who know me and say, “I can't really believe you have a degree in philosophy. You don't spout out gibberish about how the table isn't a table..”

Hegel never looked

this good.

I understand that. I do, really. Try to read Hegel, and you get stuff about consciousness-- which is the key turning point of his entire philosophy-- and you basically get gibberish, since his terms are undefined. (If you are a science fiction fan, look up Minbari theology on Babylon 5, Hegel is the same babble, only without the reincarnation bit). Read Descartes, who basically said that you had to look at every little thing with a highly skeptical eye, and start with what you know for absolute certainty, concluding that the only thing you can ever really know for certain is that “I exist,” the rest is negotiable. (Popularly known as “I think therefore I am.” Does not cover instances of drivers during rush hour, who obviously don't think, but are real enough to get you killed.)



I'm sorry, Mr. Descartes, I'm slow and stupid. If I get hit in the head with a rock, I'm going to think that the rock is real. And that someone threw it at me. And that I will have to hurt someone.



Which is why I am a Thomist.



At which point the audience asks, “A what now?”



Short version: you are a follower of the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. A lot of it is rather basic stuff that starts with, “Something is either A or not A. It cannot be both at the same time.” Tom is alive, or Tom is dead .....  or Tom is a zombie, which makes that neither “A” or “not A,” but B. Possible C.



Thomas Aquinas is basically Aristotle, the Catholic version. He's a little dry, and he's not colorful, but he's very straightforward and to the point. Aquinas works through some very common sense ideas, building up to metaphysical conclusions over many many volumes. It's very neat, very orderly, written by someone who reasoned his way up to his faith. He even tries to use the latest in science at the time …



Yes, Thomas Aquinas was a medieval philosopher, so his science kinda sucks at times. A lot of philosophers have come to the same conclusions while updating the science of Aquinas' day, but if I were to base my faith on the latest science, I'd change my faith every other year. (Right now, I think we're on Newton, revised by Einstein, revised by Quantum physics, should we ever fully understand that.)



However, Thomas Aquinas came up with the idea that “the universe is unlimited, but bounded.”



What the hell does that mean?



Simple: there is nothing outside the universe to limit it, but it only goes so far.



But, Thomas Aquinas was jettisoned five hundred years ago, so who cares … ?



Answer: Albert Einstein, who probably never even heard of Aquinas, came up with the same conclusions. About seven hundred years later. And, apparently, we can see the outer limit of the Big Bang, but there is nothing beyond that, so the universe is bounded … huh. Amazing what you toss away when you just ignore everything between Ancient Rome and the Enlightenment, isn't it?



At the end of the day, I think St. Thomas Aquinas should be the patron saint of Nerds, if we ever get a Pope who's been to a science fiction convention.



We have all sorts of oddballs in the rogues gallery of Catholic Saints. St. Augustine, who had a youth that makes Paris Hilton look like a nun; who later seemed to find no joy in anything but the Divine (sort of like a former smoker who has decided to ban smoking … then go after smokers …).



Then there was St. Francis of Assisi, who found joy in nature, and animals, and other people, and who was generally so happy and perky, he'd probably be a morning person, and who needs that, I ask you …?



But, like I said, this is Thomas Aquinas....



No, Charlton Heston did not play him in the movie. That was Thomas More, England, 1500s. A Man for All Seasons. Given the axe because he wouldn't put King Henry VIII before God.



No, Richard Burton didn't play him in the movie. That was Thomas Beckett, England, 1100s. Beckett.[See the sequel film, A Lion in Winter.] Killed because he wouldn't put King Henry II before God.



This is Thomaso di Aquino. Aquinas. He didn't go out and do things. You couldn't make a movie of his life if you wanted to ... unless you wanted a really boring movie.



When Aquinas said he wanted to go into the seminary, his parents locked him in his room and sent in a hooker to loosen him up. He talked one into converting, and, later on, he chased out a second prostitute with a bit of torch wood that he picked up from the lit fireplace. Depending on who you talked to, he was either built like a linebacker, or built like Friar Tuck (there are theories that he started all of the fat jokes about himself, including that the brothers at his residence cut a crescent into the dining table just to seat his stomach.).



He was a saint who would speed-walk around the monastery to think. Some have described his walking patterns as being akin to a train in motion.  Though he did come up with the moral justification of the Belfast Acquittal (also known as a jail break) -- he reasoned that the job of the guards was to keep the convicts in, it was not the job of the convicts to stay put.



And what does any of this have to do with A Pius Man?



Very simple: there won't be any deep, incomprehensible lines of thought. There is philosophy, theology, and history in the novel … but it is all about as deep as “a rock flew at my head. It is real. Someone threw it, and now I have to hurt them.”



I believe in black and white and shades of gray. It's called being a meliorist – which is a fancy way of saying I believe in black and white and shades of gray … theologically, it breaks down into “see everything, overlook much, improve a little.”



Though there are really no shades of gray in the case of Pius XII – the Pope either knew and did nothing, knew and did something, or didn't know. However, if a Pope who had been the former Secretary of State didn't know what was going on in the world at large, something is wrong somewhere. Shades of gray, removed. At some point, Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust.



However, I wouldn't even consider trying to compare Pius XII's actions to those of the other world powers of his day. Why? Because no one did anything about the death camps, and these were world leaders with whole armies. By that standard, Pius XII could have slept through the war and still have done more for refugees in Europe. (The United States, like most British properties at the time, closed its borders to new immigrants from Europe during World War II, so they were a negative)



The book has often been described as slipping in history, theology, and philosophy in between the gunshots. I would hate to have anyone put off by that. My philosophy and theology are tightly intertwined. This novel is not so esoteric that you will go cross-eyed reading it. If you fall asleep reading it, that would probably mean that I fell asleep writing it, and I stayed awake through the whole thing. Honest.

The Spanish Steps, A Pius Man, and why do I blow up public places?

The new, better graphic provided by Matt. 

Happy New Year, and welcome back everyone. I hope you enjoyed your holidays, your vacation time, and in New York, the twenty inches of snow. I'm still digging out.  And recovering from my Christmas Cold.  Yes, my vacation was spent indoors, coughing up a lung. Fun....



Many people who have visited my pages for A Pius Man may have noticed an odd photo. It has an image of an armored SUV driving down the Spanish Steps, in Rome. Why do I have it there, and what does it have to do with A Pius Man?



Not to belabor the obvious, but the latter question is easy to answer: a scene in my novel has the Knight-XV Fully Armored Vehicle going down said historic landmark.



And why?



Because it's fun.



To give a serious answer: public places are common targets in my novels. I've had two running shootouts that went past the New York Museum of Natural History, and ended in Central Park. One of them ended in Belvedere Castle. I had a scene that started in the Hudson River during the Macy's Fireworks display, and ended with two protagonists falling off of the Statue of Liberty. Another book ended at the Cloisters, another museum in New York cobbled together from dozens of different European monasteries.



One novel, which now needs to be rewritten, is especially egregious in public places being blown up, shot up, and otherwise trashed. I had a shootout on New York's Cross Island Parkway, a firefight outside Brennan's of New Orleans, threw someone out of the John Hancock building in Chicago, had a slow, stalking hunt through New Orleans' Bourbon Street, another shootout in a New Orleans City of the Dead, as well as a running chase throughout Boston's Quincy Market.



I had fun with that book.



I suppose I could blame my reign of havoc in public places on Alfred Hitchcock. I grew up with throwing a Saboteur off the Statue of Liberty, and having a blackmailer chased through the British Museum. I had fond childhood memories of Cary Grant hanging off of Mount Rushmore, and Jimmy Stewart saving a drowning woman underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.



So, yes, Alfred Hitchcock makes a good scapegoat.



However, public places allow for some great opportunities. Bad guys can grab hostages at will. Fugitive protagonists see every average person as a threat.



And, my personal favorite: the ability to walk the scene.



I sometimes get lazy in my writing. I can only create so many settings no one has ever seen before, and then I start muttering to myself, and I want to just get the Darned Scene Written Now. There has even been the odd sequence that I've cobbled together from video games (fans of Sam Fisher, pay attention).



But, in come cases, public areas, and tourist traps, come in handy. Especially when you're doing a walkthrough of Central Park and find places for your running shootout that aren't on any Google picture search. Walking around the Cloisters is the only way to find what the layout looks like near a perfect entry point from the Henry Hudson parkway, after using a bolt cutter on the chain link fence.

And public parks and attractions have a side benefit to them. They're nice and big, and easy to play hide-and-seek in. Granted, in my books, my protagonists hide, and the antagonists are seeking with an RPG.