Nothing Sacred: A Journey Beyond Belief

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

T.F. Rigelhof has written an anguished spiritual autobiography. His life
has been full of unusual detail and unexpected incident. Born into a
traditional Catholic family in Saskatchewan, he became an altar boy and,
later, a Jesuit seminarian. But by that time, the 1960s were changing
everything. Rigelhof lost his faith, survived a murder attempt by an
unbalanced fellow student, made a half-hearted suicide bid, left the
Church, married, and became a teacher of the history of religion and a
writer of both fiction and non-fiction in Montreal. In addition to all
this, he recently suffered a severe stroke, and writes movingly about
his determined efforts to regain his health.

In many respects, this is an embittered book. For Rigelhof, the
Catholic Church has “collapsed as a moral and intellectual, social and
personal, ritual and aesthetic framework in which it was possible to
live a whole—if not always wholesome—life.” Nothing Sacred is in
fact an extension and expansion of an earlier memoir, A Blue Boy in a
Black Dress, published in 1995. The earlier book was written in the
aftermath of the revelations concerning bizarre and dangerous cult
practices in the early 1990s. This one takes its cue from the sexual
abuse scandals within the Catholic Church in the last few years.
Rigelhof is simultaneously appalled and fascinated by the hypocrisies
and violence that arise when human spirituality and sexuality are
artificially segregated.

Rigelhof has the ability to write clearly and articulately on complex
and controversial subjects; unlike some journalists, he can move
appropriately from the precisely formal to the casually vernacular as
the situation warrants. In addition to recounting his remarkable journey
from unquestioned faith to tight-lipped agnosticism, he writes
challengingly on such diverse subjects as Vatican II, same-sex
“marriage,” the prospect of a married Catholic priesthood (“less
than a generation away,” he believes), and the rise of Pentecostalism.


This is a highly readable, provocative, and acutely disturbing book.