Tom Grace has written four novels featuring his ex-Navy Seal hero, Nolan Kilkenny. In his fifth, The Secret Cardinal, the Vatican recruits Nolan to send a team into China to rescue a man imprisoned for thirty years. Grace's novels are always fun, but this time he has outdone himself with his best book to date.
What sparked the idea for The Secret Cardinal?
I found the idea for this book in a tribute Sen. Joseph Lieberman gave from the floor of the Senate to mark the passing of Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei. Cardinal Kung endured over three decades of imprisonment in China for refusing to renounce his faith and was the first of four secret cardinals created by Pope John Paul II. From Lieberman's tribute I first learned about the repression of the Roman Catholic Church in China, the remarkable example set by Cardinal Kung, who inspired the title character of my novel, and the existence of secret cardinals.
Your hero has endured rough times and personal tragedy over the course of five novels. Does he share any of your traits?
Nolan Kilkenny shares many traits and interests, and he is in some ways my Walter Mitty-esque alter ego. Like Kilkenny, I enjoy distance running, swimming, and the martial arts, but he is far better at these activities than I am. Of course, he needs to be better because of all the trouble I create for him.Does the Vatican have a network similar to the CIA?
The Vatican did possess an espionage service during the era of the Papal States, when it controlled a large portion of the Italian peninsula and had all the temporal problems of every other European monarchy. The need for such a service disappeared when the Vatican ceded all but the property it retains today to a unified Italy. Vatican Intelligence today is an under-funded desk in the Vatican State Department that collects information from published sources. The Holy See is focused on spiritual matters and has no interest in cloak and dagger diplomacy. During the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the CIA regularly briefed Pope John Paul II on what was happening in Poland because the Vatican had no spies on the ground. The Vatican is widely regarded as the nation that is the most spied upon, yet least capable of spying.{mospagebreak}
In a scene in the Chinese prison, your characters use a device called a "fly" to get the layout of the compound. Does such a thing actually exist?
Micro-Electronic Machines (MEMs) and Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) do exist and, as noted in The Secret Cardinal, some very interesting technology in this young field has been created in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Kilkenny came into contact with it. I am pushing the envelope with my Fly, but not by much, and probably not for long.
Could you discuss the origins of the China/Catholism conflict? What do you see as the end result?
The difficulties between China and the Vatican are just a modern version of the age-old conflict between church and state. Totalitarian states have trouble with religion because it supposes a power higher than the state. In the pagan days of Egypt and Rome, the tyrants solved the problem by declaring themselves gods. Monarchies in Christian Europe eventually justified their rule by the Divine Right of Kings. As communists are avowed atheists, the leaders of China could neither declare themselves gods nor claim their right to rule as a mandate from the Almighty, so the eradication or suppression of religion is the only alternative. Eradication has failed, so the Chinese state rigidly controls religion to ensure the message the Chinese faithful hear from the pulpit is supportive of the state. All sanction religion is China is run by the state, meaning political atheists are in charge of religion. In August, the Chinese Religious Affairs Bureau issued Order Number 5 that established the rules governing the reincarnation of Tibetan Buddhist Lamas--a government that does not believe in the existence of souls has claimed authority over reincarnation.
The Soviet Union lasted roughly 90 years before collapsing. Communist China is almost sixty years old, but has evolved into something more closely approximating National Socialism. Nearly two-thousand years have passed since Jesus Christ founded the Church, and the unbroken line of succession from St. Peter to Pope Benedict XVI coupled with the 1.3 billion faithful worldwide are a testament to the durability of this entity. There are five times more Roman Catholics in China today than there were when the communists took power, and there are more Christians in China than communists. Eventually, single party rule in China will end and the communist version of totalitarianism will join feudalism in the footnotes of history.
What's next?
Promoting The Secret Cardinal, which is available in both hardcover (Vanguard Press) and unabridged audio (BrillianceAudio). I'm developing a few more ideas for future novels, some featuring Kilkenny and others veering off into new directions. I am also still a practicing architect and I have a few projects in construction, including a former nuclear energy research facility that I'm renovating into a hydrogen fuel cell lab--more interesting technology that might end up in one of my novels.
