Casaroja

by Michael Morow

Casaroja is the first published novel in a chronicle of the American Catholic Church and its missions in our day. It is the story of two boyhood friends, Christopher Henry Gauthier and Luke Eberhard, sons of a Pacific war fighter pilot and his chief mechanic. Thereafter their fathers start a small airport south of Chicago, and die together in a Cessna crash early in their sons' lives. Christopher's mother then remarries a canny, successful importer of exotic furniture, is active in Catholic groups and Democratic politics, and aggressively rears her gifted boy per Dr. Spock's principles. Luke, from another side of town, grows up near woods where he hunts and roams. Following a life-threatening illness, Christopher feels called to a minor seminary in southern Indiana, but leaves and eventually becomes a Chicago attorney. Luke, an unlikely student who followed him to the seminary, stays to become Father Matthew, a missionary among Indians in the Dakotas and then Guatemala. The two alternate as principal viewpoints throughout the series, which will also include perspectives of their friends, loved ones, priest-mentors and rivals.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published June 10, 2014

About the author

Michael Morow's first published novel, Casaroja, concerns a Catholic mission in the mountains of Guatemala amidst the civil war of the 1980s. It has been greeted with highly positive reviews. For instance, "This book captures the attention of the reader at once, and will even draw him into reading the entire text in one sitting. For, it is a fine composition and a fine contribution to a deeper meditation by the Church concerning her own foreign missions and their possible negligence and their false turns and self-sabotaging ideologies, and especially their disastrous effects upon Southern and Central American countries." (Dr. Maike Hickson)

Born in Hammond, Indiana in 1951, Michael Morow graduated from Valparaiso University School of Law in 1977 and, after a judicial clerkship, has been engaged in civil practice since. He is at work on The Long Exile, a series of novels chronicling life in the American Catholic Church and at its missions, in the post-World War 2 era. He has traveled widely in the American Catholic church including personal familiarity with missions and missionaries who have worked here and in central America since the late 1960s.

Casaroja was published in 2014 by Wingspan Press. Further novels in the series are being prepared for publication, the next, Centenary, for 2018. This novel concerns the Dakota Indian missions in the turbulent 1970s.

A collection of essays, reviews, memoirs, and travel diary excerpts from Ireland and Italy, Postcards from Laodicea, is in preparation for later 2018 publication.