New novel tells of a pair of priests exiled by their bishop to an ugly, dying parish in the hinterlands — and their unexpected success

Bishop J. Donald Doherty was chuckling at the large map of his diocese that covered most of his desk, its parish churches marked by bright blue crosses, the parish boundaries by dotted blue lines, their schools and the diocesan high school by (of course) little red schoolhouses, the cemeteries by bright green crosses. Near the northern edge of his fief lay a lonely blue cross, circled by him, a moment ago, in heavy black ink. He pressed the intercom button on his phone.

Angelico Press Launches Catholic Traditionalist Classics with Fr Bryan Houghton’s Mitre and Crook

Fr Bryan Houghton (1911-1992)

It is with great joy that I share an important development in the world of publishing: the launch of a new series by Angelico Press, Catholic Traditionalist Classics, that will bring back into print — for the benefit especially of younger readers born after the apocalypse — many fine works from the early years of the traditional movement that have become difficult or impossible to acquire. The series is inaugurated, appropriately enough, with a towering classic: Fr. Bryan Houghton’s deliciously witty novel Mitre and Crook of 1979.

When the publisher asked me for an endorsement, I wrote (without any back-cover hyperbole) that I had read Mitre and Crook on a lark years ago and instantly fell in love. Bryan Houghton was the Robert Hugh Benson of the postconciliar crisis. He brilliantly portrays a bishop, Edmund Forester, who with equal parts cleverness and courage orchestrates a complete restoration of Catholic tradition in his backwater diocese. The novel is written in the form of letters from Bishop Forester to his presbyterate and to various allies and enemies, local and abroad; the epistolary narration is suspenseful and gripping. Along the way we are treated to a scorching portrait of the souls of reformists, unbelievably narrow in mind and oblivious to spiritual realities.