Through A Glass Darkly

Through a Glass Darkly tells the story of Ron Hennessey, an Iowa farmer who returned from the Korean War to discover that farming no longer held much allure. Hennessey joined a Catholic missionary society and after nine years of study was ordained a priest and sent to Guatemala. The book describes Hennessey's conversion from being an unapologetic patriot from America's heartland to a staunch opponent of Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America - policies that occasionally threatened Hennessey's life. Hennessey's story has a subtext: America's ideals of freedom, democracy, and progress-with-justice have been violated abroad by one U.S. president after another.

Thomas R. Melville served as a Catholic Maryknoll priest in Guatemala for ten years before being expelled in 1967 by Guatemalan and Church authorities for his role in planning (with other religious, both native and foreign) the formation of a Christian unit to graft onto the guerrilla movement that was fighting Guatemala's military rulers. Melville's religious training -- as a youngster in Boston and later in Maryknoll -- prompted him to ask why successive U.S. administrations financed repressive governments in Guatemala and Central America and why antigovernment guerrillas were labeled "terrorists" while U.S. advisors and their students were hailed as "freedom fighters."