Michael Casey's Books on Amazon

 

Where I Came From

by Michael Casey

This memoir of the Casey family’s fate rises up from the coulees and frozen tundra of North Dakota during the Great Depression and The Dirty Thirties. Will the son, Michael, prevail over the stink and guts of slaughtering chickens, picking up cow pies for burning in the kitchen stove to can the chickens for winter food? There is child abuse from a teacher, Edna the Virgin, with a thick wooden ruler, a violent rape in a bunkhouse in the dark of night by a John Deere machinery salesman. His mother Margaret’s pathos comes from having to feed and care for too many children. Her Irish Catholic husband, Matt Casey, only a generation away from the Irish potato famine, supports his family with his wages as a janitor from the local public school in Parshall. Matt will not interfere with the cycle of fate by using birth control because it is a deadly mortal sin. He is a good man, drinks not a drop, but carries the curse of St. Patrick on his forehead. Michael becomes an altar boy and serves at an infant’s funeral on the bleak Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where the mother’s keening for her baby still echoes in his developing conscience. The prairie wind howls, and he hopes there is a better way. Sisyphus never had it so good.

Link to book on amazon: 

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Came-Michael-Matthew-Casey/dp/0985158018/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2JOSF2KBLZH66&keywords=michael+matthew+casey&qid=1682889593&sprefix=michael+mathew+case%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-2

Black is White: My Experiences as a Jesuit Priest

by Michael Casey

This is a memoir of my experiences as a Jesuit, from 1952 to 1969. I am broadcasting live from Mount Golgotha. I experienced the entire Jesuit formation from age 18 to age 34. But four years after ordination to the priesthood I realized that I can’t live the Jesuit life, and I left in the middle of the night. But I carried my memories and experiences with me. There is flagellation of the flesh and wearing of penitential chains in imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns; there is drunkenness, priestly pederasty, bullying by reactionary Jesuit superiors. A sadistic moral theology teacher (Father Coitus Interruptus, S.J.) pushed me to near breakdown and much sobbing of the guts. My mother’s unexpected death from cancer a few months before my ordination to the priesthood is the turning point. When she dies, the Oedipal Temple Veil is rent in two, and there will be no going back to the Old Church and the Old God. Nor do the new gods of Vatican II take heed of my striving for peace of mind. With the Jesuits, always it is shame, unnatural shame from the unnatural vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, until all belief leaves me. I walk out the door, angry, disgusted, and resentful. But at last I am human, and have a life of my own, and no longer think that black is white.