Morte d'Urban

Summary

Father Urban Roche, an energetic and worldly priest of a struggling Catholic order, is dispatched from Chicago to a shabby retreat house in rural Minnesota and sets about renovating the place and its prospects. Powers writes Church life as a comedy of institutions, full of fundraising, golf, ambition, and small spiritual reckonings. The novel is a wry, deeply observed portrait of midcentury American Catholicism rarely matched in fiction.