ABSTRACT

The confusion of priestly secrets interchanges divine mysteries with sexual crimes. The sexual irregularity of Catholic priests was one of the staples of Protestant polemic, as it was earlier of popular or learned satire. La vocation suspendue, The Suspended Vocation, rehearses many things, but the plot is immediately concerned with the parodic possibilities in the rivalry of imagined Catholic groups and their regions of secrecy. Pierre Klossowski sketched and colored graphic images of young men, religious authorities, and Christian symbols. Klossowski's essayist and anonymous narrator are both engaged, if differently, with the evocation and critique of more complex conditions of secrecy in theology, religious formation, spiritual experience, and liturgy or iconography. The Roman Church, with its bristling law codes and labyrinth of courts, manufactures and then manages all sorts of administrative secrets. For Georg Simmel, much of the social allure of the secret depends on the possibility that it might be told.