The Promise of God

The appearance of the Jewish messiah within the leadership ranks of the Catholic Church creates a spiritual and political crisis in Shapiro's heavy-handed first novel. The man in question is a humble South American cardinal named Isaac Benda Cortes, a rising candidate for the papacy. As the election draws closer, Benda Cortes not only discovers that he has Jewish ancestry, but also learns that he may well be the long-awaited messiah of the Jewish people. Cortes's family history attracts the attention of a number of powerful figures, including a South American drug lord, a quartet of wealthy American executives visited by mystical visions after suffering heart attacks, a professional basketball star who shares those visions and a Turneresque media mogul who seeks to promote Cortes as the new pontiff after a prominent Israeli rabbi informs him that the cardinal's rise to prominence matches a prophecy predicting the arrival of a Jewish messiah. The secular situation is complicated when a group of Israeli scientists discover the formula for cold fusion, then take the world to the edge of Armageddon when they refuse to share their work until the messiah is revealed. Shapiro's prose style is strictly by the numbers, and despite his attempts to erase the long-standing antagonism between Judaism and Catholicism, the gist of Cortes's message is that the Jewish faith should assume primacy because longevity gives it the greatest historical validity. In a spiritual world in which most readers have lost their tolerance for interfaith squabbling, such a conclusion may strike most as simplistic and divisive. (Mar.)