Dominicans on the scent or in the service of His Holiness. Agents in habits in Polish prose of the XXI century

Abstract

In the novels of Officium Secretum. The Lord’s Dog by Marcin Wroński and The Agent of His Holiness by Karol Kowal, the main characters are “atypical clergymen”. This “atypicality” is based on the fact that the Dominicans – father Marek Gliński and father Władysław Klonowiejski – were created by the authors as agents of the Vatican secret services. The protagonist from Wroński’s work is a monastic James Bond, who was recruited to the Officium Secretum – the internal church service that was the heir of the Inquisition, and during the Polish People’s Republic he served the Church as a double agent (he became an officer of the Security Service). Father Klonowiejski is also a special agent. In Kowal’s novel, he appears as a well-trained Holy Alliance’s scout who travels through nineteenth-century Europe in order to neutralize an agent nicknamed “Haman”.

The undercover monks (in Wroński’s novel we also have a supporting character of father Jakub), however, were not described by the authors as ideal agents. Both father Gliński, who conducts the investigation inside the church structures, and father Klonowiejski as a spy at the service of “His Holiness”, make mistakes, are oversensitive, experience doubts and remorse. In the case of both characters, intelligence activity also turns out to be a way to learn the truth about themselves and conversion. All this makes father Marek from Wroński’s work and father Władysław from Kowal’s novel deserve the name of “agents with a soul”.