Lilli’s Question, by Michael O’Neill

In a Spanish park, a young German student asks an American seminarian a question that will haunt him for forty years: “Why be a priest?”

Lilli’s Question follows Jim McGann from the streets of Madrid to the deserts of Nevada, from the parishes of San Francisco to the halls of Rome, as he struggles to reconcile faith, love, and conscience. He mourns his brother killed in Vietnam, confronts his clerical doubts, and discovers unanticipated healing in a passionate affair.

Through decades of intellectual inquiry, pastoral work, and personal loss, Jim rises in the Church but finally feels called to challenge one of its centuries-old policies, realizing that this final answer to Lilli’s question “may do great good or may destroy me, possibly both.”