July 18, 2005

An author before his time

Jacksonville writer publishes a novel about a Catholic hero and the mysterious coverup following his death

By John Darling
Tidings Correspondent

John Sack’s book arrived just in time to ride the huge wave created by “The Da Vinci Code,” but the curious part is that Sack wrote his medieval, monk-filled mystery before Dan Brown did.

Author John Sack looks out the front door of his Jacksonville home. Sack’s religious mystery novel, “The Fransiscan Conspiracy,” was written in 1994 and published this year by Riverwood Books. Submitted photo

Just hitting bookstores this week, the novel builds on the actual mystery that a band of Italian knights stole the corpse of St. Francis of Assisi when it was in procession to be buried at the Basilica of St. Francis.

This event, “sanitized” out of St. Francis’ biographies by the church, is the big mystery of “The Franciscan Conspiracy,” completed in 1994 by John Sack of Jacksonville and now published by Riverwood Books, an Ashland publisher and part of the White Cloud Publishing complex.

“The advance copies were flying off the table at BEA (BookExpo America, the biggest book fair in the country) and they could have handed out several hundred more,” said Sack, who, far from trying to piggyback on Brown’s success, got the idea for his book in 1981 while writing “The Wolf in Winter,” a biography of St. Francis for teens.

Like “The Da Vinci Code,” Sack’s book upsets Catholic Church dogma. It reveals the likely truth about why the Order of St. Francis wanted his body kidnapped and hidden from the public. It has to do with the legend, current in St. Francis’ lifetime, that he had stigmata, the wounds to hands and feet Christ suffered from crucifixion — the first reported such case.

His corpse was not found till 1811, buried under the floor of the Basilica.

As Brown did with his book, Sack attempts to set the record straight, showing how the church was motivated to whitewash St. Francis’ lusty, bawdy youth, his work with lepers and his earthly diseases, which would be thought of as punishment for sin, said Sack.

“The church wanted to create a plaster saint of St. Francis and drain him of all his humanity,” said Sack. “They worked very hard to make him a kind of second Christ, even saying he was born in a stable, this despite his family being the richest in town. They even said some wise men came along at his birth and pronounced him as ‘the One’ who would cure all the ills of the Church.”

The mystery, solved in the novel by friars associated with St. Francis, reveal his stigmata to have slightly less than divine origin.

Sack, an Ohio native and Yale grad who likes to write on his laptop in coffee shops, shaped the early parts of his plot as a member of the Blue Mountain Writers, a local group of book writers who, in the ’80s and ’90s, critiqued each other’s manuscripts in Ashland’s now-gone Blue Mountain Café.

He also won a Lewis and Clark College Walden Fellowship, enabling him six weeks of bother-free writing time in the Gold Hill cabin of Elizabeth Udall.

If the $24.95 hardback takes off, as Riverwood Press hopes and believes, Sack has a sequel or two mapped out in his mind. Riverwood has sold foreign language rights in 14 countries so far and advance sales to bookstores have been strong, said Gary Kliewer, publisher for Caveat Press, the umbrella corporation for Riverwood.