Fr. Niall Bresnahan, the publisher and founder of B&B Books, joked that until the success of Warrior, Daughter, Saint, he had secretly suspected himself of running a vanity press. The joke, delivered in Fr. Bresnahan's nasal Cork City brogue, usually got a laugh, and quickly joined his repertoire of apparently self-deprecating humor. Fr. Bresnahan had only discovered his skills as a raconteur four years earlier, when he had been assigned to the Archdiocese of Dubuque--some would say exiled--as Censor Librorum and assistant Cathedral Chaplain. In Dubuque he took up the game of golf and learned, to his surprise, that middle Americans found his accent charming.

Prior to his arrival in Iowa, charm had been the least of Niall Bresnahan's qualities. A brief outline of his career to that point reveals little time for conviviality, let alone golf:

1930 Born, Cork City, Ireland

1944-51 St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, Baccalaureate in Theology, summa cum laude

1951-52 Assistant Chaplain, Hospital Nacional de Enfermedades Infeciosas (Hospital del Rey), Madrid, Spain.

1952 Ordination

1952-57 Curate, St. Kentigern's Parish, Manchester, England

1953-56 Oxford University, First class degree, philosophy

1957-60 Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, Lateran Pontifical University, Rome, Sacrae Theologiae Doctor, theology and patristic sciences

1960-63 Missionary service in Angola

1963-65 Personal Secretary to Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, at the Second Vatican Council

1966-70 Assistant Professor, Theology and Philosophy, Catholic University, Washington D.C.

1969 Receives book contract from the University of Notre Dame Press; one-semester leave of absence from teaching duties

1970 Publication of Lean and Flashy Songs: The Misuse of Vatican II in America

In Lean and Flashy Songs, Bresnahan performed a delicate balancing act--he endorsed, or claimed to endorse, every decree, constitution and declaration issued by Vatican II (many of which he cited at length, in Latin, with punctilious if selective accuracy), while at the same time using those very documents to denounce the implementation of the Council's work in the United States: Bresnahan declared that legacy of the Council had been "hijacked by the unholiest of ideas, the idea of Reform." In a furious final chapter, Bresnahan broadened his attack to include several other unholy ideas--"the sweaty nightmare of Progress, the brutal lie of Social Equality, and the scorched wasteland of Psychology." It was in this final chapter that he made his most shocking--and yet most subtle--accusation. Bresnahan somehow managed to proclaim his loyalty, love, and eternal respect for Pope Paul VI, while simultaneously suggesting that Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the former Archbishop of Milan, had been a lifelong member of the Italian Communist Party.

Bresnahan learned quickly that fervid anti-communism played very well on the golf courses of Dubuque, Iowa. On the fairway, men of substance and achievement would confide to him their growing estrangement from a Church in which the celebration of Holy Mass increasingly resembled the meetings of a socialist cell, or a spaced-out drug party, or both. Bresnahan reminded them of a more vigorous strain of Catholicism: long hours in the polio ward, strict adherence to ancient rules, narrow escapes from Communist guerrillas at African mission schools. The golfers bought his book; they skipped the Latin but read with guttural assent the incendiary final chapter; soon an offer of financing was presented to him over drinks at the country club bar. He took the money with a handshake, bought his friends a round of his favorite apertif, and the next day established Burke & Benedict Books ("libertas per opsequium") as a "platform for the neglected voices of conservative Catholics." If the liberal Catholic bishops of the early 1970s thought they could silence Fr. Niall Bresnahan by sending him to Dubuque, they were sorely mistaken.