Is Heaven for Real

"A chilling expos of youth suicide and murder driven by preachers." Tony Frost, Tribune

Child and teen suicide is no stranger to this author: "I recall gazing at the stillness of my childhood friend in a coffin and the nun telling me that God had taken him back because he had been made of sin. He had killed himself because word got out that he had been born out of wedlock. Then there was that girl in my high school class who took the easy way out when she found herself with child. A few months after I released my biography of John Paul I, a gay teen called me and told me that my book had saved his life. He had planned to take his life on that day because his faith condemned the person he happened to be. During my years with the Children's Home and Hospital School, I've shared in the grief left in the wake of children's notes: "I have gone to live with Jesus." Thousands of mentally and physically impaired among countless others have left the same legacy behind. Then we have tragedies like F tima, where two little children are saints today because their faith encouraged them to advance their deaths in slow and agonizing ways to suffer and die for sins of the flesh against the Immaculate Heart of Mary... and a Catholic world that thinks it wonderful. "While through the years the preacher's hatred has taken its greatest toll in unwed mothers, gay and transgender teens, and other outcasts of religion, his lure of 'heaven' remains the leading cause of pre-puberty suicide today. "As for F tima, I give you much more than the Vatican's investigation which found that the children twisted abrasive ropes about their bodies, thrashed each other with stinging nettles and abstained from drinking water for weeks when the sun hung like a hot stove over all that was living and dead in the Serra. I give you murder. 'No one is going to walk away from this book without the firm conviction Lucia Santos murdered at least five children on her way to becoming the world's most famous nun.' Paris Lane, Globe

"As for me, I must live out my days haunted by children's lives snuffed out by the preacher's irresponsible bluff, because I had not acted sooner. "Thousands of tiny coffins lowered into the ground so that the preacher can sell his condominiums in the sky to sheep who lust for more."