Lost Sons is the story of three men who, as teenagers, take vows to the Catholic Church to serve the God of Love but who discover later, as missionaries in Africa and Latin America that their lives are shaped by the involvement of the Vatican in the Cold War. As each becomes engaged with right-wing dictators and governments or with radical left-wing movements for socio-economic reform and human rights, their brutal experiences of killing make them question a God who would create such a meaningless world. The three characters meet as youngsters in an Irish seminary in 1960. Two are rivals with fiercely opposing views and the third is an intellectually-gifted African who acts as their mediator. Their diverse childhood experiences (sexual abuse, alcoholic abuse and racial abuse) and their family political histories, contribute to the antagonism of the young rivals, and in the springtime of life they lock horns on almost everything: communism and capitalism; Vatican Council II and Catholic dogma; Liberation Theology and Opus Dei; humour and sex; the Spanish and Irish Civil Wars; Northern Ireland and the IRA. In the summer and autumn of life their youthful antagonism becomes murderous. While the three characters are fictitious, their actions are held to be entirely probable by many leading journalists. Thus, the book may be read primarily as 'faction': a combination of fact and fiction to raise questions not open to historians; or may be read primarily as a story of transformation of consciousness, of war, peace and forgiveness.
About the Author: Denis (Peter) Shanahan was born in Co. Kerry, Ireland and ordained a priest in Rome in the 1960s. As a missionary, he experienced a 'Catholic coup' in Lesotho and was expelled by Apartheid security from South Africa while ministering as a young priest in Sharpeville Township, south of Johannesburg. Twenty years later, at the collapse of Apartheid, he was an adviser to a Government Minister in Nelson Mandela's First ANC Cabinet. Shanahan stopped practising as a priest in the late 1970s, married, has four children and taught university. He was a UN Consultant to the World Bank Squatter Settlement Project in Zambia; a conference academic adviser to the Socialist Group in the European Parliament; and directed an EU SOCRATES Programme for post-graduate students from eleven EU universities. He travelled widely in his job, including Central America. In retirement, he was a voluntary research worker with a Catholic Church community programme for AIDS Orphans in a deprived region of South Africa. Shanahan lives between Ireland and Spain and practices as a Seanchai: an Irish story-teller/songster/piano player.