Nothing Sacred: A Journey Beyond Belief

When Rigelhof wrote his award-winning memoir A Blue Boy in a Black Dress, the wall of silence erected by the Roman Catholic hierarchy around the sexual mistreatment of boys remained intact. Nothing Sacred: A Journey Beyond Belief, picks up the threads of his earlier book and sets the revelations of the past decade into the context of his own experience. Rigelhof became an altar boy at Holy Rosary Cathedral in Regina when he was only five. As a youth, he found the church both seductive and disturbing. Yet, his five years of preparation for the priesthood, which spanned the tumult of Vatican II, nearly ended in suicide. Although his allegiance to the Catholic Church ceased with his vocation, the same spiritual passion that drew Rigelhof to the church still fuels his interest in the future of religion and the meaning of faith in contemporary society. In Nothing Sacred, he looks ahead to the fate of organized religion in the 21st century, probing the forces of the human spirit and exploring the meaning of ritual and the human need for myth-making. Hugo Meyell, referring to A Blue Boy in a Black Dress, writes in the Globe and Mail, "I hope that this book will be widely read by those who wonder what the religious future will bring." Jeet Heer, writing in the National Post, says "Rigelhof combines the urgency of good journalism with the depth of a true scholar . . . Canada needs more Rigelhofs to stir up debate." Uncompromising and provocative, Nothing Sacred will do just that. Nothing Sacred was a finalist for the Quebec Writers' Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction (2004).