This is not the time to hide in the catacombs.

An interview with the Polish news service, FRONDA, www.fronda.pl, January 16, 2010

1. You had some trouble getting your books published. What is the general reaction to them in the secularized West. Are Catholics the only people who read your books?

O’Brien: I receive many letters from believers and non-believers, telling me how much my books have meant to them. It is always a deep consolation, because for many years I could not get my books published in Canada, my homeland. My country is extremely secular, socio-politically similar to Germany and Holland. I wrote manuscripts from 1977 until 1995, and always the publishers told me they would publish my books if I deleted the Catholicism, or warped it. I always refused, and thus remained unpublished in my own native land. Even now, none of my novels have been published in Canada. When in 1995 I finally sent my manuscripts to a publisher in the USA, they were immediately accepted. Since then, during the past 15 years more than 12 of my books have been published. It was a good lesson for me about many things. For one, the true nature of secular culture, which is always tending toward the neo-totalitarian suppression of cultural freedom (as well as political freedoms); it is ever willing to lock Catholic culture into a ghetto. As Orwell once wrote:  "Some of us are more equal than others."

José Antonio Mendez interview with Michael D. O’Brien,

Alfa y Omega, Madrid, July 30, 2009 issue: 

Michael D. O’Brien: When I wrote the book more than twelve years ago, the situation in my country was beginning to move in the direction of the new “soft” totalitarianism described in the novel. I wrote it as a warning. But I did not foresee how quickly events would develop in that direction. The situation is not yet as bad as I portray in my novel, but new federal and provincial laws in my country gravely invade family life (for example, the rights of parents to instruct their children according to their beliefs on moral issues without harassment, and to keep their children out of social engineering programs regarding gender and abortion and “sexual orientation.”). Freedom of speech and religious freedom have been seriously undermined by the new “Human Rights Commissions” which are tribunal-courts for investigating and punishing “hate crime.” In Canada this term is so vague that it is virtually undefined. It is often interpreted by judges to mean any questioning of the aggressive social-revolutionary agendas of militant homosexuals. Homosexual activists have used the tribunals to harass ordinary citizens, including Catholic priests and bishops, and Catholic media, for simply speaking the truth on the disordered nature of homosexual acts. The Church, in fact, is the first defender of the dignity of the homosexual person, but it speaks clearly about the psychological wound and the sin in overt activities. The government in its new laws has simply erased the distinction between person and act, and it prosecutes anyone who continues to uphold the distinction publicly. The tribunals do not always make unjust rulings, but they are used to harass any resistance, mainly by the threat of imprisonment and the high legal costs in defending oneself from unjust accusations. This is only one dimension of the Materialistic social revolution in my country—one that exalts “rights” without responsibilities.

The story takes place in the Balkans. What inspired you to situate the novel in this place?

O’Brien:  The seed of the novel was planted several years ago, in 1995, when I was writing my novel, “Father Elijah” [Posljednja vremena]. Without warning, a fictional character appeared in my imagination, though he was one I had not expected, named Brother Jakov, a Franciscan friar who had survived terrible experiences during the war of independence, 1991 – 1995. Years later, my books were translated into several foreign languages, among them Croatian. The publisher Verbum in Split, in conjunction with the Catholic apostolate MI, sponsored my visit to Croatia, where I gave several talks throughout the country. That was the first of four journeys I have made to the Balkan region. As I heard more and more stories told to me by Croats in both Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, I began to realize that an enormous catastrophe had occurred here—more terrible and more significant than we in the West realized. I had read much about it, of course, but I learned that the media of Europe and North America had not really seen beneath the surface. I began to understand that the situation was more than a geo-political crisis, more than the horror of genocide. I saw it as a spiritual crisis that had consequences for the whole world. In prayer it came to me that I must tell this story in a way that people of the nations outside former-Yugoslavia would come to a deeper understanding. Readers would then see that your sufferings are representative of the cosmic war that will continue until the end of time—and is a warning about what will come to all the world, if mankind does not repent of its sins.

The Nazi and Soviet tyrannies are prefigurements of the ultimate trial that will come upon the Church toward the end of time, as prophesied by Jesus himself, and the prophet Daniel and in St. John's Apocalypse. We are now living in a non-violent totalitarianism that is becoming world-wide, what Pope Benedict called “the dictatorship of moral relativism.”  Both he and John Paul II repeatedly warned that democracies are not immune from degenerating into tyrannies, and that they are most vulnerable to this corruption when they embrace a secular concept of the human person and banish from their governments the higher authority of God’s laws