William X. Kienzle

Writer

• Born: September 11, 1928
• Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
• Died: December 28, 2001
• Place of death: West Bloomfield, Michigan

Biography

William Xavier Kienzle was born on September 11, 1928, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Alphonse and Mary Louise Boyle Kienzle. He attended Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, where he received a B.A. degree; St. John’s Seminary in Plymouth, Michigan; and, later, the University of Detroit. He was ordained a priest on June 5, 1954.

Kienzle served in a number of Detroit parishes from the small, inner city Patronage of St. Joseph, to the prosperous suburban St. Anselm’s. From 1962 to 1974, he was editor of the Michigan Catholic. At St. Anselm’s he became troubled by the Catholic Church’s laws governing the marriage of divorced persons. His widow, Javan Kienzle, writes in her biography, Judged by Love (2004), that he was willing to obey church law but unwilling to uniformly enforce it on others. On June 27, 1974, he took a leave of absence, the first step toward leaving the priesthood. He applied for laicization. He married editor and researcher Javan Herman Andrews in a civil service on November 29, 1974; after laicization, when he was relieved of his vows, they were married in the church. Both remained devout Catholics, attending daily mass whenever possible.

From 1974 to 1977, Kienzle edited MPLS Magazine in Minneapolis, Wisconsin; from 1977 through 1978, he was associate director of the Center for Contemplative Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. During 1978 through 1979, he was director of a similar center at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. He became a full-time writer after the publication of his first novel, The Rosary Murders, in 1979.

The novel and those that followed feature Father Robert Koesler, who becomes a consultant to the police department when cases involve Catholics. Father Koesler shares certain characteristics with his creator. Both are old enough to have lived through Vatican II and the changes that followed within the church, both feel a certain nostalgia for the more stable past, and both are divided between intense loyalty to the church and dissatisfaction with its laws. While Koester does not fully represent Kienzle, the author inserts autobiographical touches. The sensible and respected Mark Boyle is Kienzle’s fictional cardinal archbishop of Detroit. Mark Boyle was also the name of Kienzle’s maternal grandfather and the name Kienzle used as a journalist. In Judged by Love, Javan Kienzle points to other sympathetic characters who were based on people Kienzle knew.

The principal characters of the novels are often religious people who pervert Christ’s teachings to serve their own egos. The victim in Deadline for a Critic (1987) is a newspaper critic named Ridley C. Groendal, whose name evokes that of Grendel, the beast of the English epic Beowulf. Despite his church attendance, Groendal has become a monster of wrath, jealousy, and greed. In Bishop as Pawn (1994), the primary victim is a bishop whose religious obligations are subordinated to his greed and pride. Masquerade (1990) is about a wealthy television evangelist whose hypocrisy far exceeds his Christianity. Kienzle’s distinction between God’s law and man’s perversion of that law form a background against which many church problems can be briefly illumined.

Kienzle won a Michigan Knights of Columbus journalism award in 1963, and, in 2000, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature. He died of a heart attack on December 28, 2001, in West Bloomfield, Michigan.