THE BLACK CRUSADE

In the winter of early 1945, a young lady fled Krakow, Poland, to escape the fate of millions of women who fell prey to the advancing Red Army of the Soviet Union. Three decades later, she would face that enemy again, only this time, her enemy (and head of a KGB operation) was hiding behind the black uniform of the most intellectual order of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus. His weapon of attack: Liberation Theology; her weapon of defense: the Scripture she had learned in a Paris convent.With Liberation Theology, the Jesuits had the ‘alt-Gospel’ they needed to justify armed struggle against poverty wherever it existed. But its selective application both ignored the institutionalized poverty of Africa and Asia and embraced the dictator-imposed poverty of Cuba. Such hypocrisy created the allies that the nun needed to prevail in this religious battlefield: a Polish Pope, a disillusioned young Jesuit, and a Salvadoran officer who had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.The Black Crusade is fiction based on historical fact that takes the reader from mid-20th Century Europe to the last battle of the Cold War in El Salvador, Central America the week after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.