John McCoy began to work on this biography of Raymond G. Hunthausen, archbishop of Seattle, Washington, from 1975 to 1991, while Hunthausen was still archbishop and McCoy directed communications for the archdiocese. He interviewed dozens of people from the area, and finally Hunthausen himself after he retired and moved back to Montana. But McCoy set aside his notes for twenty years and returned to them only after Pope Francis succeeded Benedict XVI. Readers will see why Francis' early papacy inspired McCoy to return to his subject, as Hunthausen approached his ministry in a very Francis-like pastoral and open manner.

McCoy's title suggests that his biography will focus on a great political contest between Hunthausen, Ronald Reagan, and John Paul II, but this may be misleading. None of the participants ever acknowledged the contest, and Reagan plays almost no role in the book. Instead, McCoy offers an accessible, clear, and sympathetic portrait of Hunthausen that begins with his decision to witness for peace and against nuclear weapons publicly in the early 1980s, but then shifts to a more conventional and chronological telling of Hunthausen's life story. By the time we return to the 1980s, and to the book's climax, the battleground seems to have shifted dramatically. Critics attacked Hunthausen, and the Vatican targeted him ostensibly for his very open, pastoral, and welcoming ministry. He was too willing to listen to and support gay and lesbian Catholics in their efforts to remain true to their sexual identities and to their Catholicism. He advocated too firmly for increased roles for women in the church, participated too readily in interfaith social justice and liturgical efforts, and allowed former priests to participate too fully and publicly as laymen in their parishes. Though McCoy suggests that these were all subterfuges, that John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger really worried more that Hunthausen's peace advocacy might undermine the strong coalition the Vatican built with Reagan to overthrow Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there is little evidence that the Vatican did not genuinely obsess about these other matters.

The story that emerges is quite powerful. Hunthausen's background gave no hint that he would stand at the center of one of the most significant ecclesiastical conflicts in the post-Vatican II era. He grew up in a large and devout Montana family of seven children, studied chemistry and played football at a small Catholic college there, joined the priesthood, returned to Carroll College to teach chemistry, coach football, and eventually become the college president. He was tapped to become bishop of Helena, Montana, by John XXIII just as the Second Vatican Council began. He had been a very hierarchical, rules- and duty-driven priest and college president, but experiencing the council and seeing its new vision of church as the people of God transformed him. He committed himself to being a consultative, open, pastoral bishop, who quickly earned the admiration of those bishops in his region of the country. He was no national figure, though, and spoke only a handful of times at the national bishops meetings. He succeeded in generating enthusiasm and increasing membership in both Helena and Seattle, but drew national attention only when he determined that he must support publicly the peace activists who challenged America's nuclear policy. When he became an “activist” himself, and urged others to withhold the percentage of their income tax that went to support nuclear weapons, McCoy argues, Hunthausen put himself in the way of Vatican ambitions to court Reagan's favor and support. Ratzinger and John Paul II pursued their investigation of practices in Seattle that were common in other dioceses because of Hunthausen's high-profile peace witness.

McCoy adroitly tells the story of the Vatican-mandated visitation, Donald Wuerl's appointment as minder auxiliary bishop with extraordinary powers in the archdiocese, Hunthausen's bafflement and growing resentment at his authority being undermined in such a public way (while the specific evidence against him remained a closely guarded Vatican secret), and the eventual resolution. McCoy is an able guide through the intricacies of Hunthausen's struggles, and readers will more fully appreciate by the book's end both the deep personal costs to Hunthausen and the profound institutional harm the American church endured. In the end, Hunthausen represented a vision of church that fanned the fears of those already terrified by Vatican II's dramatically transforming potential. His continued fealty to that vision in the face of official denigration offers meaningful hope for the future of any church that can produce such a man of great integrity and witness for Christ's love.