It is 1972, and Veronica Chater's parents believe that Vatican II's liberalization has corrupted the Catholic Church, inviting the Holy Chastisement'"an apocalypse prophesied by three shepherds in Fatima, Portugal. To spare his family this horror, Veronica's father quits the highway patrol, sells everything, and moves the family of eight from California to an isolated village near Fatima.

But Portugal is no Catholic utopia, and the family schleps home penniless to join the nascent Catholic counterrevolution: attending the Latin Mass in truck garages and abandoned buildings, serving meals to religious soldiers, breeding a new member of the faithful every year. As Veronica comes of age on the fringes of the American Dream, she rebels against a fanaticism that forbids anything modern'"clothes, movies, or music. This is the story, both sad and funny, of a family torn apart by religion and brought back together in spite of the injuries it inflicted on itself.

At the center of "Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family" stands the figure of Veronica Chater's father, a one-time California highway patrol officer so focused on a single idea that he uproots and impoverishes his large family and distorts the lives of his children. His obsession is with the reforms of Vatican II, which he thinks have corrupted the Catholic church. Disgusted with... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the liberalization he sees in California, in 1972 he decides to relocate to Fatima, Portugal, where the Virgin Mary supposedly visited three shepherd children in 1917 and imparted three secrets: One was a lurid description of hell. The second was a warning that godless Soviet communism threatened the world. The third secret was never revealed by the Church, but Chater's father, like other traditionalists, believed it was a prophesy of Vatican II and the moral destruction it would wreak.

But once in Portugal, having settled close to Fatima and joyfully prepared for their first mass there, the family discovers the local church is as liberal as those they rejected in California. Bitterly disillusioned, Chater's father moves his brood back home. Here he begins associating with increasingly extremist splinter groups, carries a gun to the fly-by-night church services he and his family attend in garages and deserted department stores, and sends two of his sons — aged 10 and 12 — to a militaristic Catholic boys' academy on the East Coast.

Most of the book is riveting. Chater's descriptions of their troubled voyage to Portugal, the freedom the kids found in a rural village, and the mixture of pleasure and astonishment with which they explored local customs — all these are particularly lively and evocative. But once the family is back in the United States, even as Chater describes the beginnings of her own rebellion, much of the color leaches from the story.

Reviewed by Juliet Wittman, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Short-story and magazine writer Chater brings an ear for dialogue and an eye for the absurd to this tragicomic debut memoir about coming of age in the 1970s in an ultraconservative Catholic family.The ordeals of such a childhood - the nuns, the rulers, the guilt - have long provided fodder for stand-up comedians, confessional autobiographies and even musical comedies. The author, one of 11 children, contributes to the canon in this painfully funny account. Her father, a state trooper and converted Catholic, was enraged by the Church's liberalization after the 1965 Vatican II Council. He scorned shorter veils for nuns, Mass conducted in English and parishioners standing for communion as "Vatican II." In church he ordered his children to close their eyes, clench their fists and refuse the blasphemous Handshake of Peace. Chater was taught that corruption of Catholic traditions would lead to communist world domination and trigger an apocalyptic scenario called the Holy Chastisement. Her father fantasized about moving the family to the miracle capital of Lourdes, France; when that plan fizzled, they settled for rural Portugal. Initially hopeful ("even the dogs were Catholic"), they discovered that Portugal was just as "Vatican II" as California. The family sunk into poverty and returned to America, marginalized and disappointed. Chater's father grew ever more fanatical. He banned his daughters from wearing pants, shipped his sons to a cultlike anticommunist Brazilian monastery and dragged the ever-larger and poorer family to a series of guerrilla parishes that met in abandoned storefronts and empty garages. The kids got intermittent emotional relief from their devout but eminently practical mother, so frugal that she chose an old mop as airplane carry-on luggage upon leaving Portugal. The memoir's tone shifts jarringly at the end, when the voice of Chater as a bemused child becomes that of an unhappy young woman. Still, that voice relates a compelling story with a dramatic climax. Affecting and unsparingly honest.

Chater recounts her life growing up Catholic in a family where the reforms of Vatican II were seen as the work of Satan. This is the story, both sad and funny, of a family torn apart by religion and brought back together in spite of the injuries it inflicted on itself.

Veronica Chaterhas written for national women's magazines and This American Life. Her stories have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Guardian(London), and various anthologies. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.