A Priest's Affair - Neville Symington
This is the story of a Roman Catholic priest in the grip of a new fanaticism - the bigotry that gripped many priests in the week of the second Vatican Council - and of his consequential sudden descent into madness.
It is also an exploration of deeper existential questions concerning the nature and dangers of personal freedom; the conflicts posed by profoundly different beliefs co-existing within a single creed, and the search for a personal sense of living and the way frustration of desire can lead to madness.
By the way of this multi-faceted exploration, the author describes processes which find parallels in many contemporary institutions.