“Nobody wants to hear hard sayings if they’re put as a ‘no.’ John Paul II presented the theology of the body as a glorious yes,” he observed during his recent interview with Celebrate Life. Now Brian has presented that glorious “yes” to a new audience by writing a trilogy that is, at once, a sermon, a warning for our age and a realistic fiction thriller.

Brian didn’t set out to write a trilogy but to “reconcile the American dream and the Church’s universal call to holiness.” This father of seven children and former Madison Avenue advertising executive felt impelled to tell his children and the next generation the truth about God’s plan for life and love, and to show them the moral consequences of trading the divine plan for our own. “My generation [the baby boomers] pursued the American dream to the exclusion of the Church’s call to holiness,” he explained. “And in the process, we … handed our children stones instead of bread. … My generation has denied its children everything they need to survive, beginning and ending with truth.”

Those stones were the effects of the 1960s sexual revolution: widespread acceptance of the pill and other contraceptives, as well as the infiltration of violence, profanity and sex into American homes via cable television in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Broken families, moral decline and a burgeoning culture of death ensued, resulting in the collapse of American society in less than 30 years. Brian’s riveting novels suggest that the question isn’t what will fix America butWho can save souls, restore the family and create a culture of life. Only Christ can give us the bread we need.

Who is your intended audience?
BG: Our children, our priests, our seminarians and all others among the remnant—in that order.

Your characters’ conscience plays a big role in your novels. What’s the importance of forming a good conscience?
BG: In Deuteronomy [30: 19–20], Moses lifted up the Law in his hands and told our elder brothers in the faith that he was offering them a choice between life and death. I’d say the formation of a “right conscience” is about that important.

In Motherless, you speak of a new genesis: man creating man after his own image and likeness. What’s the motive behind this?
BG: The architects of the “Life Sciences Revolution” seek nothing less than the nullification of Genesis in our time. It’s in Genesis that we read God created man in His image and likeness. Satan has determined the moment has now arrived when man will create man in his own image and likeness.

This is man’s capstone revolution. The other great revolutions merely laid its foundation. In the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution lured the man from the home; in the 1960s, the cultural revolution lured the woman from the home; in the ‘90s, the technological revolution lured the children from the home … even as they remained in it. With no one home, Satan is convinced he’s now free to make his final run.

How far are we into the “Life Sciences Revolution”? What’s fact and what’s fiction?
BG: Time magazine recently published a cover story [Feb. 10, 2011] on this demonic end game. Its principal herald, [futurist] Ray Kurzweil, predicted … man wired to machine by neural implants, by 2045. … He’s the guy who predicted [in his 1990 book that a computer] would defeat the world’s reigning chess champion [which happened in 1997]. It’s being claimed that about two thirds of the … neural regions of the human brain have already been reverse-engineered [analyzed to understand their operation] and mapped.

Do you see people now beginning to grasp more clearly the connection between contraception and abortion, in vitro fertilization and other sins against life?
BG: I wish I could say yes. I can’t. One of America’s leading think tanks recently determined that history tells us empires collapse in stages. First, there is a cultural implosion. This is followed by an economic collapse. And finally, we have the complete disintegration of the political order. It is perhaps noteworthy that the cultural implosion itself has three stages. First, contraception becomes widespread. This leads to the widespread practice of abortion. This, in turn, leads to the widespread acceptance and practice of homosexuality.

There are lots of sermons in the first two books of your trilogy. What are you trying to say?
BG: The Gospel of life and love is the cornerstone of the new evangelization. Why? Because the gift to co-create life for all eternity is the primordial gift of gifts from a generous and trusting Creator. … But it’s a gift that carries with it an equally primordial accountability: the responsibility shared by the child’s parents to welcome and nurture and instruct this [child] in the mystery of the law of the gift [Pope John Paul II’s term for the biblical truth that self-fulfillment is only found in self-giving love and service to others], which is written into her own tiny heart.

Are you saying that clergy aren’t truly living out their spiritual fatherhood unless they also preach about life and love from the pulpit?
BG: Yes.

Are Fr. Sweeney’s [the main character in the trilogy] parishioners “getting it” or is the seed falling on rocky soil when he preaches?
BG: The cultivation of fertile soil for a productive spiritual life is first and foremost the responsibility of parents. It’s the clergy’s responsibility to add richness and depth in the faithful exercise of their divine mandate to “bind and loose”… and by facilitating the sacramental encounter wherein Christ reveals Himself to man and reveals man to himself.

In our time, man suffers from an epic and unprecedented identity crisis. He has lost touch with himself. Clearly, this suggests the unleavened people of God are entering into this great sacramental encounter [of the Eucharist] unworthily. Paul was fairly clear on this point. He said this was about the best way he knew to eat and drink condemnation upon ourselves [1 Cor. 11: 28–32, on the need to examine oneself before receiving the Eucharist].

How can we encourage more clergy to instruct parishioners on the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life and human dignity?
BG: Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput said it best when he proclaimed quite boldly, “There will be no renewal of America without a renewal of the Catholic Church, and no renewal of the Catholic Church without a renewal of the Catholic family, and no renewal of the Catholic family without a bold proclamation of the sacred truths regarding the transmission of human life.”

Can you give us a hint of what Childless will be about? Is there hope in the end?
BG: The trilogy tracks 40 years in the life of a small mythical community…Fatherless is set in the 1980s. It’s morning in America. Man is handed a brilliant new apple with a two-headed worm [the pill and pornography] inside.Motherless is set in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s twilight in America. Man, effectively hollowed out, finds himself on the slippery slope born of his own technological genius. Childless is set in the 2020s and beyond. It’s midnight in America, the end of an age. But it’s also the dawn of a new age—an age a beloved former pope liked to refer to as … a new springtime of humanity.

So there’s hope in the end?
BG: Lots of it.

“We have fathers struggling to be fathers, mothers turning to petri dishes to be mothers, and children that will be recreated in the image and likeness of man by men—rather than the reverse as recorded by God himself in Genesis,” Gail said.

The husband of 40 years, father of seven, grandfather of five, former semi-pro baseball player, and retired CEO and entrepreneur, draws on his own experiences to develop the novels’ characters. He shared one of those experiences with the Denver Catholic Register.

“We had three daughters who went through three Pre-Cana programs, in three successive years, in three different parishes,” he said. “We asked each after the program concluded: ‘Did they tell you about the dangers of artificial contraception?’ And they all said ‘no.’

“‘Did they tell you about the wonders of natural family planning?’ And they said ‘no.’”
Gail, who has homes in Pennsylvania and Florida, realized if this was happening to his children, it must be happening to others as well.

“There are more than enough brilliant books out there, summoning children to heed the truth,” he said. “I didn’t want to repeat any of that.”

So he decided to compose a story, creating characters that were wrestling with the consequences of poor choices, as they attempted to balance faith, family and career. It was his hope that these characters would attract young readers.

“In drawing in young readers I hope to share the bold proclamation of the ‘Gospel of Life’ and love,” he said, referring to the teachings and encyclicals of Pope John Paul II. “Who will make this bold proclamation, if not us?”

“Fatherless” has proven to appeal not only to young readers, but a wider audience as well.

“It’s astonishing to me that different generations of readers, both male and female, East Coast to West Coast, both professional class and what we might call ‘blue collar’ seem to find something in the book that stirs something in their souls,” he said.

He described the series as “truth disguised as fiction.”

“It is truth because it channels so much of the viewpoint, perspective and teachings of the great John Paul II, who galvanized the world, and inspired me and so many like me,” he said. “He was the ‘greatest of the great’—a gift not just to our Church but to the whole world.”

“The American Tragedy in Trilogy” is being published by Human Life International, a pro-ife ministry founded in 1981 that sponsors materials, conferences and mission trips to advise and inspire pro-life leaders, families, seminarians and students.

“They’ve done a superb job, not just for me, but for the HLI mission of exposing the lie of contraception and the harm it does to women and families,” he said. “I’m grateful to be a small part of their work.”

He indicated the trilogy, while honest and realistic, ends optimistically.

“The trilogy will end on a very hopeful note I assure you,” he said. “But by no means has the darkness reached a crescendo. By no means has it peaked in our time.”

Gail spoke to a crowd at Bonfils Hall on the campus of the John Paul II Center in Denver earlier this  month. In his lecture, “Fatherhood in a Fatherless World” he called on men, in particular, to teach their children to say “no” to self and “yes” to God.

You can listen to this lecture online.

Brian Gail spoke with ZENIT about the importance of the Pope’s teaching for people today struggling to be holy despite the negative influences around them. He addressed in particular the conflict that people feel in reconciling “the American dream” with the universal call to holiness.

In fact, Gail’s first novel, “Fatherless,” which recently hit the Catholic bestseller list, deals with these everyday battles men are confronted with such as holiness in the workplace.

In his trilogy, Gail incorporates his experience as a husband, father and grandfather, a former semi-pro athlete, and a retired CEO and entrepreneur. Currently, he writes, educates, and gives talks worldwide.

The second book of his trilogy, “Motherless,” is due to be released in a few weeks (by Human Life International). The third book, “Childless,” is currently being written.

Part 1 of this interview appeared Tuesday.

ZENIT: You’re coming from the world of business, and from what I understand, you’ve been a successful businessman. How does the theology of the body, as you’ve understood it, relate to the business world?

Gail: It is about subject and object. John Paul II’s paradigm works for power, profit, and pleasure.

He said that it is no less ruinous to the man himself to objectify another man or woman for profit, or power, than it is to for him to objectify his own wife for pleasure.

The God who made each of us in his own image and likeness as a subject does not wish another of his creatures to regard the other as an object.

In the wife’s case, the woman’s case, she is a co-heir, she is co-equal. She is not an object.

What the theology of the body does is become a catalyst in the soul of a man to have to address that fundamental truth.

Do I love completely, authentically, unreservedly, unconditionally, my wife, in her totality, in her authenticity?

And as a businessman called to live the same Gospel, do I treat my employees, labor (if I represent capital and they represent labor) do I treat them as objects or as subjects? Are they just mere mechanisms for my profit? Interchangeable? Faceless? Anonymous, without rights? Or do I have an accountability to recognize each and every one of them as a subject too?

Before I got my first position as a CEO, I went to my confessor and spiritual adviser and I said, “Father, how do I be a good CEO?”

He said, “Get to know your people.”

I said, “Father, I will get to know my people.” We had hundreds of employees, but I said: “I will get to know my people, believe me, I will do that. But how do I get to be a good Catholic CEO?”

He said, “Brian, get to know your people.” He would not say anything more than that. He would not add anything more because he wanted to full import of this statement to find its life in me.

And I’ll never forget the reaction I got when I decided to leave and take another job as a CEO — the outpouring of affection — and it came back to me: “You demonstrated that you knew us and we were important to you.”

I remembered what he said. He was not talking about the theology of the body. He was not talking about object and subject. And yet he was.

He was saying, get to know them, they’re subjects too — not subjects as in the right of kings — but rather, they are each a “you.” And I knew that they were, because I used to be where they were.

I realized that I had an accountability to them and their families in doing my job and exercising my fiduciary responsibilities. That’s a way a businessman is able to live the heart and soul and spirit of the theology of the body.

ZENIT: Do you see any sort of a conflict in the way a man might be drawn to give himself to his career, his work, and the way he is drawn to give himself to his family?

Gail: Sure. The great drama in our time, in my generation — I am in the first class boomer generation, ’46 — has been the reconciliation between the American dream and the universal call to holiness, which is self-mastery.

There have been many times that I erred on the side of pursuit of the American dream, many times when I pursued with a single-minded fury, determination and passion my success in the business world, perhaps to the neglect of my wife and family.

It is really, in our time, preternaturally difficult to reconcile the two, and even more so because the Clarion trumpet call of the Church’s raison d’être, which is the call to universal holiness, has grown fainter and fainter.

Thus all the businessman and husband who is out in the workplace hears is the drumbeat of the market. It is not offset by what he hears for seven to eleven minutes on Sunday.

ZENIT: Is there anything particular about the theology of the body that inspired you in writing your books, or that you brought into the novels?

Gail: I think the theology of the body is the quintessential solution for man’s most fundamental problem.

My read of it, and the rest of what John Paul II said — how the theology of the body works into his overall outlook — is that every human person is created in the image and likeness of God; every human person is therefore “sovereign” and has the right to pursue truth in any way he chooses.

Therefore, no man, no government — local, national, international — may impede that person’s progress, because he is created in the image and likeness of God. He has the right to pursue truth, goodness and beauty in any way that he chooses.

If he persists and does not stop along the way, he will ultimately seek and find the One whom he searches for, a Person, and he will cross in the process the threshold of hope, realize his ultimate goal and fulfill it.

He will encounter truth, but in the form of love, and recognize that truth is a primordial gift, from Love himself.

At that moment, like the rich young man in the parable, he has an accountability. He must either choose to conform his life to that truth, even to the shedding of blood, or to walk away sad because he had many possessions.

If he chooses to conform his life to it, he must then begin the lifelong work of self-mastery, because it is only the person who has mastered self who has something to donate.

And in understanding the acting person and the gift of self to others, this human person comes to the greatest of his needs, which is this authentic sense of self, of identity: the who, what and why, the metaphysics of his existence, so to speak.

In that he finds his peace, and in him finding his peace he is able to share that peace with others. That is how there is peace on earth and the kingdom of God is ushered in.

The fundamental issue today is that the human person has forgotten, or he no longer understands, his core identity. We’re in the midst of an identity crisis.

And the core issue of the core issues is that we’ve lost a sense of who God is.

Without understanding who God is, and who we are as a consequence of that — and I mean consequence — we are trapped in this sense of self, the mind of self, and we cannot get out. We are in a bubble and we don’t know how to solve the problems we are creating for ourselves. That is why we are teetering out of control and heading toward a bottomless black abyss.

ZENIT: What in your opinion is going to be the thing that brings us back?

Gail: I would say there will have to be — I’m going to use this word in the broadest possible terms — an intervention of some sort.

It could be something that we do to ourselves. On Sept. 12-13, 2001, [the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks], you could not get into a Church. I was downtown Philadelphia working in business, and the best I could do with my schedule was arrive right on time for the 12:05 midday Mass. It was so crowded that I could not get on the steps, let alone get inside.

But eight days later, I could get to the front of the Church. So maybe it is something that we do to ourselves.

Maybe it is something that is done to us, meaning the strike of some celestial body, a comet or meteor, whatever those things are that people are always worried about and Hollywood fictionalizes — some event that gets our attention and makes us realize that we are all one brotherhood.

Or maybe in this age of Divine Mercy, we will receive the penultimate mercy, and collectively, somehow mystically, we will get a full sense of who we are before God and how we would appear at the moment of our judgment.

Nothing less than that, in my opinion, will turn this around.

His first book, “Fatherless,” recently hit the Catholic bestseller list. The second book of his trilogy, “Motherless,” is due to be released in late October (by Human Life International). The third book, “Childless,” is currently being written.

In his books, Gail incorporates his experience as a husband, father and grandfather, a former semi-pro athlete, and a retired CEO and entrepreneur. Currently, he writes, educates, and gives talks worldwide.

Gail explained to ZENIT about how this trilogy follows a 40-year strategy against the family, incorporating historical facts and real life stories to illustrate the key enemies, heroes and plots of our time.

Part 2 of this interview will be published Wednesday.

ZENIT: Could you give us a preview of what we can expect in this trilogy?

Gail: It is called “The American Tragedy in Trilogy.”

It is about the demonic attack on family, and how it brought down one of the greatest empires in human history, how Satan took dead aim on family, in our time, in one of the greatest of countries — and civilizations actually — in the same way he did in the garden, through the big lie.

By taking father out of the home, taking mother out of the home, by creating technology that is all pervasive in the home, he prepares the soil for the ultimate solution, which is the life sciences revolution.

This will be the nullification of Genesis; it will be man creating man in his image and likeness.

The trilogy explores that Biblically significant (in my opinion) 40-year period, between morning in America — the 1980s — and midnight in America — the 2020s.

The first book picked up on pornography, cable porn in the home — in the sanctuary — and the Pill in the cabinet, and the devastation that these wreaked in the family.

The next step on the slippery slope is life in the Petri dish, life in the laboratory, created without the mothers; thus the second book is called “Motherless.” It covers in vitro fertilization, under the microscope so to speak, along with embryonic stem cell testing.

We move ultimately to “Childless,” set in the 2020s, when nanotechnology, the transhuman society, nanobots and hybrids, ultimately give rise to the “human species 2.0.” We’re all 1.0, whereas 2.0 means — as Ray Kurzweil, its herald, its “John the Baptist,” proclaimed in his last book — the fusion of what he refers to as biological intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Man, therefore, now having a computer inside of him, being part computer, has the capacity of a mainframe to zip, sort and compute. And even then they will introduce the virtual experiences into that software, which becomes neural implants in the minds of 2.0 humans.

We’re just a primitive version, and they’re at work on a refinement. They are going to fix the problems. They are going to do it out of subatomic particles that they themselves created. The technology was imbedded, not by a god, but they discovered it and so therefore in their own minds, in their own bubble, they are creating out of nothing.

The trilogy is about morning to midnight, about father to child, about, as John Paul II said, the final confrontation between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel.

ZENIT: In many ways we’ve been able to see the negative effects of pornography and contraception in a multitude of broken marriages and families, but we have not yet seen the long-term consequences of the widespread use of in vitro fertilization. What do you think will be its effect on society and the family?

Gail: I think there will be both a short-term and a long-term consequence of our society’s embrace of in vitro fertilization.

There is the immediate consequence of significantly adding to the estimated 500,000 embryos cryogenically preserved in some 225 storage facilities scattered across the country. These are children who were created outside the marriage act — often by married couples — and who are now motherless.

This is a human disaster of the first order — not just for the children who will eventually be chopped up and used for commercial research purposes (tissue for embryonic stem cell research) or simply discarded as refuse — but for the institution of family and, therefore, America.

Longer term in vitro fertilization, like its twin sister embryonic stem cell research, is simply the next steep slide down the slippery slope into the dark abyss that is the culture of death.

It is an essential demonic coordinate in the race to nullify in hate what God created in love.

It will lead inexorably to what are already being called transhumans — the fusion of artificial and biological intelligence in a new species of man some nanotechnologists are already referring to as “Homo Evolutus.”

This is nothing less that man creating man in his own image and likeness — a nullification of Genesis I. This pure hubris could well summon fire to fall from the sky.

ZENIT: In your book, “Fatherless,” you focus on the everyday conflicts that men in particular experience in daily life. What would you say is the most important point for men to remember in understanding how to daily seek holiness?

Gail: It is to be a father in a fatherless world, now that the currency has been devalued in the past generation and a half.

The father has to do one thing: He has to model and teach his children how to say no to self.

We have not been able to bridge the gap between what our technology permits us to do and what our hearts tell us we want to do. And unless a father can teach his child how to say no to self, he fails in his primary accountability in his vocation.

The great problem of today, the great existential crisis is this identity crisis man has because we have not been able to say no to self.

The secret is that a man can only say no to self if first he has said yes to God. A no to God makes a no to self impossible — not difficult or remote, but impossible.