Father Flanagan Laments: A Satirical Novel Father Flanagan Laments, a Rabelaisian satire of religious and sexual mores, follows the hilarious struggles of an all-too-human man of the cloth as he grapples with his inner demons and the hypocrisies of church and community. He is sustained, through all his many moral failures and struggles, by his absolute belief in a future where he sits through eternity at God's feet. Denny Goetz's writing has been compared to that of Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh, Lenny Bruce, and John Kennedy Toole, and it would serve readers well to approach his novel with a healthy impatience with hypocrisy, a well-developed sense of humor, and an appreciation of the contrary forces tugging at Flanagan. Father Flanagan Laments finds humor in the disparities between church teachings and social reality. Read this lampoon. You too will finally laugh.