SOURCE: Wheeler, Edward T. “An Unhappy Traveler.” Commonweal 122, no. 19 (3 November 1995): 20-1.

In the following review, Wheeler offers a generally negative assessment of The Sign of the Cross, noting that Tóibín seems to grow weary of his subject.

The Sign of the Cross is part story of a pilgrimage, part travel book which offers to take us in the company of its author on “Travels through Catholic Europe.” We go with Colm Tóibín, the forty-year-old Irish novelist, critic, and journalist, to many places: to Lourdes to bathe in the waters, to Seville to see the Palm Sunday procession, to Vilnius to try to understand the Lithuanian church, and, with dangers of war as backdrop, to Medjugorje in Croatia to a shrine of the Virgin. With the author we interview believers, converts, professors of literature, visionaries, and politicians; and with Tóibín, we “cheat” in...