Yesterday at long last, a copy of each of the Leibowitz/Miller books was in my hands and under my roof. Spent much of last night reading.

Robomatic, the Extreme Unction passage you describe is part of the apocalyptic ending of A Canticle for Leibowitz, in the final third of the book, with the sub-title Fiat Voluntus Tua, or Thy Will be Done. Yes, it is highly emotional, and good writing as well.

I believe I have hit upon a fellow author to whose work "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman," with all its controversy and polarizing of its readers, is compatible. That author is the late great Edward Abbey. Abbey is the aspiring novelist whose claim to fame is more due to his non-fiction than his fiction, the essayist who wrote jeremiads against the despoilers of the wilderness of the North American West (and Mexico too, to be fair).

The power-mongering and war/hostilities between different leaders of human societies, played out on the grasslands, plains, canyons, and high mountain desert of the American Southwest, is a setting in which Abbey would feel right at home. Abbey often stated that he wanted to be reincarnated as a buzzard -- and in "Saint Leibowitz," the buzzard is symbolic of the dark aspect of the Goddess of Creation, the Devouring Mother with her endless cycle of consuming and destroying her own creation so as to create anew.

No wonder the readers who felt at home, initially, with the cloistered patriarchy of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" were scandalized and horrified with the newer book. When people hate "Saint Leibowitz and the Horse Woman," they really, truly, madly, deeply hate the book: one reviewer went so far as to compare it to Philip K Dick at his most insane. I don't find the newer book insane at all; but then, I have a warm soft squishy spot in the cockles of my heart for Edward Abbey, who is brought to mind by so many passages in the book.