Bare ruined choirs?

Papal Sin
Structures of Deceit
Garry Wills
Doubleday, $25, 326 pp.

The Catholic church, Garry Wills believes, is locked into "deep structures of deceit" by an overblown papolatry, whose determination never to admit error dooms the modern papacy and along with it the whole church to a fundamental dishonesty, "the cumulative product of all the past evasions, the disingenuous explainings, outright denials, professions, deferences, pieties, dodges, lapses, and funk." All this saps honesty and, by inflating the church's claims beyond reasonable bounds, helps create among educated Catholics, in Cardinal Newman's words, "a habit of skepticism or secret infidelity as regards all dogmatic truth." With provocative irony, Wills titles the final section of this denunciation of papally driven deception, Splendor Veritatis, "The Splendor of Truth."

Wills's specific targets are, on the whole, a predictable round-up of liberal Catholicism's usual suspects. These include the church's sorry record over the Jews, and the aggressive and overbearing manner in which the nineteenth-century papacy opposed modernity and had itself declared infallible. But most are issues of sex and gender: the papal prohibitions on contraception and abortion, the church's practice and teaching on the indissolubility of marriage and on annulment, the exclusion of women from the priesthood, clerical celibacy and its consequences. As Wills sees them, these deceits result in clerical hypocrisy, the sexual exploitation of women by priests, widespread active homosexuality among the clergy, and pedophilia and its coverups.

On some of these issues Wills writes compellingly. An appalling chapter on the refusal of church authorities in Dallas, Texas, to take seriously or act on reports of sexual abuse by local priests illustrates the misery that can flow from the self-protecting determination of an institution to suppress scandal without eliminating its causes. He dwells powerfully also on the gap between the theoretical justifications for celibacy, in terms of spiritual heroism and availability to others, and the sometimes shabby deceits by which men ill-suited to it maintain the fiction of celibacy. Though I found myself dissenting from much of the detail of what he had to say on the current attitudes of the church toward the Jews, he rightly targets the inadequacies of the Vatican's Holocaust document "We Remember," whose unappetizingly defensive tone stands in such sharp contrast (though this came too late for Wills to comment on it) to the open-hearted imaginativeness of John Paul II's words and actions during his recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

And Wills makes one telling theological observation. Those who maintain that the church's teaching on such issues has never changed, he argues, are

compelled to subvert tradition, by inventing new arguments and justifications for their chosen positions as the old reasons become indefensible. So, he suggests, the real reason for the exclusion of women from the priesthood was that they were believed to be inferior or at any rate naturally subordinate to men. Now that this can no longer be acknowledged as a justification, it is claimed that the sex of the officiant at the altar is iconic, without which the priest would not be perceived to act in persona Christi. Similarly, according to Wills, clerical celibacy was imposed on the church at large because even married sexual activity was believed to defile the purity of the ministers of the sanctuary. Now that this denigration of the dignity of the marriage bed is no longer acceptable, the rule of celibacy is justified by the allegedly greater availability of the celibate for universal love. Such "jerry-built contrivances" are "shoved under" tottering doctrines and practices to keep them in place, and the result is "the quiet corruption of intellectual betrayal." Whatever one thinks of Wills's particular examples, he is certainly right in his claim that what passes for "traditionalism" in the church is often in fact an authoritarian insistence on the status quo, liable to be subverted or at any rate troubled by proper attentiveness to the complex reality of the tradition.

In the end, however, there is something repellently illiberal about Wills's angry liberal certainties, his wholesale and unqualified conviction that every right-thinking Catholic must agree with him, and that the positions he rejects can be held together by nothing except rank tyranny and the intellectual equivalent of quantities of chewing-gum. Every issue he discusses is open and shut, and he finds in the standard works of biblical commentary or popular history on his shelves unchallengeable proof of his own views. Since, then, the Apostles were not bishops, Peter was not the first pope, the laying on of hands was merely a solemn form of Jewish commissioning for any responsible job, therefore hierarchy and priesthood are matters of mere ecclesiastical organization and there can be no reason to exclude women from the priesthood. Quod erat demonstrandum.

History for Wills, as for his model, Lord Acton, is an arsenal of cautionary tales, demonstrating again and again how all those mean old guys got it wrong. The history of the papacy in particular is an endless saga of tyranny, crassness, and self-interest. Wills makes much of the disturbing story of Pius IX and his godson, the Jewish boy Edward Mortara, baptized by a Christian nurse while dangerously ill, and subsequently taken from his parents and educated as a Christian, ending his life as a devoted Catholic priest. Wills is understandably scandalized by this heart-breaking story, but the case for him has no nuances, no moral ambiguities. Mortara was just a scalp on the papal teepee, a testimony to the moral blindness of Pius IX. Wills has no sense that to leave a technically Christian child in a non-Christian home might actually have presented a real dilemma even to good men in another age, that a nineteenth-century pope might sincerely have conceived his responsibilities in terms other than those that seem self-evident to a twenty-first-century American. If any parallels to the case of Elian Gonzalez occurred to Wills, he does not mention them.

The limitations of Wills's approach are on display in his discussion of "Marian Politics." For Wills, the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary is essentially a ghastly mistake, propagated by the papacy, which has idolatrously exalted a creature in the place of her Lord, oppressed women, denigrated sexuality, usurped the proper role of the Holy Ghost, and infantilized the clergy. Mary, for him, "is the mother of Jesus' weakness, not his strength," and traditional Catholic exegesis of the Cana story, notably that of the present pope "eager to foist his view of the mediatrix on the revealed word," has got it "exactly backward." Wills betrays no sense at all that a millennium and a half of Marian devotion, art, and theological reflection might be something other than a blind plunge into misunderstanding and alienation, that the figure of Mary might have offered the Christian world a legitimate vehicle for the exploration of a multitude of themes--the place of the feminine in the church, the relationship between nature and grace, the cooperation of the creature with its creator, the historical rootedness of the messiah, and the role of nature and nurture in his human formation. Wills takes us on a walk round the art galleries of Florence, in search of bad theology. Pausing in front of Botticelli's Coronation of the Virgin, an exquisite celebration of the transfiguration of human vulnerability by grace, shrinking vernal nature made immortal by the Incarnation, Wills sees only a piece of papal propaganda (though the picture was not a papal commission). God the Father, he notices, is wearing a papal tiara, "a comparison of the pope to God." Before Orcagna's representation of the Apostles at Pentecost, gathered round the statuesque figure of the Virgin as the dove descends, Wills tuts in disapproval, because the Apostles appear to venerate the Virgin, not the Spirit. He seems blind to the astonishing theological complexity of this image of the church, as male Apostles bow in deference before a strongly feminine figure. Indeed, in Botticelli's archaistic version of the same scene, which Wills must have walked past in the Uffizi, the Apostles reel and cringe in disarray as the fire falls, while in the midst of them the Virgin gazes upward in prophetic rapture, her prominent belly pregnant with the church's future, her hands raised in the traditional "orante" position like a priest's at the altar, an unforgettable theological vision of the church which eludes Wills's reductive analysis.

To a Catholic living in Britain, Wills's book seems symptomatic of the profoundly polarized state of American Catholicism. Most intelligent Catholics will share some of Wills's concerns, and all will surely applaud his insistence on the need for truthfulness in the church. Yet it is hard to know what to make of a Catholicism so profoundly at odds with itself. Wills recently published a book titled A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, in which he defended the role of federal authority. But distrust of the church's government, and of the church's past, looms everywhere in the book under review. It is of course prudent not to take officials, even Christian officials, at their own estimation. In the end, however, Wills's critique of the present state of the church is a monologue, which attributes no worth to opposing positions, and which envisages no function or motive for ecclesiastical authority except ignoble and overbearing self-interest. Cardinal Newman, one of Wills's truth-telling heroes, thought the life of the church involved a complex interplay--and tension--between the elements of prophet, priest, and king. Prophecy meant intellect, theology, and its demands; priesthood meant the prayerlife of the church and its spiritual and intuitive dimension; while the royal element of the church was its organizational and historical dimensions--structure, hierarchy, tradition. For Newman true Catholicism involved an endless struggle to hold these differing energies in balance, privileging none over the others. He would have hated this book.

Eamon Duffy is Reader in Church History in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. He is the author of The Stripping of the Altars and Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, both published by Yale University Press.