Completing our education, reinvigorating our faith.

Why I Am a Catholic

Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 390pp)

GARRY WILLS' WHY I AM A Catholic completes the education that most of us never got. Catholics have never been taught a lot of church history. The catechism, yes; church history, no. In his new book, Why I Am a Catholic, Garry Wills makes it very clear why. To teach a person church history can make it very difficult to shape them into the kind of institutional Catholic that the institution wants them to be.

At the same time, ironically, Why I Am a Catholic completes the very kind of Catholic education that stands to make a very committed Catholic. During my first time in Rome in the 1970s a wise old monk told me in the midst of my frustration with the enormity, distance and pomp of the system: "Everyone who comes to Rome for the first time should come for at least four weeks. In the first two weeks, we all lose our faith. In the last two weeks we put it back where it should have been in the first place--in Jesus." Clearly, in this book Wills is doing the same Thing for us. In showing us the underside of church history, he frees us to rethink Jesus.

Wills himself demonstrates what it means to be a thinking Catholic, an educated Catholic, a Catholic who is more immersed in the faith than in any of its present structures.

THE VERY STRUCTURE OF THE book plunges a person into the reality that was classic US Catholic in World War II America. Wills looks at three major dimensions of a Catholic culture: Its early formation, its historical reality and its spiritual foundations. Each of them affects the other. Each of them is tested by the other. And, ironically, each of them to mature must be able to stand free of the other.

Wills spends the opening chapters of the book detailing his own standard-brand formation in Catholic schools, parish catechism classes, a Dominican high school and eventually a Jesuit seminary. He is, in other words, Every catholic in his immersion in a Catholic ethos that made religion a series of exercises, the priesthood an elite class and the pope a stand-in for the present voice of God. Wills' upbringing, in other words, is not unlike most of the rest of his generation. He describes a home and a life that revolved around a parish, a school, and a religious order. Most of all, he recalls for us all the rules that gave coherence and credibility to each of those elements. In watching his life develop, we remember our own. He did what good Catholics did everywhere: he obeyed, he prayed, and he aspired to sanctity as defined by the institutional church. At the same time, he became a voracious reader, a serious student and, somewhere over the years, a thinker and scholar, as well. It is what he discovered as a scholar and how it affected his own thinking as a result that both explains and legitimates the kind of thinking that is now permeating the rest of the modern Catholic world. Why I Am a Catholic leads all of us to examine the foundations of our own Catholicity. It is required reading for the Catholic today who finds her/his church life in tension with his/her faith life.

Wills the historian, in part two of the book, looks at the history of the papacy from the time of Peter--who was anything but pope in the modern sense of the word--to John Paul II with his attempt to "restore" the Vatican Il church to its Vatican I clerical controls and papal power. In the course of the exercise, Wills does two things: first, he looks squarely at what over time became a clear divinization of the papacy; second, he confronts us with the political, moral, and social history of the papacy, much of which was saved from total theological debacle either by outside political forces or the pressures of conciliarism. It is not a pretty picture. It is a history of papal bastardy, murder, election fraud, and military mayhem or, in later ages, of political intrigue, monarchical ambitions and theological resistance to science, conscience and the democratic state. And all of them aided and abetted by a commitment to clerical control and ardent anti-intellectualism.

THE QUESTIONS THAT EMERGE IN this section are enough to make any church-goer quiver: if popes were all infallible, what happened when we had three of them at one time, which we did, and one of them was murdered by another? If the infallible one got murdered what happened to infallibility then? Or better yet, perhaps, when popes were wrong, theologically as well as socially, and had to be corrected by councils or princes, did their infallibility make wrong right? When people refused to overthrow their secular or Protestant governments, as was required of English Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth, or the separation of church and state was denounced, as it was in the case of the Americanism heresy, were Catholics in sin for continuing to cooperate with these public institutions?

Saddest of all, perhaps, is the fact that the third segment of the work documents the present dangerous tendencies to restore as "of God" both clericalism and new forms of thought control. Then, the question becomes: in our own time, when members of the curia attempt to cancel the decisions of Vatican II itself, or the role of episcopal conferences or the place of collegiality in the church, is it of the essence of the faith to submit to such remakings in the name of papal infallibility?

Wills' review of situations in which the church has led Peter rather than Peter leading the church provides a sobering insight into the place of unity in tension and tension in unity if the church is ever to be whole. It gives hope for the synthesis that must surely emerge out of our own times of transition from a theocratic to a universal understanding of the role and place of the church in society.

BUT THE BOOK DOES NOT END where it began, in the faith of childhood. Nor does it end in bitter repudiation of the faith in the light of the frailty and often downright sinfulness of its structures. Instead, it ends just where my old monk friend said that any confrontation with the church as institution must. It ends with Wills' own clear understanding and staunch clinging to the essential elements of the faith. Wills' position is more than clear. True, the institution is often at cross-purposes with itself, always cumbersome, ever in process, truly a pilgrim people and never more obvious in that than when the papacy itself stumbles along the path. But under it all, Wills reminds us, is the presence of God, the call of Jesus and the ongoing work of the Spirit. The book takes us far beyond the ground rules of the catechism to the mysticism of the Creed.

Garry Wills' Why I Am a Catholic is not an exercise in idle criticism. It is an exercise in the kind of commitment that sees faithful critique as the ground of conversion and faith as the foundation it takes to both grow through criticism and transcend it at the same time. I repeat: Garry Wills' Why I Am a Catholic completes the education that most of us never got but, for the sake of the church, should certainly pursue. Of one thing I'm sure: we could all become better and truer Catholics for having read this book.

SISTER JOAN CHITTISTER is a leading voice in contemporary spirituality and church and world issues. A widely-published author, columnist and noted international lecturer, she is currently the executive director of Benetvision: a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality. Her next book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Wm. B. Eerdmans), will be published in the spring of 2003.