Opposites detract.

The Truth
of Catholicism
Ten Controversies Explored
George Weigel
HarperCollins, $24, 208 pp.

Breaking Faith
The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism
John Cornwell
Viking Compass, $24.95, 307 pp.

Both of these books will probably sell quite well. Their authors are craftsmen of English prose. The books brim with wonderful rhetoric. Both are manifestos "courageously" setting out solutions to the problems with contemporary Catholicism. The authors' recent books on popes are bestsellers: John Cornwell's controversial Hitler's Pope and George Weigel's hagiographical Witness to Hope on John Paul II. They would each find the position taken by the other to be the problem with Catholicism today. And that's the problem with them.

Weigel's book will be greatly appreciated by those who think that Catholics must sing in perfect unison as conducted by John Paul II. Weigel's technique is to string together quotations with his own nicely crafted prose: In 157 endnotes, there are 70 citations to the present pope, 13 to theologians Ratzinger and Balthasar, 17 to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and 13 to literary sources. Of the 17 citations to Documents of Vatican II, the majority are to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Nothing new here. No controversies. No historical development. No room for other voices. Just the truth, eternally given in the present, glowing with certainty, a polished rock for beleaguered believers. We can climb out of the seas of confusion and find refuge from the storms of relativism on Weigel's Catholic Gibraltar: Belief in God is always liberating. The Virgin Mother is the image of the communion that is the church. The priest is an icon and, of course, women can't be icons of God incarnate. The moral life is one of virtue, but here are the rules (Kant would be delighted with this way of conceiving virtue; I am not so sure of Saint Thomas and Aristotle). Sex is wonderful, even liturgical--but only in lifelong, heterosexual marriage. Contraception is sin, but may be forgivable in confession even without a clear and firm purpose of amendment. Homosexual activity is wrong, and homosexuality is linked with aids (does Weigel still think this a gay disease?). Suffering is a good teacher and redemptive (really? always? for everyone?--I write shortly after September 11). Christ brings religious unity (tell that to the Muslims and Jews!). Making saints is an act of God, not of the church (the politics of saint making is, of course, irrelevant). Either buy into this myth, a "craggy world" of radical, saintly, extravagant self-giving, or buy into the brave new world of "rationally organized self-indulgence"! "Either/Or," but as written by a late twentieth-century bright-eyed propagandist, an Americanist Chestertonian.

Cornwell's thesis is that, despite all the great things he has done, John Paul II is leaving the church in a "dramatically worse state than he found it." The present pontificate construes constructive criticism as treachery. It is a Catholic Dark Age. The faithful are marginalized. There is a huge gap between official teaching and Catholics' practice and belief. The liturgy is in shambles. Cornwell rehashes disputes about the pelvic issues, abortion, homosexuality, non-marital sex, etc. He notes a lack of participation by nominal Catholics. (Although the United States is often criticized on this point, by any measure the ratio of active to nominal Catholics in the United States is about four times that of Western Europeans, and the abortion rate in the country is a quarter of that of Eastern Europe.) He retails again the sorry state of the priesthood, the disgruntlement of laity, the increasing patriarchalization of the church, and the marginalization of women. (I hear a women's Country and Western chorus singing in the background, "Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be clerics.") He rehearses some of the stories of Vatican disciplinary actions as crackdowns on independent thinking and creativity. He opines on the politics of sainthood and of the creation of Avery Dulles as a cardinal. The church of his birth, with which he broke faith for decades, and to which he returned before writing Hitler's Pope, is in the proverbial handbasket on the proverbial path.

Weigel and Cornwell seem to agree that centrifugal and centripetal forces are now tearing apart the church they each love. Weigel's solution is to return to the Eternal Truths of the present pope and to live obediently by the Rules as laid down by the divinely guided Vatican. Cornwell's solution is to soften the "my way or the highway" approach of Weigel's camp and to soften the discipline of the church while cleaning up the excesses of the liturgical reforms.

Those of us who are "true believers" in the present pope will cheer Weigel's book. And as a compendium of one strand of Catholic theology (a magisterial strand sounding all too hollow to many ears), it can't be beat. Those of us who are authentic hand-wringing liberals will find that Cornwell's book reminds us of what we rightly fret about. For a compendium of difficulties in the church, of errors made, and of suffering induced in believers, it can't be beat.

But the world is not as dark and bleak as Weigel suggests. Nor is the church so separable from the world. Neither is the church so dark and distressed as Cornwell portrays. Nor will watering down doctrine and discipline ease the problems.

Weigel rightly points out that the church is not a "denomination," which he identifies roughly with what sociologists call a voluntary association. If we follow his path, though, this big God-given church of and for sinners will become a narrow sect for the saved. Cornwell seems to want us to walk down a neo-Anglican path, with well-done liturgy and laxity in doctrine and morals, in effect to become a denomination. If we follow that path, the bark of Peter will lose all its moorings when still and its bearings when under way.

World Catholicism is a diverse communio. We strive to recognize a unity of prayerful faith in a diversity of cultural expressions. Globalization has given us instant communication that has highlighted more clearly than ever the diverse contemporary contexts in which we seek to live in and live out our faith. Historical investigations have taught us not only how wildly diverse have been the structures of our church and the expressions of our faith, but also how much the influence of the Christian tradition has waxed and waned in the lives of believers. We have only begun the process of recognizing that our faith is necessarily inculturated and that those inculturations, beginning with the church of Pentecost in Palestine, are truly and necessarily diverse. Despite our difference over time and space, we are in communion with the pontifex maximus, the great bridge-builder, and with each other in the communio sanctorum. If the church truly anticipates the reign of God, imagine how wonderfully and graciously diverse in practice and belief heaven must be! "Diversity" does not mean "anything goes," and "unity" does not mean that there is only "one true expression" of the faith--at least this side of the pearly gates.

Obviously, this reviewer finds neither book descriptively or prescriptively adequate, though others will find one or the other the best thing since whole-wheat hosts.

Terrence W. Tilley, chair of the theology department at the University of Dayton, is author of Inventing Catholic Tradition (Orbis).