Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit.

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit by Gary Wills (New York: Doubleday, 2000); 326 pp,; $25,00 cloth.

--reviewed by Edd Doerr

On July 11, 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution (H. Con. Res. 253) by 416 to one (Democrat Pete Stark of California) "strongly objecting to any effort to expel the Holy See" from the United Nations General Assembly as a "permanent observer." The resolution, sponsored by Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey, was aimed at countering the See Change campaign--initiated by Catholics for a Free Choice and supported by more than 500 organizations in the United States (including the American Humanist Association and the International Humanist and Ethical Union)--which seeks to terminate the arrangement by which the Catholic church (the Holy See) enjoys a preferred status at the UN denied to all other religious and lifestance groups. The church has used that privileged status to thwart efforts to have the UN deal more adequately with population growth and women's rights issues.

Smith's resolution garnered nearunanimous support because a great many members of Congress mistakenly feared offending Catholics--a fear based upon the erroneous notion that the pope and bishops speak for and represent a majority of Catholics in the United States. As I have pointed out numerous times in the Humanist and elsewhere, the Vatican's authoritarian leadership is out of sync with most Catholics on such key issues as contraception, abortion, divorce, clerical celibacy, the ordination of women, and education.

The Smith resolution highlights the importance of the just-published book, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, by eminent historian and devout Catholic Gary Wills. In this book, Wills makes it abundantly clear that the papacy has long engaged in an Orwellian "selective manipulation of history" in the interest of advancing papal power at the expenses of truth and such basic human values as freedom of conscience. He zeros in on the Vatican's misrepresentations regarding the Holocaust and anti-Semitism (a topic explored last year by John Cornwell in Hitler's Pope) and on its "dishonesties" in dealing with contraception, clerical celibacy, ordination of women, and coverups of clerical child abuse.

Wills wants a reformed and democratized Catholicism and repeatedly decries the "structures of deceit" which for so long have been such a notable feature of papal power politics and centralized authoritarianism. Politicians and U.S. citizens generally of all persuasions need to recognize that there are in reality two Catholic churches: one, a power-hungry oligarchy; the other, the vast majority of quite ordinary people who, we might note, helped put Bill Clinton in the White House twice.

Wills' book deserves the widest circulation.

Edd Doerr's latest book is Catholic Schools: The Facts (Humanist Press).