Religion Booknotes.

Papal biographer George Weigel writes to the young in his latest book, though he is only a sometime teacher who conducts annual classes in Krakow for something called the Tertio Millenio Seminar on the Free Society. His main energies are devoted to punditry in Washington, D.C., as a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, but he writes about places all over the globe: Rome, Jerusalem, Mount Sinai, Birmingham (England), London, Baltimore, Krakow, Paris, and Milledgeville (Georgia).

Letters to a Young Catholic

George Weigel

Basic Books, $22.50, 251 pp.

The letters that make up this book are meant to describe for young Catholics what it means to be a Catholic--by highlighting places that shaped the author's own religious experience. Apart from Weigel's native Baltimore, it comes as no surprise that Rome and Krakow loom large in his consciousness. As the celebrated biographer of Pope John Paul II, Weigel naturally gravitates to St. Peter's Basilica and the excavations where the tropaeum (a memorial) of Peter rests in a cemetery beneath the basilica, which was first built by Constantine and later rebuilt by a series of Renaissance popes and architects. That place anchors Weigel's vision of the church and its Petrine origins. The other end of his spiritual axis is Krakow, the former home of John Paul II. Weigel's vision of Catholicism constantly comes back to Karol Wojtyla's vision of faith and theology. We get pages on Marian doctrine refracted through the symphonic theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the papal penchant for the piety of Grignion de Montfort, and an exploration of the pope's "theology of the body."

When he's not operating on a rarefied theological plane, Weigel's vision of Catholicism is deeply indebted to the Catholic revival of the twentieth century. He hymns the Catholicism of G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Evelyn Waugh. He waxes eloquent about Chartres Cathedral, which allows him to muse on the theology of beauty. He does likewise with the Sistine Chapel, rhetorically linking Michelangelo's ceiling with the pope's theology of the body. There is nothing systematic about his letters, but Weigel does hit the current hot-button items: women priests, sexuality, liturgical practices, and so on. In general, however, this book is free of Weigel's usual penchant for Pecksniffian attacks on "liberals," though he does deliver glancing blows at Karl Rahner, liturgical enthusiasts, and gay activists.

The Church's Bible

The Song of Songs

Translated and Edited by Richard A. Norris Jr.

Eerdmans, $40, 346 pp.

The Church's Bible is the inaugural volume of a highly anticipated series of commentaries on the major books of the Bible. The general editor of the series is Robert L. Wilken, the respected historian at the University of Virginia. The Song of Songs, while little read today except by lovers of literature, is one of the crucial texts for the development of Christian spirituality. Ascribed to King Solomon, it is the third wisdom book (after Proverbs and Ecclesiastes) which bears his name. Since the early church fathers saw Christ as the embodiment of wisdom, they scrutinized this work with minute care. They argued that Songs should be read after learning the life of virtue from Proverbs and gaining illumination from Ecclesiastes. In fact, Origen argued that the three paths of the spiritual life (purgation, illumination, and union) correlate with reading these three great books. The tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs stretches from Origen to mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.

This volume includes a lucid essay by Wilken on the Christian reading of the Old Testament and an informative introduction to the Song of Songs by Richard Norris. The meat of the book is a verse-by-verse English translation of the Latin Vulgate and Greek Septuagint followed by reflections taken from a range of patristic and medieval commentators. Some twenty commentators are cited, including major figures like Origen, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux.

In a sense, Norris had an "easy" task since Song of Songs is one of the shortest books in the Bible. Even a short book, however, provides a wealth of richness. After all, Bernard of Clairvaux gave eighty-plus sermons on Songs! I do not envy the editor(s) of the forthcoming volumes dealing, say, with the Psalms or the prophet Isaiah. In both cases, a verse-by-verse commentary may be impossible because of the length of the books and the mountainous commentaries on them.

The Church's Bible is the second such series of commentaries published in the last few years. The other is the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Inter Varsity Press) edited by Thomas Oden and Christopher A. Hall, which I reviewed earlier (January 15, 1999). Of the two, I recommend the Eerdmans because it uses fresher translations, gives longer citations, and provides better introductions to the materials. Still, both series are significant theological resources for biblical study. The rich patristic and medieval commentaries on the Bible are a reminder that centuries of scholarship have not exhausted this book's riches.

Behind Closed Doors

A History of Papal Elections

Frederic J. Baumgartner

Palgrave/MacMillan, $24.95, 272 pp.

The next papal conclave will operate under regulations established by Pope John Paul II in 1996. Those regulations refine rules made by Pope Paul VI in 1975, which were, in turn, refinements of procedures set out by Gregory XV in 1621. The process of electing popes has changed many times over the course of the church's history. The pope is the bishop of Rome and was once elected by the clergy and laity of the city. Eventually, that somewhat democratic procedure was restricted to the pastors of Roman parishes and the heads of the city's seven diaconal stations. It was only early in the eighth century that this body became known as the cardinal clergy, and only in the twelfth century that the phrase "college of cardinals" began to appear. Since then, cardinals have been powerful figures in Rome.

Baumgartner describes the machinations behind each papal election from the third century through modern times. Much of his book makes for less than edifying reading. One recalls Hilaire Belloc's quip that the sorry history of the church is proof of its divine protection because no mere earthly institution could survive its leadership.

Nevertheless, the book contains some wonderful nuggets. We are told of an incident in 1270 when the Roman people, irate over a four-year conclave, tore off the roof of the building where the election was being held to force the cardinals to choose a pope. We learn that Marcellus II (1555) was the last pope to keep his own name and that Pius V (1566-72), a Dominican, started the custom of the pope dressing in white. It's also interesting to learn that in the last six centuries, the papacy produced only three saints. Of course, many popes were notoriously corrupt; some of them named a nephew or two as cardinals to keep things in the family. In the eighteenth century, Clement XII named his nine-year-old nephew to the college. Other intriguing facts: It was Sixtus V who, in 1586, set the age limit for membership in the college of cardinals at seventy. (The limit is now eighty.) And the practice of burning ballots to create white smoke signaling the election of a pope is a rather modern custom.

The current rules governing papal election still call for secrecy (conclave is derived from cum clave: [locked] with a key). The process typically starts fifteen days after the burial of the pope and requires a two-thirds majority. Thanks to John Paul II, during the next election, the cardinals will live in more commodious accommodations than the jerry-built quarters once used within the Vatican. And, as has been the custom for centuries, odds-makers will offer their odds; but as the Romans say, chi entra papa esce cardinale: the one who enters as pope often exits a cardinal.

Dorothy Day

Portraits by Those Who Knew Her

Edited by Rosalie Riegle

Orbis, $22, 212 pp.

I met Dorothy Day only once when she visited Florida to spend a few days with her biographer, William D. Miller. Miller arranged for a group of us to hear her speak and I was so shy (I am not a shy person) that I never spoke a word to her. I do remember, however, a few things: the plainness of her dress, the beauty of her face. When a student asked if she could come north to volunteer at the Catholic Worker house in New York, Day told her that she would be welcome, but not to romanticize the poor because (in contrast to the 1930s) the poverty of the city carried with it the aura of violence.

My love of Day has been a distant, reverential one ever since the 1950s. It was then I purchased my first copy of the Catholic Worker from Ammon Hennacy, who was flogging the paper outside St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. I was a teenager, and I still subscribe today. How I loved to read Day's column "On Pilgrimage" and the frequently reprinted "Easy Essays" of Peter Maurin; how I admired the woodcuts of Ade Bethune, Fritz Eichenberg, and Rita Corbin. Books about Day and the Workers still pour off the presses, but rarely have I read one as interesting as this collection of reflections by those who knew her best.

The memories of Day that make up this book were collected and transcribed by Rosalie Riegle, a retired professor of English from Saginaw, Michigan. It is hard to encapsulate in a few paragraphs the many facets of this work. It came as a wonderful revelation that epithets like BS (articulated as real words) fell from the lips of this saintly icon (what will the saint-makers do with this?). It was powerfully moving to read about her final days when she was tenderly cared for by her doctor, Marion Moses. It is intriguing to learn that Day found consolation in the fact that the late Michael Harrington left the church not because of a woman but because of "theology." It is equally edifying to hear that living without a mate was a real cross and that Day deeply loved Forster Batterham, the father of her child, until the day she died. Her flashes of anger, her moments of pique, the consolation she found in literature and opera, her sadness that she had not been a better mother, the squalor in which she was so willing to live, her unrepentant commitment to the politics of the Left, her profound life of prayer--all these emerge in the stories and remembrances collected in this volume.

Why are such things important? Because if Day is canonized it would be a rare moment in which a truly human person, described from so many angles by such a diverse cast of characters, would be held up as a model of what it means to be a saint in the contemporary world. Should she be canonized? That question, I gather, is much discussed in Catholic Worker circles. My opinion: if she is canonized, let it not be a way to domesticate the power of her witness. Robert Ellsberg, writer and editor of Orbis Books, has it right when he says that Dorothy Day is a "common ground" saint: she challenges activists to love the church and conservatives to heed the radical demands of the gospel. That strikes me as a fair description of what Day's life was all about.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.