The St. Peter Principle.

Why I Am a Catholic, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp., $26)

Edward Gibbon was a historian of staggering knowledge. When a new scholarly work appeared, he tells us, he took a stroll in his garden. He reviewed in his mind the subject of the book and what he already knew about it. Then he skipped those parts and read only the remainder, an approach that saved much time. For many books, he probably read only the table of contents.

That, of course, was Gibbon. Before opening Why I Am a Catholic, however, I decided to try that great man's approach: I organized in my own mind what I consider to be the established reasons for being a Catholic. I reduced them to four propositions:

1. The Catholic Church is the fullest expression of Christianity as rooted in the entire Bible from Genesis through the New Testament. Christian departures from Catholicism strike me as diminishments, Reformation amounting to subtraction.

2. An institution that has evolved over time, especially over a very long period of time, surviving many vicissitudes, enjoys a presumption of validity. It has lived with us. It is the result of experience and reflection, the latter by minds agreed to have been towering, as well as by the collective mind of millions. It deserves an overwhelming presumption in its favor as over against the prescriptions of individual idealists who, in comparison, are but the flies of a summer and whose visions possess either no actuality or no continuing existence. Jacques Maritain was right when he began his late masterpiece, The Peasant of the Garonne, by thanking God for the visible Church. Yes, thank God -- literally -- for the visible Church. I am even beginning to develop a fondness for the smell of candles, bad sculpture, and very dubious architecture.

3. The Creed is absolutely fundamental, as Mr. Wills masterfully explicates, and the institution of the papacy is necessary to protect the Creed from homemade opinions. The papacy guarantees the unity of the Church against what John Dryden characterized as a "downhill Reformation" into sects and schisms and eccentrically inspired individuals. As Matthew Arnold said, the Protestant principle is "individual judgment"; yet the vast majority of people cannot do the hard intellectual work that validates the analogical formulations of the Creed. As a result, unusual homemade religions proliferate.

4. That the Church has had imperfections should not be viewed as dispositive evidence against it. God writes straight with crooked lines; this is true throughout the stories recounted in the Bible, and -- as Garry Wills illustrates abundantly and very informatively -- it isis equally true of the history of the papacy. Father Andrew Greeley was correct when he said that "If you can find a Church that is perfect, by all means join it; but realize that, when you do, it has ceased to be perfect."

What is valuable, indeed irreplaceable, about the visible Church is addressed by Mr. Wills in this book, but he seems to be dragging it grudgingly out of his active and well-informed brain. Most of what he has to say about this historic institution is condemnatory; it apparently was wrong from the start.

That brings us to the genesis of Why I Am a Catholic. It is manifest here that Mr. Wills was both surprised and stung by the reaction of many Catholics to his 2000 book Papal Sin, the papal sin consisting of lies and cover-ups. The "structure" of the sin, he maintained, is lying to protect the Church from losing face, from scandals that might endanger its religious mission. (We have certainly seen quite enough of that recently from many Catholic bishops.) But many Catholics were outraged by Mr. Wills's comprehensive criticism of particular popes, and perhaps also by his tone of recrimination; they demanded to know why he considered himself a Catholic. This new book is his response, his testimony to and explanation of his religious beliefs. I find it moving, valuable, and persuasive: He is a Catholic. He is no Newman, but he felt obliged to respond, as Newman felt obliged to respond in his own famous apologia to Charles Kingsley.

Yet there remains in Mr. Wills's new book the same unsettling violence of emotion that marred his earlier one. In the opening autobiographical parts, he is candid in saying that on the very day he first entered a Jesuit seminary -- to which institution he owes his formidable classical education -- he considered leaving. Finally, he did. In cataloguing the lies and evasions of the popes he seems to have, often, a kind of glee. And sometimes he is wrong. In this book, for example, he defends his treatment of Pius XII in Papal Sin:

I did not claim, for instance, that he sympathized with Nazism; I do not think he did. I expressly stipulated that he might have had a justifiable fear that action on his part would hurt those it meant to help. I focused instead on his post-war claims that he had spoken out "several times" against the Holocaust. That was dishonest.

Here are the facts. On December 25, 1942, the New York Times editorially praised Pius XII's Christmas Message for that calamitous year -- and it certainly did not characterize as "silence" the pope's appeal on behalf of "hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their own part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or a slow decline." Here's what the Times editorial said:

This Christmas, more than ever, the Pope is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a Continent. . . . Because the Pope speaks to and in some sense for all the peoples at war, the clear stand he takes on the fundamental issues of the conflict has greater weight and authority. When a leader bound to impartiality to nations on both sides condemns as "heresy" the new form of national state which subordinates everything to itself, when he assails the exile and persecution of human beings "for no other reason than their race or political opinion" . . . the impartial judgment is like a verdict in a high court of justice. Pope Pius expresses as passionately as any leader on our side the war aims of the struggle for freedom.

Before he became pope, Pius had drafted Pius XI's strong anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender sorge ("With Burning Sorrow"). Because he spoke out so strongly in both cases, I suppose he might have done so "several" other times; he was hardly "dishonest" on this. Perhaps Mr. Wills was merely climbing on the fashionable bandwagon of Pius XII denigration.

On a quite different but much more important matter, Mr. Wills sometimes leaves the impression that he believes the Gospel narratives are weak as history. It may be true, for example, that the selections from prior material that went into the making of the Gospel of Mark were influenced by the doctrinal needs of a local church, but the figure of Jesus in that narrative is recognizably the same one as in the other narratives, which also have their own emphases. In my reading, Mr. Wills is simply wrong when he writes that as for this "main figure, Jesus, he is hieratic, moving through events as an embodied mystery, without any human psychology to be probed." C. S. Lewis thought Jesus to be one of the three most recognizable figures in narrative, the other two being Socrates and Samuel Johnson. (I would add Hemingway.) The voice of Jesus is unmistakable, not at all the voice of the narrators, who would have been incapable of inventing it. In a moment He could intuit the nature of a complete stranger, as He does in the case of the rich man who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus' presence must have been a powerful thing. Peter, on first meeting him, senses at once that He is something unusual; comical as Peter is, he does share a certain gift of perception with Jesus.

On the issue of the reliability of the Gospels, historian Stephen Neill gets it right: "When the historian approaches the Gospels, the first thing that strikes him is the extraordinary fidelity with which they reproduced, not the conditions of their own time, but the conditions of Palestine in the time and during the ministry of Christ." And no less than Paul himself testifies to a sense of the historical shared by the followers of Jesus. He writes in the famous passage, I Corinthians 15:3-6: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep." This epistle antedates the earliest Gospel narrative; the story now had to be written down because the witnesses were dying off. But Paul knew that witnesses are necessary to sustain the claim of fact. The history that exists in the narrative has not been dissolved by an assortment of critical perspectives.

Why I Am a Catholic has a firm structure appropriate to its purpose as an apologia. Its introductory autobiographical section includes an interesting account of Mr. Wills's brief association with National Review -- an association that foundered because of his approval of the revolutionary tactics of the black movement (in a glowing NR review of James Baldwin's contemptible The Fire Next Time) and of the antinomian behavior of the "kids" at Chicago in 1968. From all that, it was on to the Berrigans and other riffraff, and there I started to lose track of his rollicking adventures. The book then undertakes a long account of the rocky history of the papacy, an exaltation of Vatican II and John XXIII, and a setting forth of the terms on which Mr. Wills could approve of a much reduced papacy. It concludes with a masterful explication of the Creed.

Three writers who guide Mr. Wills throughout are Augustine, Newman, and Chesterton. Early in his career, Mr. Wills wrote a book on Chesterton; in 1999, he published a brief biography of Augustine that is a small classic. In the book under review he uses all three to excellent effect.

If Why I Am a Catholic has an adequate formal structure, emotionally it is a loose and baggy monster. Mr. Wills is passionately a Catholic; no one can doubt that. But he has a turbulent and furious desire to reinvent the Church, next Monday if possible, preferring his own vision to what in fact is or with prudent change might actually be. (A meditation on Montaigne's great essay "Of Experience" might calm his nerves.) All of which is merely to say that Mr. Wills is an intellectual -- and he knows, if only intermittently, that while existence is the fulfillment of idea, this fulfillment often appears only slowly in time. Such, indeed, is the doctrine of Incarnation.