The Truth of Catholicism. (Book Review).

George Weigel, The Truth of Catholicism, New York: Harper Collins, 2001, pp.126, $36.50 Cdn.

Weigel, author of the outstanding biography of John Paul II entitled Witness to Hope, here explores ten controversies related to the Catholic Church. He begins by recounting Evelyn Waugh's description of his Catholic life as "an endless delighted tour of discovery in the huge territory of which I was made free." To those attracted to or disturbed by Catholic teaching and the Catholic way of life, Waugh offered a simple invitation: "Come inside." It looks different, in other words, on the inside.

Weigel concedes that the Church is probably the most controversial institution on the planet: "Whether the question is the uniqueness of Christ, the meaning of freedom, the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, or the use and abuse of sex, the Catholic Church often finds itself a church of contradiction, in opposition to what seems to be the common wisdom of our times." Viewed from outside, it can seem narrow-minded, crabby, and pinched, "the heckling preacher of an endless string of prohibitions." Which is strange, Weigel say, "because Catholicism is about affirmation: the affirmation of humanity, and of every individual human life. .. ." Once inside, he suggests--following Waugh--that you may find that what seemed cramped and confining is a huge and liberating terrain on which to live a fully human life--and prepare for destiny beyond human imagining.

Some of the ten controversial questions he discusses are "Is Jesus the only Saviour?"; Does belief in God demean us?"; "Where do we find the 'real' world?"; and "How should we live (the moral life)?"; and "How should we love (the gift of sex)?" Over and over again, he asks or infers that we may be looking at a problem in the wrong way. For example, in his discussion of the "real" world, he says that Cardinal George of Chicago is often asked why the Church doesn't ordain women, and his answer, "You tell me what you think a priest is and we'll take it from there." The answer he gets is almost always a functional one: "If a woman can be a chief executive, why can't she be a priest?" Weigel says the question looks different if it is viewed through the prism of the sacramental imagination: suppose a Catholic priest is not a functionary but an icon? He is not someone who leads or stands in for the whole community, but an icon of Christ the high priest. The quality of all before the law is a bedrock principle of a just society. The variety of gifts given by the Holy Spirit, the different kinds of service rendered to the Lord, these are the bedrock reality of the Church, which is a communion of believers, not a nation state.

In a chapter headed "Is Catholicism Safe for Democracy?" Weigel discusses the charges made in Paul Blanshard's 1949 best-seller, that the Church is an "undemocratic system of alien control" in which lay people were chained by the "absolute rule of the clergy." A year later, in Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power, Blanshard compared two "alien and undemocratic centres," Moscow and Rome, creating parallels between their structures of power, management of truth, thought control, and strategy of penetration. Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray wrote at the time that this was not the old Protestant-based anti-Catholic nativism, but the view that democracy could not co-exist with transcendent moral norms. Only the Church stood in the way of radical secularism, a great political project to make the United States a country in which religiously grounded values have no place in public life.

There is a profound irony here, Weigel notes, Since the Church played a major role in the collapse of Communism in Central Europe and opened the way for democracy. But the critics of the Church today are in many ways the lineal descendants of Paul Blanshard. They see no place in a democratic society for the assertion of unchanging, binding moral norms--except for the "absolute truth" that there are "no absolute truths."

Weigel observes that the Church, on the basis of the experience of centuries, is convinced that, to make democracy work, people must have as their own the moral truths which teach us to be civil, tolerant, respectful--in a word, democratic. Such convictions do not come to us easily; they have to be taught. "And the Catholic Church does that, by teaching young and old alike the dignify of the human person."

In his last chapter, "What will become of us? Saints and the human future," Weigel points out that the twentieth century was a century of great fears, and therefore it produced a brilliant literature of antiutopias, chilling portraits of a dehumanized future. George Orwell's 1984 was one such book. It seems that Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World has a clearer view of the long-term threat to human freedom.

Huxley's novel, Weigel thinks, was astonishingly prescient about the possibility that biotechnology and eugenics could eventually remanufacture human beings and therefore the human condition. The world it depicts is not a world of terror like that in 1984; everybody is happy. One day, however, Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers who ensure stability in this "enlightened" world, receives a paper from a brilliant but erratic scientist, Bernard Marx. Mond decides that the paper cannot be published and that Marx will probably have to be confined because he is a danger to the public. Why? Because his paper suggested that there might be purpose in the world and in human lives. People in the Brave New World were conditioned to believe that happiness was the supreme good; if they took to believing that the goal was somewhere beyond, confusion and dissension would result. Huxley's utopia was a world of stunted humanity, of souls without longing, without passion, without sacrifice, without suffering. The people who created it were convinced that the world and the human beings inhabiting it are essentially purposeless.

So to the question "What will become of us?" the designers of this world gave the answer that they could create a world in which science had solved the problems of everyday living and no one was in need of anything which might contribute to his happiness. If purposelessness and randomness really do define the world and ourselves, Weigel writes, then one possible answer to the question "What will become of us?" is the dehumanization of Huxley's novel. We can put our faith in mundane happiness as the "sovereign good." But in a world that often imagines itself purposeless, Catholicism proposes a transcendent purpose for every human life; we must become saints. Discerning that vocation, giving oneself to it, and then dying in it is the drama of the Christian life as the Catholic Church understands it. So Weigel concludes, the brave new world tells us that we ought to settle for a middling happiness in a world free of trouble. Catholicism tells us not only that we are capable of greatness but that greatness is dem anded of us.

So Weigel ends his brilliant book by asking which you choose: "Which is the world on which you would want to bet your life?" He has not shied away from the most fundamental of questions.

David Dooley, Ph.D., is associate editor of this magazine.