The triumph of wills.

IN 2002, Garry Wills--the distinguished NATIONAL REVIEW alumnus long renowned for his dissents from Vatican orthodoxy--published a book titled Why I Am a Catholic. ("Some who have read this book," he later admitted, "still ask why I am a Catholic.") His answer in that volume boiled down to an effort to disengage the concept of Catholicism from that of the papacy, and the idea of the papacy from the papacy as it has actually existed. This distinction between Catholicism-as-idea and Catholicism-as-organization has been much favored by liberals in recent years, but it has been useful even to conservatives. In a recent Weekly Standard article, for example, First Things editor Joseph Bottum marveled at the contrast between the vigor of Catholic philosophy in the American public square (as represented by, among other things, the prospective Catholic majority on the Supreme Court) and the weakness of the Catholic institutional hierarchy: "We may be seeing the emergence of one of those uniquely American compromises: A Catholic philosophical vocabulary is allowed to express a moral seriousness the nation needs, on the guarantee that the Catholic Church itself will not much matter politically."

What distinguishes Bottum's analysis here from that of Wills is a clear sense that Catholicism has a unique contribution to make to the general project of Christianity. Wills's Catholicism, in contrast, often reduces to a "mere Christianity" in which Catholic distinctives, while they can certainly be preserved for sentimental reasons, exist chiefly to provide a rich target for debunking. Take, for instance, the classic text from Matthew 16, used by Catholics for centuries to defend the institution of the papacy: "You are Peter [rock], and on this rock I will build my church." Wills has puckishly suggested an alternative interpretation of this passage, one based on the Gospels' portrayal of Peter's inconstancy: "[W]as Jesus teasing Peter when he called him 'Rocky,' naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?"

In his most recent book, What Jesus Meant (Viking, 176 pp., $24.95), Wills continues this project. Jesus, he writes, mandated neither a hierarchical Church, nor a papacy, nor a priesthood.., and so on. To many Catholics, this will be disturbing and possibly even offensive; little of it should be controversial among Protestants, at least of the low-church type. But a representative of the latter group is entitled to ask: Does the Willsian debunking of Catholicism add anything of value to Protestantism as it already exists? He is a Catholic who is highly skeptical of the Catholic distinctives; is there anything specifically Catholic that he wishes to contribute to Christianity in general?

The answer to these rhetorical questions, delightfully enough, is yes. A couple of months ago, the notoriously prolific Wills published another book, The Rosary: Prayer Comes Round (Viking, 190 pp., $24.95), which is an excellent work about a specifically Catholic form of devotion that deserves a lot more attention from other branches of the Christian community. The rosary is a combination of repetitive prayers (the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Doxology) and meditations on New Testament scenes (referred to as "mysteries"). Owing to the repeated prayers, it has been viewed with great suspicion by Protestants anxious to avoid the "vain repetitions" Jesus warned against (Matt. 6:7). But as Wills makes clear, the repetitions are actually a great aid to contemplation: "Changing the rhythm of one's life, freeing the mind to move in a different way, involves slowing down the tempo of thought, entering a stalled state." The idea is not to wear out the divine Hearer with a rote recitation, but to calm the mind of the one who is praying--and thus enable him to focus on the Bible scenes being meditated upon. I would add another consideration: The chief impediment to prayer is distraction, and the rosary helps solve this problem by building the distraction into the prayer itself. If the mind wanders from the mysteries, it can wander to the repeated prayers--and vice versa. To wander away from the prayer entirely requires more than the usual amount of mental agility.

Another objection frequently raised to the rosary is that the prayer most frequently repeated with in it is addressed not to God, but to Mary. Is this not idolatrous on its face? Wills ably explains that this asking for Mary's help is not idolatrous; it is, he writes, merely "to rely on our fellow member of the mystical body of Christ." It is standard practice among Evangelicals to ask our fellow church members to pray for us; the Hail Mary simply extends this practice to the woman who was the Church's first member. (Anyone whose theological conscience absolutely forbids addressing in prayer--of any kind--a non-Divine person can replace the Hail Mary with another short prayer, e.g., "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner." What's essential for this form of devotion is to preserve its two-track structure.)

In 2002, Pope John Paul II expressed the hope that the rosary could become "an aid and ... not a hindrance to ecumenism." Garry Wills's fine book offers--from a surprising quarter--a substantial boost to the effort to bring Christians together through this marvelous form of contemplative prayer.

* It is chastening to realize that the most recent crop of college graduates were barely entering elementary school when the Berlin Wall fell; to them, the Cold War is simply not a living memory. In The Cold War: A New History (Penguin, 333 pp., $27.95), John Lewis Gaddis--a distinguished specialist on the period--has written an excellent summary of that conflict involving the enslavement of millions.

The key to writing history, it has been said, is to capture the sense that events could have turned out differently; and it is on this level that Gaddis scores his most impressive success. In retrospect, it is obvious that Brezhnev and his fellow Kremlin gerontocrats were rattling sabers at the Free World from behind the palisades of a monumental Potemkin village: a society that was a failure in every respect, and offered no realistic hope to the world. The role of the visionary, in this case Ronald Reagan, is to discern what will become obvious long before it appears to everyone else as such. Reagan saw, writes Gaddis, "that the Cold War ... had become a convention: that too many minds in too many places had resigned themselves to its perpetuation. He sought to break the stalemate--which was, he believed, largely psychological--by exploiting Soviet weaknesses and asserting western strengths."

A broader point Gaddis makes is that the West's victory in the Cold War was, in essence, a triumph of people power. The detente system that froze so many people into totalitarian regimes, Gaddis says, "might have lasted if elites still ran the world, but deference to authority was not what it once had been." From Berkeley, to Prague, to Gdansk, to Tiananmen Square, to the pulling down of Saddam Hussein's statue in central Baghdad: This is not the trajectory campus Maoists and Che-T-shirt wearers would have envisioned. But it may indeed be that Ronald Reagan has turned out to be... the Ultimate Sixties Hero.

* A wise maxim teaches that one mustn't let school interfere with one's education. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has been publishing an impressive series of brief "Guides to the Major Disciplines," to help college students--and others-explore academic disciplines in ways that resist the fads of the PC academy. The most recent addition to the series is A Student's Guide to Religious Studies (ISI, 108 pp., $8), by church historian D. G. Hart, who provides not just sound recommendations for outside reading in the field of Western religion, but an insightful history of the role religion has played in U.S. education. Hart debunks the myth of a Golden Age of Christian higher education in America: "As friendly as the colonial and denominational colleges were to faith ... the explicitly religious content of their undergraduate curricula was minimal." And, throughout the book, he offers hope that even today's highly secularized universities if approached in the right spirit--can be the arena for a beneficial intellectual encounter on religious subjects.

* The man behind Narnia emerges as a lovable and fascinating figure in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him (Ignatius, 509 pp., $16.95), edited by James T. Como. This is the third edition of a work originally published in 1979, and its 24 essays capture the spirit of a man who has charmed and inspired countless readers.

* The year 2005 made Americans more aware than ever before of the importance of an effective system of disaster relief. In the small and moving book His Name Is Today: Bob Macauley and AmeriCares (Jameson, 203 pp., $25), author Bill Halamandaris tells the story of the entrepreneur who founded AmeriCares--the world's largest private relief agency, which is often the first private group on the scene when natural or manmade disaster strikes. The book's epigraph, from Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, refers to a child in need: "To him we cannot answer 'Tomorrow.' / His name is 'Today.'"