True or false reform? (Books).

Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust

By Justus George Lawler, Continuum International, 2002, $24.95 (cloth).

IN A LETTER APPEARING in the Sunday New York Times (February 2, 2003), Justus George Lawler refers to an article on the CostaGavras movie, "Amen," which is based on the play, "The Deputy," by Rolf Hochhuth. The article, "Power and Silence in the Vatican," was written by Alan Riding who noted that Pius XII's alleged failure to condemn the persecution of the Jews was attributed to his "fear of German reprisals." Lawler points out that Hochhuth had written another play, now relatively unknown, "The Soldiers," in which the Anglican Bishop Bell, concerned with the slaughter of non-combatants, tries in vain to persuade Churchill to stop the Allied saturation bombing--specifically the bombing of Dresden, a refuge for children as well as the aged and infirm, which was destroyed a few months before the end of the war. It is ironic, suggests Lawler, that the pope had over and over condemned, without any "fear of German reprisals," the destruction of civilian centers at a time when it was the Luftwaffe that was almost e xclusively the guilty party.

Popes and Politics emphasizes this irony by noting that Churchill was asked to take action in order to prevent what international law and the Geneva Conventions forbade. Pius XII was allegedly asked to speak against the unprecedented attempt to destroy a whole people. For his "silence" he has been condemned in a flood of publications appearing in the wake of "The Deputy," and continuing up to the present--Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning being the latest. The irony is redoubled inasmuch as Pius's condemnation of "city busting" or "carpet bombing"-as a more calloused era would call it--was totally ineffectual, while it has become almost axiomatic that his condemnation of the Holocaust would have significantly curtailed if not prevented it altogether.

Lawler without exonerating Pius is equally persuasive that the excommunication called for by James Carroll and now Goldhagen would have had no effect since the majority of murders were from roundups by the Reich security forces. The SS and the Gestapo along with their cohorts were--by shootings and other direct means--responsible for more deaths than were the gassings in the death camps. Rabid hatred for the Jews made such men so intent on killing Jews that they persisted even up to the very last days of the war. The Times letter leaves it up to the reader to deduce why there are no celebrated movies of "The Soldiers" fifty years after its events occurred, or no books on Churchill that look at his whole career through the single lens of the obliteration bombing that left a fifth of all German homes destroyed.

This discussion serves to illustrate how Popes and Politics highlights the kinds of historical insights and distinctions that make it particularly significant amid the swirl of epithets and counter-epithets relating to Catholics and the Third Reich. But this is not a book on the church and the persecution of the Jews. In fact, the distinguished scholar, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, in The Jerusalam Post, "Warts on 'The Body of Christ"' (August 30, 2002), begins his article: "To understand the focus of this profound and original meditation on the interplay of theological conviction and political reality we have to ignore the allusion to 'the Holocaust' in the title...., because Lawler has sought--successfully in my view--to place that acutely contemporary issue into the more profound context of the on-going struggle for reformation and renewal in Roman Catholic Christianity."

In addition to the chapter on "The Pope and the Shoah: Proclamation v. Reprisal," other chapters relating to that "more profound context" are "Gaining Perspective: 'About a Little Book'"; "Squinting at History: The Rhetoric of Stigmatization"; "Skewing Catholic Scholarship: The New Papaphobia"; "Contextualizing Papal Sins: A Cautionary Tract on Reform"; then come two chapters called "Beyond the Politics of Rancor" subtitled respectively "The Varieties of Personal Renovation" and "The Vagaries of Institutional Renovation." The guiding spirit of these chapters explicitly about renewal is Yves Congar, whose still untranslated Vraie et fausse Reforme dans l'Eglise Lawler introduced in Commonweal several decades ago and to whom this book is dedicated (along with Henri de Lubac).

In the midst of a raft of books by authors who, whether from left or right, have distorted history in order to exalt or denigrate the institutional church, Lawler nevertheless describes his book as "cautiously optimistic" about the future of reform. He acknowledges with many of the people he criticizes the importance of the revolution of Vatican II; but unlike them he doesn't think John XXIII is "an inimitable exception." (In fact, he finds in John Paul II's continuing effort to eradicate two millennia of antisemitism a revolution in many ways more radical than that initiated by his predecessor.) And he notes that the reform of Catholicism from Leo XIII is an exception, as is that of the Council of Trent, the Council of Constance, the political-ecclesiastical reform of Hildebrand, and so on. "Ultimately the Incarnation is an exception [one of the rare places where Lawler displays a non-Scotist bias], history is an exception. Spirit emerging out of the primordial planetary mass is an exception."

He draws on an image from physics to describe the "homeostatic principle" that maintains an equilibrium or, better, a reciprocal causality between center and periphery, between the church teaching and the church learning. Drawing on physiology he affirms that in the institutional church, in "this mystical/historical body," there is an immune-suppressive system "called Providence" which comes into play when the equilibrium is threatened. He cites the historical example of the infection known as the "imperial papacy" in the thirteenth century and the counterbalance to that over-centralizing impetus in the emergence of the mendicant orders and the universities. Closer to the present are the figures he cites most frequently as countering modern centralizing trends: the British Cisalpinists and the French Gallicanists, along with de Lamennais, Rosmini, Newman, Acton, Blondel, Ireland, Bernanos, Maritain, and Congar.

If balance is the leitmotif of Popes and Politics, it does not describe Lawler's characterization of those he calls "ideological denigrators" and "ideological consecrators" of the papacy. These are, respectively, the "papaphobics" and the "papaloters" (Garry Wills's term) alluded to above. He accuses both groups of dishonesty and deceit (including Mr. Wills who applies those adjectives to every modern pope but John XXIII) and itemizes specific instances of the exercise of those traits, It is the means employed, not the ends, that he condemns in the ideological denigrators, for he is clearly sympathetic to democratization, to women's rights (he is a leading publisher of feminist theology), to intellectual freedom. He is not only sympathetic but insistent about concerns for social morality replacing the present preoccupation with personal, i.e., sexual morality. Indeed, he maintains that one of the "signs of the times" is the present-day church's status as the only truly global faith community in history; and i t is this that mandates a focus on such global issues as poverty, AIDS, human rights. "Mandates" evokes "mandatum" and Lawler clearly delights in puncturing, often with texts from Cardinal Newman, any indulgence in that curious academic innovation.

The book was written before the pedophile scandal roiled the American church, and one wonders if Lawler would temper his judgment that "the episcopate constitutes the central element in any reform effort." He bases that judgment on the theoretical ground that the bishops- responding to the laity's genuine and forthright "free speech in the church"--mediate curial regulations and act as a filter for aberrant Roman impositions on the faithful. True, he observes that "there is small hope" if the bishops are "ambitious only to rise in the petty world of church politics"--but that ambition does not seem to have been an issue in the scandal of sexual abuse. Rather what the bishops in question displayed was a contentment with their own mediocrity, a go-with-the-flow status quo smugness.

Better a grand inquisitor, one might say, than a petty administrator.

Popes and Politics began with a dedication to Father Yves Congar and quoted his words to the author: "An intellectual seeker is not able to work under the lash. It is impossible to have creative thinking without having the freedom to scrutinize, without having a certain freshness of perspective." In 1958 Congar was, the dedication says, a "spiritual exile in Strasbourg." The book closes with another quotation from the Dominican theologian six years earlier when he was accused by Vraie et fausse Reforme of having influenced various renewal efforts that went astray: "Reading the manifesto of their youth, I fear that they find nothing great in the profound truths which the saints have lived in the church and for which at this very moment confessors are offering without glory before the eyes of men, their health, their liberty, and the very life of the body." Congar, along with scores of others cited in this book, was among those unknown confessors; and there are uncountable numbers of them living in today's chu rch. This book may give them solace.

Ellen Arl is a professor at the University of South Carolina, Sumter, where she produces and hosts, Ex Libris, a book-talk show on South Carolina Public Television.