The Church of Wills. - Review - book review

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 328 pp., $25)

Ezra Pound once said of the Catholic Church that an institution that could survive the picturesqueness of the Borgias possessed a certain native resilience. Garry Wills is not in the same league as the Borgias, though not for want of trying. In Papal Sin he seeks to discredit virtually every distinctive feature of Catholicism, while claiming merely to be setting the record straight on the errors and "structures of deceit" that have grown up around the Vatican in recent decades. But there is reason to doubt this. Wills's properly purified Catholicism-theological dog ma aside -perfectly coincides with modern Ameri can liberalism. It is hard not to think that this unlikely harmony reflects a certain dogmatism of its own.

Wills is a gifted and remarkably productive writer. After brilliant graduate work in classics at Yale, he began writing for this magazine. But in the late 1960s, under the influence of the civil-rights and antiwar movements (particularly the Berrigans), his conservatism underwent a reversal. Now a professor at Northwestern, he often appears in The New York Review of Books and has received prizes, including a Pulitzer, for vigorous volumes on a variety of political and cultural subjects. Just last year, he published a deftly written brief biography of St. Augustine.

In the present work, however, Wills's anger at both Catholicism and conservatism often overcomes his learning. Strong pages on New Testa ment scholarship, Augustine, and 19th-century Catholic history are tacked on to relentless liberal polemics. Wills claims Augus tine, Acton, and Newman as his heroes, but it is doubtful those strict Christians would return any such compliment. Meanwhile, scholars and church figures who disagree with Wills's tendentious positions on a score of complicated questions are not simply declared wrong, they are explicitly called liars. It's no wonder that liberal- pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has expressed agreement with Wills and wondered why Wills is still a Catholic.

The author's argument unfolds in three main phases. First, he tries to show that the Church has lied about its treatment of Jews and its supposed silence during the Holocaust. Implying that an institution that would lie about that will lie about anything, he then turns to alleged doctrinal dishonesties internal to Catholicism. Finally, he claims that Truth itself explodes the truth-claims and authority of the Church as it currently understands itself. A logician might notice that these three subjects are not strictly linked (Catholic leaders might, say, misconstrue anti-Semitism in the Church in the past century yet still be right about the proper understanding of the New Testament). But to Wills, alleged Catholic anti-Semitism stems from the same spirit of untruth as the Vatican's denial of ordination to women, its mandatory priestly celibacy, its "homophobia," its allegedly obsessive concern with life in the womb, and its belief in papal infallibility.

The problem with this thesis is its own failure to tell the whole truth. Wills largely accepts John Cornwell's dubious claim that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope." Putting anti-anti-Communism to new uses, Wills believes that the greater Soviet threat led Pius to be silent about Nazi genocide, and that his successors have been forced to defend him. Whatever historians may eventually determine about the many actors- Pope, governments, Jewish groups themselves-who could have done more for European Jews, at the time Pius seemed outspoken to some observers. The New York Times editorialized about the Pope's "lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent" in the 1940s; today, the Times editors, forgetful of their predecessors, claim he was "shamefully silent." Einstein wrote to the paper in 1941 that he had never been interested in the Church until it alone began speaking in defense of European Jews. The chief rabbi of Rome effusively praised the Pope for helping save his people and later converted to Ca tholicism, taking Pius's given name, Eugenio. (His wife also converted, taking the name Eugenia.) What Wills dogmatically declares to be a flagrant instance of characteristic lying may in fact be an attempt to open current opinion to fuller truth.

Wills's views put him in strange company. He claims that the canonization of figures like the Polish saint Maxi milian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz, is an unsavory attempt to "usurp" the Holo caust. But it takes willful naivete to believe, as Wills does, that the Nazis arrested people like Kolbe for purely political, not religious reasons.

Kolbe's Catholicism was undoubtedly a factor. Thousands of Catholics and Protestants were threatened and then arrested by the Nazis; thousands of priests wound up in Dachau and many others were forced into labor camps. Mussolini convinced Hitler that it was a bad idea to take on the Church directly: Such persecution usually winds up destroying the persecutors and strengthening the Church. So even as they rounded up thousands of priests and lay people who were later martyred in various ways, the Nazis always claimed that they were moving only against their political enemies. In private, though, Hitler spoke of crushing the Catholic Church "like a toad."

Wills ignores all this because he wants to use the Holocaust as a springboard to further arguments against the Church. In fact, a great deal of the truth remains to be told about the ways Christians were persecuted under Nazism. Re covering that truth in no way "usurps" the Holocaust, nor does it make un seemly claims of Christian victimhood. Rather, it would remind us of what Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg argued openly: Nazis had to oppose so-called negative Christianity precisely because they thought the "political Jew Paul" had made it into an instrument for turning the Aryan race into Semites.

Since Wills is quite capable of simplifying recent history to fit a thesis, it is no surprise when he does the same with the more distant Christian tradition. On issue after issue, he pieces together interpretations from recent secular and Biblical scholarship, which cumulatively-and miraculously-reveal that the ancient Mediterranean provided us with a creed remarkably similar to the most recent Democratic party platform.

Take sexuality. Christianity radically altered the sexual ethos of the ancient world, crowding out male-male eroticism and raising the status of women and girls, who were often victims of infanticide. This was one reason many women became Christian. In step with modern feminism, Wills only notices the growth of "the great Christian lie about women." On homosexuality, even the most ingenious modern scholars cannot entirely get around certain Biblical texts. So Wills is forced to make weak arguments that the "abomination" in Leviticus 18:22 is outmoded ritualism, and that Romans 1:27 might actually condemn pederasty instead of what it says literally ("men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error").

Wills takes a similar tack on abortion. There may be nothing in the New Testament about it, but neither does Wills go out of his way to remind anyone that very early Christian documents like the Didache condemn it. There is a presumption in Scripture, and in most human societies, against taking human life. Augustine and Aquinas, Wills contends, are uncertain of when "ensoulment" occurs and a full human being is present. Many modern Christians may be equally uncertain yet decide that respect for life means we should err on the side of life, just as we don't shoot into a thicket until we're sure a deer, rather than a person, is there. But Wills and those who agree with him take this uncertainty as permission to abort without limit. There is a brief nod to respect for life: "Though the fetus may not be a person, it is human life, it has the potential to become a person. It is something that should not lightly be done away with or deprived of respect." In the end, though, it seems that this principle would pose no serious obstacle to any abortion among the 1.3 million peformed in America annually.

On internal Church matters, too, Wills seems to think himself more authoritative than the Pope and the Christian tradition. Thus, women should be allowed to be priests, even though Wills thinks the Catholic notion that priests transform bread and wine at the consecration is magical nonsense. Wills assures us that "the Pope [i.e., John Paul II, a Polish authoritarian] has made the number of priests dwindle sharply by insisting on celibacy." Since, according to Wills, priests are living a sexual lie in large numbers and are gay in increasing percentages, they should be allowed to marry. But whatever the explanation for the recent crisis of vocations in developed nations, celibacy cannot be the only reason. The same discipline was in place in 1950, when there was no vocation crisis, to say nothing of 1850 or 1450. And John Paul has stimulated a modest increase in vocations.

So we have Garry Wills calling us to a True Church that has never existed, Catholic or Protestant, and we might ask why he bothers. Perhaps he imagines that, like a modern Luther, he will spark a new Reformation. But the churches that have liberalized the most have experienced the sharpest decline in numbers, while the ranks of evan gelicals and Catholics are growing. The latter two groups will surely not be reading this book, and anyone who already agrees with Wills will not need to. Though Wills claims to be describing a church of love, not rigid dogma, he scorns those who disagree with him. And his truth- claims ride roughshod over a lot of inconvenient truths. It is unfortunate that someone with Wills's gifts should have yielded to this exercise in hubris.

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