Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. By Garry Wills. Doubleday, 326 pp., $25.00.

GARRY WILLS identifies the foundational sin of the papacy not as pride, but as the deceit that cloaks sinful deeds in silence, denies error, or presents new theological justifications for no longer tenable positions. He inventories the "structures of deceit" that engender habits of skepticism or hypocrisy. The discrepancy between the private behaviors or beliefs of churchpeople and the Catholic Church's public teaching reinforce these structures of deceit. Will presents himself as a champion of honesty and truth in the tradition of St. Augustine, Cardinal Newman, Lord Acton and John XXIII.

Wills's book is a catalogue of all the predictable "hot topics" one sees in the press: Pius XII'S apparent failure to strongly oppose Hitler's genocide in World War II, Paul VI's encyclical prohibiting the use of artificial contraception, the exclusion of women from the priesthood, the discipline of clergy celibacy, homosexual priests, pedophilia, abortion and Marian devotions. The sensational value is high. And there is truth in much of what Wills relates. Sins and infidelities have been committed by every rank of the church's ministers. Ironically, however, Wills himself engages in misleading scholarship by not telling the whole story, by a selective reading of sources and by errors of fact and logic.

In several chapters Wills makes his larger point by recounting a particular story in some detail. He has chapters on Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe (both canonized for their martyrdom in the Holocaust) and on Edgardo Mortara, the baptized Jewish boy taken from his family by Pius IX. Wills argues that Stein died in the Holocaust because she was Jewish rather than because she was Catholic. It's true that Stein died because she was of Jewish descent--she would not have died if she had been only Catholic. However, her death was associated with her Catholicism insofar as Catholics of Jewish descent were targeted by Hitler only after the protest of the bishop of Utrecht. Wills interprets the church's canonization of Stein as a usurpation of the Holocaust. Do we need to dispute ownership as if she were the baby in the Judgment of Solomon? I don't think so. Let us mourn the victims of the Holocaust and be united in our common grief. On the other hand, the story about the baptized Jewish boy taken from his family and raised in the Vatican certainly strikes the contemporary reader as an appalling violation of fundamental family rights.

Wills's larger point, about the church's complicity in Hitler's atrocities and its underlying anti-Semitism, needs to be made on firmer historical grounds. Recent significant historical studies holding quite diverse interpretations of the period, such as those by Margherita Marchione, Pierre Blet, Roll Hochhuth and John Cornwall, demonstrate how controverted an assessment of this period can be. The problem is Wills's lack of nuancing. The more specific question of the extent to which we should hold Pius XII accountable for the fate of the Jews of Rome and elsewhere demands a study of how the Vatican's foreign policy was determined by the concordat agreements with other nations and an assessment of that strategy. Wills does not incorporate the historical investigations that significantly contribute to the resolution of this question. In the mixture of sin and grace which is the human condition, the church has at times been anti-Semitic and at other times heroic in working to save Jewish lives.

Wills needs to cite what the church is doing today to resolve this issue. Despite the inadequacies of the Vatican document "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" (March 16, 1998), the church does admit that the balance in Catholic-Jewish relations over 2,000 years has been "quite negative." In November 1999 the Holy See together with the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations commissioned a group of six scholars--three Catholic, three Jewish--to review the 12 volumes of archival documents of the Holy See already released for the World War II period.

While Wills's book was in press, on March 12, 2000, John Paul II presided at an historic service for a Day of Pardon. He asked forgiveness for the past and present faults of the children of the Catholic Church. Seven representatives of the Roman Curia acknowledged that "men of the Church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth." These included the use of "nonevangelical methods" in the service of faith; faults committed "against the people of the Covenant," Israel; sins committed against love, peace, the rights of peoples and the respect for other cultures and religions; sins that have wounded the dignity of women and the unity of mankind; and sins against the fundamental rights of human persons, including abuses against children, the poor and the unborn. This list substantiates many of the charges that Wills makes. The current papacy cannot rewrite history, but it does call for a reformed Roman Catholic conscience.