Bare ruined choirs? - Review - book review

Papal Sin
Structures of Deceit
Garry Wills
Doubleday, $25, 326 pp.

The Catholic church, Garry Wills believes, is locked into "deep structures of deceit" by an overblown papolatry, whose determination never to admit error dooms the modern papacy and along with it the whole church to a fundamental dishonesty, "the cumulative product of all the past evasions, the disingenuous explainings, outright denials, professions, deferences, pieties, dodges, lapses, and funk." All this saps honesty and, by inflating the church's claims beyond reasonable bounds, helps create among educated Catholics, in Cardinal Newman's words, "a habit of skepticism or secret infidelity as regards all dogmatic truth." With provocative irony, Wills titles the final section of this denunciation of papally driven deception, Splendor Veritatis, "The Splendor of Truth."

Wills's specific targets are, on the whole, a predictable round-up of liberal Catholicism's usual suspects. These include the church's sorry record over the Jews, and the aggressive and overbearing manner in which the nineteenth-century papacy opposed modernity and had itself declared infallible. But most are issues of sex and gender: the papal prohibitions on contraception and abortion, the church's practice and teaching on the indissolubility of marriage and on annulment, the exclusion of women from the priesthood, clerical celibacy and its consequences. As Wills sees them, these deceits result in clerical hypocrisy, the sexual exploitation of women by priests, widespread active homosexuality among the clergy, and pedophilia and its coverups.

On some of these issues Wills writes compellingly. An appalling chapter on the refusal of church authorities in Dallas, Texas, to take seriously or act on reports of sexual abuse by local priests illustrates the misery that can flow from the self-protecting determination of an institution to suppress scandal without eliminating its causes. He dwells powerfully also on the gap between the theoretical justifications for celibacy, in terms of spiritual heroism and availability to others, and the sometimes shabby deceits by which men ill-suited to it maintain the fiction of celibacy. Though I found myself dissenting from much of the detail of what he had to say on the current attitudes of the church toward the Jews, he rightly targets the inadequacies of the Vatican's Holocaust document "We Remember," whose unappetizingly defensive tone stands in such sharp contrast (though this came too late for Wills to comment on it) to the open-hearted imaginativeness of John Paul II's words and actions during his recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

And Wills makes one telling theological observation. Those who maintain that the church's teaching on such issues has never changed, he argues, are

compelled to subvert tradition, by inventing new arguments and justifications for their chosen positions as the old reasons become indefensible. So, he suggests, the real reason for the exclusion of women from the priesthood was that they were believed to be inferior or at any rate naturally subordinate to men. Now that this can no longer be acknowledged as a justification, it is claimed that the sex of the officiant at the altar is iconic, without which the priest would not be perceived to act in persona Christi. Similarly, according to Wills, clerical celibacy was imposed on the church at large because even married sexual activity was believed to defile the purity of the ministers of the sanctuary. Now that this denigration of the dignity of the marriage bed is no longer acceptable, the rule of celibacy is justified by the allegedly greater availability of the celibate for universal love. Such "jerry-built contrivances" are "shoved under" tottering doctrines and practices to keep them in place, and the result is "the quiet corruption of intellectual betrayal." Whatever one thinks of Wills's particular examples, he is certainly right in his claim that what passes for "traditionalism" in the church is often in fact an authoritarian insistence on the status quo, liable to be subverted or at any rate troubled by proper attentiveness to the complex reality of the tradition.

In the end, however, there is something repellently illiberal about Wills's angry liberal certainties, his wholesale and unqualified conviction that every right-thinking Catholic must agree with him, and that the positions he rejects can be held together by nothing except rank tyranny and the intellectual equivalent of quantities of chewing-gum. Every issue he discusses is open and shut, and he finds in the standard works of biblical commentary or popular history on his shelves unchallengeable proof of his own views. Since, then, the Apostles were not bishops, Peter was not the first pope, the laying on of hands was merely a solemn form of Jewish commissioning for any responsible job, therefore hierarchy and priesthood are matters of mere ecclesiastical organization and there can be no reason to exclude women from the priesthood. Quod erat demonstrandum.