Books Examining the structures of papal deceit
PAPAL SIN: STRUCTURES
OF DECEIT By Garry Wills Doubleday, 304 pages,
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By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Fans of historian and author (and erstwhile NCR columnist)
Garry Wills were a bit disappointed in his 1999 biography of St. Augustine, not
because it was anything less than brilliant but because it was so short. At 152
pages, Wills seemed to be just warming up.
We neednt have worried. In Papal Sin, Wills puts his
extensive knowledge of Augustine, and the rest of church tradition, to work
illumining the structures of deceit he sees built into the Roman
Catholic papacy. His thesis is that every era of papal history has its own
besetting vice. The medieval papacy was consumed by lust for political power,
as the Renaissance popes were consumed by avarice for riches.
Today, Wills argues, the structural sin characteristic of the
papacy is intellectual dishonesty.
Because the papal system is incapable of acknowledging error,
Wills believes, it drives apologists into mental gymnastics to defend doctrines
for which there are no good arguments. For example, women were barred from the
Catholic priesthood because of antique beliefs about ritual impurity and
masculine superiority. Since it is no longer possible to invoke those
principles, defenders of the ban today are forced to claim that because Jesus
did not ordain women, the church cannot, an assertion that even conservative
Biblical scholars reject on the grounds that the historical Jesus had no
concept of founding a priesthood, let alone excluding women from it.
Official positions on womens ordination and other issues --
such as contraception, the churchs role in the Holocaust and mandatory
priestly celibacy -- are so deficient in intellectual credibility, so
disingenuous in their abuse of historical evidence, that a man condemns
himself in his own eyes if he tries to claim that he agrees with it,
Wills writes. This inner conflict, he suggests, is an unacknowledged factor in
todays priest shortage.
A case in point offered by Wills is the 1998 document We
Remember the Shoah, which was supposed to move Catholic-Jewish relations
forward by acknowledging the complicity of the church in fostering
anti-Judaism. Yet the document is mostly devoted to exonerating the church, as
opposed to some misguided believers, and blaming the Nazis for not following
the churchs teachings.
The truth, Wills argues, is that the church was shot through with
anti-Jewish attitudes for centuries. He points to a 1928 decision by Pius XI to
suppress a Catholic organization called the Friends of Israel. The pope
complained that the group did not take adequate note of the continual
blindness of this people and that its approach was contrary to the
sense and spirit of the church, to the thought of the Holy Fathers and the
liturgy. The mention of the liturgy was almost certainly a reference to
the notorious phrase perfidious Jews, repeated during Holy Week
until John XXIII removed it.
Pius XI drew a distinction between religious anti-Judaism, which
was acceptable, and its secular form, which was not. As Wills points out, the
most tragic aspect of this sorry episode is that a few years later, when Pius
XI asked the American Jesuit John LaFarge to prepare a draft encyclical
denouncing racism, the decree on the Friends of Israel was the closest thing to
a denunciation of anti-Judaism LaFarge could find in the entire corpus of 1,900
years of papal writings.
So it goes through a host of current hot-button issues within
Catholicism. The Vatican claims it cannot administer Communion to remarried
divorcees, for example, because that would compromise the integrity of a
sacrament founded by Christ; yet Wills shows that for the first four centuries
of church history, we had no concept of marriage as a sacrament. Augustine, for
one, discusses the characteristics of a valid marriage in detail without ever
mentioning acknowledgment by the church. (Augustine also had no concept of
penance as a sacrament, an ironic point for the author of the
Confessions.)
This is in many ways an angry book. Wills writes with the passion
of a faithful Catholic frustrated that his church, which has fostered such
heights of intellectual virtuosity, is also capable of such obvious duplicity.
This passion sometimes leads Wills to overly sweeping conclusions and
fingerpointing that seems excessive, but if so, it is the excess of prophecy.
This is not Wills best book, but it may prove to be among his most
important.
Wills will face accusations of disloyalty from Catholics steeped
in the ideology of the imperial papacy, for whom deference to the pope is the
sum and substance of their faith. Yet in his deep desire to see the church
realize its better self, Wills offers the loving criticism that only arises
from real faith.
As a young German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger put it in
1962: What the church needs today are not adulators to extol the
status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are not less than their
passion for the truth: men who face every misunderstanding and attack as they
bear witness; men who, in a word, love the church more than ease and the
unruffled course of their personal destiny.
Nothing could better express what Wills is after in Papal
Sin.
John L. Allen Jr. may be reached at
jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, May 26,
2000
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