Winter Books:
That
rarest of birds
By JAMES T. FISHER
Twenty-five years ago, as a nervous incoming student at a
Jesuit university meeting for the first time with my freshman adviser, I
blurted of having recently read Garry Wills Bare Ruined Choirs, a
1972 chronicle of Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion that
greatly excited me. The young Jesuit adviser listened sympathetically before
calmly replying: Next time I see Garry I am going to punch him in the
nose.
He was miffed at Wills highly skeptical account of Woodstock
College, the Jesuit theologate that had been moved from rural Maryland to
Manhattans Upper West Side in the late 1960s. My adviser seemed to link
the recent demise of this daring experiment in urban engagement with
Wills depiction of the program as after all, a failure, a
place where unfocused dabbling in community organizing had supplanted
purposeful theological studies.
Wills is that rarest of birds, a Catholic public intellectual
whose dramatic account of the churchs travail engages readers both
faithful and secular. Though I was dimly aware that Wills had himself been a
Jesuit seminarian in a different era, I was startled to discover that a
journalistic treatment of contemporary American Catholicism could arouse such
strong feelings in an adviser whose scholarly concerns ran toward European
theologians of daunting remoteness.
Wills knew all about those folks, too. As a journalist and
historian, in fact, he had it all: the rhetorical skills of a classicist, the
rigor of a scholastic and a wee touch of the literary brawler so highly valued
in the age of Mailer. For Catholic readers especially it was a thrilling mix.
In a 1975 essay for The New York Review of Books (reprinted in Lead
Time: A Journalists Education), Wills described George Wallaces
appearance at the previous summers Democratic Party midterm convention.
Wallace was a relic, he wrote, tended and dressed, wheeled
around and displayed, like a political Infant of Prague.
Long before sportscasters began invoking the Hail Mary
forward pass, Wills applied the collective memory of American Catholicism to
public affairs with no special pleading, just the weight of his impeccable
intellectual authority. Currently an adjunct professor of history at
Northwestern University, Wills is the author of more than 20 books on topics
ranging from Jack Ruby to Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson to John Wayne.
Wills new book, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit,
might best be understood in the light of the cultural capital earned in these
bold and provocative works. Papal Sin is, however, a very different kind
of study. It offers an angry polemic rather than a fresh look, and it lacks the
originality that readers have come to expect from the author. But how could it
be otherwise, given the lavishly documented post-conciliar history of
grievances with the Roman Catholic church Wills recapitulates and embellishes?
Wills thus finds the papacys inadequate response to the Holocaust
grounded in the same structures of deceit that bolster the
churchs teachings on birth control, priestly celibacy and womens
ordination. What reader of NCR and other Catholic publications in recent
decades is not familiar with this refrain? In Bare Ruined Choirs, Wills
concluded that it was time to join the underground of prophetic
Catholic radicalism. Nearly 30 years later, as many younger Catholics find a
radical alternative in orthodoxy, Wills now proffers a jeremiad for the
revolution that never was.
Mantra-like rhythm
In Papal Sin, the Vaticans structures of
deceit are invoked with a mantra-like rhythm that often substitutes for
extended analysis. That is not to say Wills lets selected pontiffs off the
hook. Paul VIs 1967 encyclical on Priestly Celibacy is excoriated as a
parody of exegesis
New Testament passages are twisted, omitted,
extended, distorted, perverted to make them mean whatever the pope wants them
to mean. He deconstructs the same popes arguments from natural law
in Humanae Vitae with relish and a flair that few journalists (and fewer
scholars) can match. Wills account of the ill-fated pontifical commission
on birth control blends passion with erudition; the story has been told many
times before but never with the rhetorical flourishes Wills unleashes. His
handling of this and other controversial topics will undoubtedly come in for
close scrutiny by specialists: If we are lucky, the results will provoke
vigorous discussion.
Though Wills ardently calls for a new openness to history within
the church, he seems to assume that rigorous historical investigation will
serve to validate his point of view alone. Yet reformers and traditionalists
alike have been guilty in recent years of distorting history in the heat of
battle. Wills eloquence should by no means encourage readers to embrace
Papal Sin as the last word.
As a polemic, Papal Sin is devoid of many features found in
Wills best books. In the past, he has unearthed obscure or long-forgotten
figures and used them as a kind of lens to mediate a new understanding of
prominent individuals we thought we already knew. In Bare Ruined Choirs,
for example, he revealed the indebtedness of the Jesuit visionary Teilhard de
Chardin to the writings of Robert Hugh Benson, a son of the archbishop of
Canterbury who converted to Catholicism and wrote spiritual adventure stories
in a seizure of apostolic scribbling. In Nixon Agonistes,
among the greatest of books on American political culture, Wills followed the
trail of his subjects early influences to Fr. John Cronin, an exponent of
Catholic social thought and an anticommunist whose 1947 meeting with Richard M.
Nixon determined the outcome of the Hiss case. Wills bold
assertion that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were deeply influenced by
the Scottish Enlightenment (in Explaining America: The Federalist) was
prompted in part by an unpublished 1943 dissertation by historian Daniel
Adair.
In each of these works, Wills located sources from outside the
dominant traditions of scholarship, a move rooted perhaps in his Catholic
education and his experience as a countercultural conservative
journalist in the early 1960s. There is no corresponding method on display in
Papal Sin, perhaps because Wills story is already too familiar to
admit the kind of fresh insight his hard work has generated in the past. His
account of the role played by the American Jesuit John LaFarge in drafting Pius
XIs hidden encyclical condemning anti-Semitism, for instance,
opens with high drama but falls flat in the telling. The existence of this
unreleased document was first revealed in 1972 by Jim Castelli in NCR.
In his introduction to the 1997 English translation of Georges Passeleq and
Bernard Sucheckys The Hidden Encylical of Pius XI, Wills wrote
that both LaFarge and the pope fought with such weapons as were given
them, blindly but in motion toward the truth. In Papal Sin, however,
Wills claims that even though Pius XI wanted to tell the truth
he
was the pope, and that can make telling the truth impossible. John
LaFarge was thus drawn inexorably by the pope into the structures of
deceit that afflict those trying to tell the truth from the Vatican.
LaFarge may have been capable of writing an encyclical to meet
Wills standards (though the surviving version indicates otherwise), but
his prior encounters with African-Americans surely raise doubt. It is no
discredit to his pioneering work in the Catholic interracial movement to note
that LaFarge was highly paternalistic in his treatment of black Catholics, a
trait well documented by historian David Southern in John LaFarge and the
Limits of Catholic Interracialism. Thomas Turner, the leader of the
Federated Colored Catholics, complained in 1933 that LaFarge and his Jesuit
colleague William Markoe tried to grab the land, put up their flag and
claim the country for their own, precisely what Wills accuses the papacy
of doing with the memory of the Holocaust. In such highly polemical works as
Papal Sin, context tends to run down a one-way street.
Dissent becomes tradition
In Papal Sin Wills cannot find a fresh angle from outside
the dominant scholarly tradition because dissent already is the tradition, at
least at it has unfolded in the mainstream of American Catholic theology. Just
as secular academics on the left eschew their undeniable hegemony in many
humanities disciplines, dissenting Catholic theologians tend to nurture a
mythology of embattlement (and not without reason since they are indeed
embattled!). But they rarely acknowledge the extent to which they have helped
shape theological discourse here and abroad for the past 35 years, producing,
on balance, a finely wrought body of scholarship that is often more subtle than
Wills presentation.
In his treatment of Marian politics, for example,
there is no mention of recent feminist scholarship that has portrayed Mary in
far richer terms than as a stick to beat smart girls with, in
novelist Mary Gordons dismissive words. Wills wants us to believe that a
dissenting historical scholarship can speak truth to Vatican power, but
speaking power to power would be a more accurate metaphor for the
dynamic currently in play.
Wills accuses the Vatican of claiming victimhood in the Holocaust
but he likewise sees only victims among opponents of the churchs official
teaching. He never acknowledges even a hint of self-interest in the positions
espoused by critics of the papacy. He is also highly deferential to secular
sources of authority. While he concedes that a fetus is human life,
Wills notes approvingly that womens right to an abortion has been
upheld by the American Law Institute, the American Medical Association, and the
American Public Health Association. Yet abortion is not a thing
that can be proposed as an ideal, so it should be avoided,
principally by all safe measures of birth control -- the one effective
antiabortion measure the Vatican will not allow.
Wills suggests that, in some cases at least, abortion is not
a choice that would arise if the Vatican were not always and everywhere opposed
to condoms and other birth control devices. If Wills demands that church
take its cues from rights enshrined by the secular state, he is
certainly not guilty of promoting cafeteria Catholicism: Practice
should conform to teaching, but the teaching cannot reclaim its moral authority
until the papacys structures of deceit are dismantled.
In this view, as in so many other respects, Papal Sin
reflects the sensibilities of a Catholic liberalism forged in the Vatican II
era. That will be obvious to most readers. It is often forgotten, however, that
Catholics of Wills generation were first raised in a militantly
anticommunist religious subculture. Wills himself has written poignantly (in
Confessions of a Conservative) of growing up a Catholic cold
warrior, praying after Mass every day for the conversion of Russia. Like
so many of his generation, Wills would not begin to question my own
cold-war mentality till the 60s, when the Indochina engagement looked not
so much imperial to me as dumb.
The embarrassment Catholic liberals came to associate with
anti-communism may account for the muted response of many to Pope John Paul
IIs role in the rise of Solidarity and other movements of resistance
against communism. Wills does not indicate whether he believes that this
powerful witness was rooted in yet another structure of deceit. Yet
the contrast between Wills persistent focus on individual rights in
Papal Sin and the churchs broader engagement with issues of social
justice around the world is hard to overlook. There is no mention in Papal
Sin of the social encyclicals or of the work being performed by thousands
of young Catholics inspired by the tradition of Dorothy Day and the Catholic
Worker movement, toward which Wills has expressed great admiration in the past.
Days blend of fidelity to the magisterium and harsh critique of consumer
capitalism resonates more powerfully than ever with many students at Catholic
colleges today.
Many older Catholics find the rage for orthodoxy among some young
people disconcerting, as though they were incapable of appreciating the
struggles of the past three decades to make the church safe for
critical/historical self-scrutiny. Yet Papal Sin betrays the same
tension between Wills prophetic and historical voices that has marked all
of his writings on Catholicism. As early as 1965, in an essay for Daniel
Callahans still-fascinating anthology, Generation of the Third
Eye, Wills insisted that young Catholics must trade their mirrors for
windows and become more familiar with the theology of the Mystical
Body than with the sociology of [Catholic] ghettos. This was advice even
his papal targets could have endorsed. In 1972 the sociologist Will Herberg
wrote in National Review that Wills (in Bare Ruined Choirs)
is capable of flashing insights that reveal the inwardness of a situation
in a quite spectacular manner. But Garry Wills is also a radical, and, like all
radicals, he suffers from the characteristic disease of radicalism -- a
foreshortening of historical perspective.
Disinterested scrutiny
The power of Bare Ruined Choirs -- as the critic John
Gardner noted that same year in The New York Times Book Review -- lies
in Wills ability to link the crisis of the church to that of
American civilization as a whole. In the year 2000 the similarly
apocalyptic tone of Papal Sin seems incapable of shaking the view of
many on the outside that the church is simply irrelevant. To Richard Rorty
(also writing in the Times), Wills splendidly passionate
polemic only begs the question of why anyone would expect an
ideally honest and free church of Christ to still be a
church? Not even Wills diminished pantheon of prophetic heroes
untainted by structures of deceit can survive the disinterested
scrutiny of Rorty, who reminds us that Augustine spent a lot of time
detecting and denouncing heresies.
Non-Catholics may view the churchs current round of
internecine and intergenerational warfare with ennui or amusement, but stakes
are quite high for anyone seeking a usable past, a collective memory to sustain
a wobbly tradition. It is hard to read Wills dismissal of todays
highly scrupulous seminarians (serious men might well hesitate before
joining this company) without recalling the retrospective self-critique
of fussy 1950s Catholic piety that he helped generate. As the great Catholic
historian Philip Gleason once wrote, overlearning things sometimes seems
our specialty.
Papal Sin may tell us more about this ongoing struggle to
define a tradition than it does about wrongs committed in the name of the
church. As a member of the Catholic lost generation, AWOL for a
good part of the 1970s and 1980s, I am in no position to chastise Wills for his
anger. But if an advisee at the Jesuit school where I teach were to report on
having read Papal Sin, Id tell her that she now owns a sense of
the deep struggle that has wracked the church in her lifetime. Then Id
recommend a few more books on the papacy.
James T. Fisher holds the Danforth Chair of Theological Studies
at St. Louis University. His books include The Catholic Counterculture in
America, 1933-62 and Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley.
National Catholic Reporter, November 3,
2000
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