BOOK REVIEW

Questioning upward

Garry Wills says the church hierarchy exerts too much control over Catholics

By Paul Wilkes, Globe Staff, 06/11/2000

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n a recent trip to a monastery that I frequent, I met a young professor from what is commonly considered one of American Roman Catholicism's better schools of theological instruction. We walked together one evening, and I asked about the quality of the seminarians he taught. They were a middling group, he allowed, but it wasn't their native intelligence, abilities, or talents that concerned him.

"They seem to have been taught not to think," he said, and detailed how it was hard to engender good parry and thrust in class when he dealt with some of the most crucial areas in both Catholic church and American cultural life. The students had been taught -- or had agreed upon signing up -- that certain things were simply not to be discussed in polite company, among them women's ordination, birth control, Mary's central role in salvation, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, and papal infallibility.

Whatever the current causes of this intellectual malaise among men about to be charged with the shaping of Catholic souls, Garry Wills would place a good portion of the blame on a pervasively corrosive attitude demonstrated by the very men in whose consecrated hands have been placed the tiller of the fragile bark crafted on the shores of Galilee.

"Papal Sins" might be too hyperbolic a title. But nonetheless the accumulations of papal detritus from oversight, arrogance, fear, and misplaced righteousness have created the atmosphere evident not only at that school of theology, but also, really, throughout the church. It is not about outright lying, but as Wills says, a "structure of deceit."

It seems strange that Wills, himself a Catholic, would write such an impassioned, critical book. Considered to be a somewhat conservative voice on both culture and religion, it is apparent that the intellectual compromises implicit in the creation and maintenance of Roman Catholic doctrine are simply more than he can bear.

Wills cries out, in pain. Stop the casuistry! Stop the posturing! Reclaim the vigor and simplicity of message and the way of Jesus Christ! Have faith!

In the first 10 pages of the book, Wills has aptly put his finger on what is amiss in the church today, and the rest of the book is pure bonus.

Concentrating primarily on the period since mid-19th century, Wills paints a picture of moral integrity and squalid circumvention woven through the papacy. There is the sad myopia of Pius XII during the Holocaust. There is Pius IX's obsession with the Virgin Mary that would have him claiming -- and demanding all Roman Catholics subscribe through exercising the never-before-used trump card of papal infallibility -- the basically un-biblical and unprovable Immaculate Conception (Mary was born without the stain of sin) and her bodily Assumption into heaven. Wills's portraits of the popes are -- gasp! -- of human beings.

Although the church eventually would claim great powers, eventually up to and including infallibility for these men, Wills sees them as creatures of history and their own humanity as much as they are St. Peter's legitimate heirs. The feet that slip into the shoes of the fisherman are indeed, if not of clay, certainly of flesh.

When John XXIII's successor took up the unfinished business of sex that Vatican II had found too hot to handle, he quite simply said no to a body of human experience and medical knowledge. Paul VI's commission recommended that the church change its categorical stand against any form of birth control this side of the Russian roulette of so-called natural family planning. But no, his Vatican advisers murmured, no, this would be but the thin wedge that would imply that all previously sacrosanct church teachings were up for review and could have been wrong. So often papal or curial rebuke comes with the supposedly debate-closing line that this teaching or that practice "might lead to confusion among the faithful" or is "a danger to the faith." The ideal, it seems, still prevails: that facts have no place in the face of a declared truth and that confusing some of the faithful or changing one's mind are far greater sins than condemning hundreds of millions of Catholics to hell for disobeying a practice that no longer holds up to scrutiny. Of course, this is most often the argument presented by the cardinals and monsignori and the curial bureaucrats -- to admit the church was wrong for centuries would be suicidal to any further acceptance of the pope (and themselves) as moral arbiters.

For as towering a presence as the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy itself have been down through the centuries, once St. Peter's straightforward, peasant-style leadership had morphed into a religious monarchy with not only spiritual, but temporal, prerogatives at stake, the papacy has shown a remarkable reluctance to address (not necessarily to adapt or succumb) to popular culture and new ideas. When modernism forwarded a fresh approach, Pius IX pronounced, "What you call the modern world is no more than Freemasonry." Debate closed. Let's move on. Or, better yet, back.

Although the church proclaimed for years that it was the one, true, and only path to God and redemption, there has been a remarkable fear in the papacy that someone would lift the pope's tiara and find a mere mortal's head supporting such a grand conceit.

Wills's assessments are underscored with a statement -- in that brilliant introduction -- that his "book is a tribute, in part, to the honesty that has led so many priests to keep silent under the burden of deceptiveness called for by their superiors -- and it is a plea that the weight be removed. I am not attacking the papacy or its defenders."

But of course he is. Most of the time with good cause. In the case of Edith Stein that she is, as Wills maintains, being "deployed against her own people," I would quibble. Perhaps this Jewish-born woman, who became a Carmelite nun and was killed at Auschwitz, is a case that exists in a yet uncharted land where Catholic paranoia and Jewish pride simply cannot come to bear upon a woman who makes both faiths proud. Neither needs exclusive rights to her.

Wills discusses the issues of the prolapsed role of women in the church and the attenuated crop of priests (one study, which was suppressed, showed that 40 percent of priests had "severe personal, behavioral or mental problems in the previous 12 months") now in training and newly ordained. He sees the role of the pope as piercing the very soul of the church so badly that it is difficult to carry out the mission for which the church was founded: namely, to bring about God's kingdom on earth. The Holy Spirit has been shunted aside in favor of the pope and the clerical bureaucracy, both in Rome and in chancery offices around the world. Or subsumed in the person of the Virgin Mary, whose humility and obedience are constantly stressed as the qualities Catholic women should emulate.

For, Wills asks, how can today's idealistic young men and women enter religious life when they must first sign on to a series of half truths and be prohibited from walking in the confusion that faces the very people they are supposed to serve? How can they, he asks, "keep a straight face or an honest heart" if "their own integrity rebels?" How can some play "with the truth while using the name of Jesus, who said he is the truth?"

Wills seems to be saying that Jesus is still in the boat, that Catholics need neither fear nor have to know exactly where that boat is heading. And most certainly need not look back at the wake and self-assuredly say that all the twists and contortions were because of his steering and not our own.

Paul Wilkes's most recent book is "Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life." He teaches writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington

This story ran on page M1 of the Boston Globe on 6/11/2000.
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