That rarest of birds

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 3, 2000 by James T. Fisher

Wills is a public Catholic intellectual with a sharp pen and broad appeal

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 Manhattan's 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 church's 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 Journalist's Education), Wills described George Wallace's appearance at the previous summer's 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 papacy's inadequate response to the Holocaust grounded in the same "structures of deceit" that bolster the church's teachings on birth control, priestly celibacy and women's 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 Vatican's "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 VI's 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 pope's 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 subject's 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.