That rarest of birds

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

Wills accuses the Vatican of claiming victimhood in the Holocaust but he likewise sees only victims among opponents of the church's 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 "women's 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 papacy's "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 II's 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 church's 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. Day's 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 Callahan's 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 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."