Bare ruined choirs? - Review - book review

Commonweal, July 14, 2000 by Eamon Duffy

History for Wills, as for his model, Lord Acton, is an arsenal of cautionary tales, demonstrating again and again how all those mean old guys got it wrong. The history of the papacy in particular is an endless saga of tyranny, crassness, and self-interest. Wills makes much of the disturbing story of Pius IX and his godson, the Jewish boy Edward Mortara, baptized by a Christian nurse while dangerously ill, and subsequently taken from his parents and educated as a Christian, ending his life as a devoted Catholic priest. Wills is understandably scandalized by this heart-breaking story, but the case for him has no nuances, no moral ambiguities. Mortara was just a scalp on the papal teepee, a testimony to the moral blindness of Pius IX. Wills has no sense that to leave a technically Christian child in a non-Christian home might actually have presented a real dilemma even to good men in another age, that a nineteenth-century pope might sincerely have conceived his responsibilities in terms other than those that seem self-evident to a twenty-first-century American. If any parallels to the case of Elian Gonzalez occurred to Wills, he does not mention them.

The limitations of Wills's approach are on display in his discussion of "Marian Politics." For Wills, the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary is essentially a ghastly mistake, propagated by the papacy, which has idolatrously exalted a creature in the place of her Lord, oppressed women, denigrated sexuality, usurped the proper role of the Holy Ghost, and infantilized the clergy. Mary, for him, "is the mother of Jesus' weakness, not his strength," and traditional Catholic exegesis of the Cana story, notably that of the present pope "eager to foist his view of the mediatrix on the revealed word," has got it "exactly backward." Wills betrays no sense at all that a millennium and a half of Marian devotion, art, and theological reflection might be something other than a blind plunge into misunderstanding and alienation, that the figure of Mary might have offered the Christian world a legitimate vehicle for the exploration of a multitude of themes--the place of the feminine in the church, the relationship between nature and grace, the cooperation of the creature with its creator, the historical rootedness of the messiah, and the role of nature and nurture in his human formation. Wills takes us on a walk round the art galleries of Florence, in search of bad theology. Pausing in front of Botticelli's Coronation of the Virgin, an exquisite celebration of the transfiguration of human vulnerability by grace, shrinking vernal nature made immortal by the Incarnation, Wills sees only a piece of papal propaganda (though the picture was not a papal commission). God the Father, he notices, is wearing a papal tiara, "a comparison of the pope to God." Before Orcagna's representation of the Apostles at Pentecost, gathered round the statuesque figure of the Virgin as the dove descends, Wills tuts in disapproval, because the Apostles appear to venerate the Virgin, not the Spirit. He seems blind to the astonishing theological complexity of this image of the church, as male Apostles bow in deference before a strongly feminine figure. Indeed, in Botticelli's archaistic version of the same scene, which Wills must have walked past in the Uffizi, the Apostles reel and cringe in disarray as the fire falls, while in the midst of them the Virgin gazes upward in prophetic rapture, her prominent belly pregnant with the church's future, her hands raised in the traditional "orante" position like a priest's at the altar, an unforgettable theological vision of the church which eludes Wills's reductive analysis.