The Church of Wills. - Review - book review

National Review, July 17, 2000 by Robert Royal

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 328 pp., $25)

Ezra Pound once said of the Catholic Church that an institution that could survive the picturesqueness of the Borgias possessed a certain native resilience. Garry Wills is not in the same league as the Borgias, though not for want of trying. In Papal Sin he seeks to discredit virtually every distinctive feature of Catholicism, while claiming merely to be setting the record straight on the errors and "structures of deceit" that have grown up around the Vatican in recent decades. But there is reason to doubt this. Wills's properly purified Catholicism-theological dog ma aside -perfectly coincides with modern Ameri can liberalism. It is hard not to think that this unlikely harmony reflects a certain dogmatism of its own.

Wills is a gifted and remarkably productive writer. After brilliant graduate work in classics at Yale, he began writing for this magazine. But in the late 1960s, under the influence of the civil-rights and antiwar movements (particularly the Berrigans), his conservatism underwent a reversal. Now a professor at Northwestern, he often appears in The New York Review of Books and has received prizes, including a Pulitzer, for vigorous volumes on a variety of political and cultural subjects. Just last year, he published a deftly written brief biography of St. Augustine.

In the present work, however, Wills's anger at both Catholicism and conservatism often overcomes his learning. Strong pages on New Testa ment scholarship, Augustine, and 19th-century Catholic history are tacked on to relentless liberal polemics. Wills claims Augus tine, Acton, and Newman as his heroes, but it is doubtful those strict Christians would return any such compliment. Meanwhile, scholars and church figures who disagree with Wills's tendentious positions on a score of complicated questions are not simply declared wrong, they are explicitly called liars. It's no wonder that liberal- pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has expressed agreement with Wills and wondered why Wills is still a Catholic.

The author's argument unfolds in three main phases. First, he tries to show that the Church has lied about its treatment of Jews and its supposed silence during the Holocaust. Implying that an institution that would lie about that will lie about anything, he then turns to alleged doctrinal dishonesties internal to Catholicism. Finally, he claims that Truth itself explodes the truth-claims and authority of the Church as it currently understands itself. A logician might notice that these three subjects are not strictly linked (Catholic leaders might, say, misconstrue anti-Semitism in the Church in the past century yet still be right about the proper understanding of the New Testament). But to Wills, alleged Catholic anti-Semitism stems from the same spirit of untruth as the Vatican's denial of ordination to women, its mandatory priestly celibacy, its "homophobia," its allegedly obsessive concern with life in the womb, and its belief in papal infallibility.

The problem with this thesis is its own failure to tell the whole truth. Wills largely accepts John Cornwell's dubious claim that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope." Putting anti-anti-Communism to new uses, Wills believes that the greater Soviet threat led Pius to be silent about Nazi genocide, and that his successors have been forced to defend him. Whatever historians may eventually determine about the many actors- Pope, governments, Jewish groups themselves-who could have done more for European Jews, at the time Pius seemed outspoken to some observers. The New York Times editorialized about the Pope's "lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent" in the 1940s; today, the Times editors, forgetful of their predecessors, claim he was "shamefully silent." Einstein wrote to the paper in 1941 that he had never been interested in the Church until it alone began speaking in defense of European Jews. The chief rabbi of Rome effusively praised the Pope for helping save his people and later converted to Ca tholicism, taking Pius's given name, Eugenio. (His wife also converted, taking the name Eugenia.) What Wills dogmatically declares to be a flagrant instance of characteristic lying may in fact be an attempt to open current opinion to fuller truth.

Wills's views put him in strange company. He claims that the canonization of figures like the Polish saint Maxi milian Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz, is an unsavory attempt to "usurp" the Holo caust. But it takes willful naivete to believe, as Wills does, that the Nazis arrested people like Kolbe for purely political, not religious reasons.

Kolbe's Catholicism was undoubtedly a factor. Thousands of Catholics and Protestants were threatened and then arrested by the Nazis; thousands of priests wound up in Dachau and many others were forced into labor camps. Mussolini convinced Hitler that it was a bad idea to take on the Church directly: Such persecution usually winds up destroying the persecutors and strengthening the Church. So even as they rounded up thousands of priests and lay people who were later martyred in various ways, the Nazis always claimed that they were moving only against their political enemies. In private, though, Hitler spoke of crushing the Catholic Church "like a toad."