The St. Peter Principle. - "Why I Am a Catholic" - book review

National Review, August 12, 2002 by Jeffrey Hart

Why I Am a Catholic, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp., $26)

Edward Gibbon was a historian of staggering knowledge. When a new scholarly work appeared, he tells us, he took a stroll in his garden. He reviewed in his mind the subject of the book and what he already knew about it. Then he skipped those parts and read only the remainder, an approach that saved much time. For many books, he probably read only the table of contents.

That, of course, was Gibbon. Before opening Why I Am a Catholic, however, I decided to try that great man's approach: I organized in my own mind what I consider to be the established reasons for being a Catholic. I reduced them to four propositions:

1. The Catholic Church is the fullest expression of Christianity as rooted in the entire Bible from Genesis through the New Testament. Christian departures from Catholicism strike me as diminishments, Reformation amounting to subtraction.

2. An institution that has evolved over time, especially over a very long period of time, surviving many vicissitudes, enjoys a presumption of validity. It has lived with us. It is the result of experience and reflection, the latter by minds agreed to have been towering, as well as by the collective mind of millions. It deserves an overwhelming presumption in its favor as over against the prescriptions of individual idealists who, in comparison, are but the flies of a summer and whose visions possess either no actuality or no continuing existence. Jacques Maritain was right when he began his late masterpiece, The Peasant of the Garonne, by thanking God for the visible Church. Yes, thank God -- literally -- for the visible Church. I am even beginning to develop a fondness for the smell of candles, bad sculpture, and very dubious architecture.

3. The Creed is absolutely fundamental, as Mr. Wills masterfully explicates, and the institution of the papacy is necessary to protect the Creed from homemade opinions. The papacy guarantees the unity of the Church against what John Dryden characterized as a "downhill Reformation" into sects and schisms and eccentrically inspired individuals. As Matthew Arnold said, the Protestant principle is "individual judgment"; yet the vast majority of people cannot do the hard intellectual work that validates the analogical formulations of the Creed. As a result, unusual homemade religions proliferate.

4. That the Church has had imperfections should not be viewed as dispositive evidence against it. God writes straight with crooked lines; this is true throughout the stories recounted in the Bible, and -- as Garry Wills illustrates abundantly and very informatively -- it isis equally true of the history of the papacy. Father Andrew Greeley was correct when he said that "If you can find a Church that is perfect, by all means join it; but realize that, when you do, it has ceased to be perfect."

What is valuable, indeed irreplaceable, about the visible Church is addressed by Mr. Wills in this book, but he seems to be dragging it grudgingly out of his active and well-informed brain. Most of what he has to say about this historic institution is condemnatory; it apparently was wrong from the start.

That brings us to the genesis of Why I Am a Catholic. It is manifest here that Mr. Wills was both surprised and stung by the reaction of many Catholics to his 2000 book Papal Sin, the papal sin consisting of lies and cover-ups. The "structure" of the sin, he maintained, is lying to protect the Church from losing face, from scandals that might endanger its religious mission. (We have certainly seen quite enough of that recently from many Catholic bishops.) But many Catholics were outraged by Mr. Wills's comprehensive criticism of particular popes, and perhaps also by his tone of recrimination; they demanded to know why he considered himself a Catholic. This new book is his response, his testimony to and explanation of his religious beliefs. I find it moving, valuable, and persuasive: He is a Catholic. He is no Newman, but he felt obliged to respond, as Newman felt obliged to respond in his own famous apologia to Charles Kingsley.

Yet there remains in Mr. Wills's new book the same unsettling violence of emotion that marred his earlier one. In the opening autobiographical parts, he is candid in saying that on the very day he first entered a Jesuit seminary -- to which institution he owes his formidable classical education -- he considered leaving. Finally, he did. In cataloguing the lies and evasions of the popes he seems to have, often, a kind of glee. And sometimes he is wrong. In this book, for example, he defends his treatment of Pius XII in Papal Sin:

I did not claim, for instance, that he sympathized with Nazism; I do not think he did. I expressly stipulated that he might have had a justifiable fear that action on his part would hurt those it meant to help. I focused instead on his post-war claims that he had spoken out "several times" against the Holocaust. That was dishonest.

Here are the facts. On December 25, 1942, the New York Times editorially praised Pius XII's Christmas Message for that calamitous year -- and it certainly did not characterize as "silence" the pope's appeal on behalf of "hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their own part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or a slow decline." Here's what the Times editorial said: