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

National Review, August 12, 2002 by Jeffrey Hart

This Christmas, more than ever, the Pope is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a Continent. . . . Because the Pope speaks to and in some sense for all the peoples at war, the clear stand he takes on the fundamental issues of the conflict has greater weight and authority. When a leader bound to impartiality to nations on both sides condemns as "heresy" the new form of national state which subordinates everything to itself, when he assails the exile and persecution of human beings "for no other reason than their race or political opinion" . . . the impartial judgment is like a verdict in a high court of justice. Pope Pius expresses as passionately as any leader on our side the war aims of the struggle for freedom.

Before he became pope, Pius had drafted Pius XI's strong anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender sorge ("With Burning Sorrow"). Because he spoke out so strongly in both cases, I suppose he might have done so "several" other times; he was hardly "dishonest" on this. Perhaps Mr. Wills was merely climbing on the fashionable bandwagon of Pius XII denigration.

On a quite different but much more important matter, Mr. Wills sometimes leaves the impression that he believes the Gospel narratives are weak as history. It may be true, for example, that the selections from prior material that went into the making of the Gospel of Mark were influenced by the doctrinal needs of a local church, but the figure of Jesus in that narrative is recognizably the same one as in the other narratives, which also have their own emphases. In my reading, Mr. Wills is simply wrong when he writes that as for this "main figure, Jesus, he is hieratic, moving through events as an embodied mystery, without any human psychology to be probed." C. S. Lewis thought Jesus to be one of the three most recognizable figures in narrative, the other two being Socrates and Samuel Johnson. (I would add Hemingway.) The voice of Jesus is unmistakable, not at all the voice of the narrators, who would have been incapable of inventing it. In a moment He could intuit the nature of a complete stranger, as He does in the case of the rich man who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus' presence must have been a powerful thing. Peter, on first meeting him, senses at once that He is something unusual; comical as Peter is, he does share a certain gift of perception with Jesus.

On the issue of the reliability of the Gospels, historian Stephen Neill gets it right: "When the historian approaches the Gospels, the first thing that strikes him is the extraordinary fidelity with which they reproduced, not the conditions of their own time, but the conditions of Palestine in the time and during the ministry of Christ." And no less than Paul himself testifies to a sense of the historical shared by the followers of Jesus. He writes in the famous passage, I Corinthians 15:3-6: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep." This epistle antedates the earliest Gospel narrative; the story now had to be written down because the witnesses were dying off. But Paul knew that witnesses are necessary to sustain the claim of fact. The history that exists in the narrative has not been dissolved by an assortment of critical perspectives.