Shelf Life. - two books about religion - book review

National Review, May 6, 2002 by Michael Potemra

Justus George Lawler gives every impression of being a lefty on Catholic Church matters: He refers to Pope John Paul II's belief about contraception -- namely, that it is connected to a contemporary "culture of death" -- as "ludicrous" and "a diabolic fetishizing of condoms"; he stresses the need, among local bishops, for greater independence from Rome; and he has all the customary liberal views about the environment, capital punishment, nuclear disarmament, and so on.

All of which makes it simply amazing that he has written a very good book attacking today's most famous Catholic lefties -- James Carroll, Garry Wills, John Cornwell, and all the other usual suspects -- for vitriolic bias and shoddy scholarship. In Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (Continuum, 252 pp., $24.95), Lawler examines the recent attacks on Pope Pius XII and on the current Church hierarchy, and finds them seriously wanting both as accounts of the truth and as blueprints for Church reform. He catches the erudite Wills, for example, in a number of scholarly errors; but much more importantly, he raises some deeper questions about the Willsian project: "The fundamental flaw in [Wills's] invocation of structural sin or structural deceit as the explanatory device for all aberrant acts, all failures and errors [of] the contemporary church . . . [is] that it removes the church from its historic reality as a temporal institution undeniably progressing, by fits and starts like any other institution, over two millennia of growth."

In the work of Wills and others, says Lawler, this broad-brush denunciation of the Church hierarchy shows an indifference to "the human element" in the people they are attacking:

To publicly deploy texts and interpretations that are clearly distorted, or to bring overcharged rhetoric to the arraignment before one's private bar of justice of bishops and popes, past and present . . . smacks less of the creation of an informed public opinion than of playing to the gallery, less of calm conversion and regeneration than of mobocracy and religious "McCarthyism" -- if not of mere self- aggrandizement.

Lawler proposes another model of Church reform, one based on telling the truth as one sees it -- and remaining patient. (His book is dedicated to two controversial theologians -- Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac -- who were silenced by the Vatican on suspicion of heresy early in their careers but ended up being named cardinals by Pope John Paul II.) But one need not share all, or indeed any, of Lawler's reform agenda to admire the intellectual vigor, unflinching honesty, and puckish wit of his assaults on Wills and his cohorts. In discussing, for example, their denunciation of Pius XII for refusing to criticize the Nazis by name, he says that "the exercise of a modest historical sensibility, much less any semblance of empathy," would suggest that this is like complaining that "the Declaration of Independence 'refused to name' George III, or that the Emancipation Proclamation 'refused to name' Jefferson Davis or the Confederacy."

Lawler's book includes a sprinkling of attacks on Church conservatives -- he calls Richard John Neuhaus "sanctimonious," for instance, without pausing to give any evidence of Fr. Neuhaus's supposed sanctimony -- but these potshots at the Right are few and far between. Make no mistake: This book, whatever its author's intention might be, will offer a great deal of aid and comfort to Catholic conservatives.

-- Because of America's separation of church and state, religion has mamanaged to play a very important part in our public life without giving rise to the poisonous anticlericalism that has afflicted so many other countries. Religion remains a powerful underpinning of our national character and self-image, as evidenced in Eugene F. Hemrick's new book, One Nation Under God: Religious Symbols, Quotes, and Images in Our Nation's Capital (Our Sunday Visitor, 142 pp., $6.95). Hemrick, a Catholic priest at a Capitol Hill parish, has found his neighborhood "inundated with religious inspiration" in its statuary and inscriptions: Moses presides over a frieze atop the Supreme Court building; a bronze St. Paul graces the main reading room of the Library of Congress; the Capitol itself houses statuary honoring such great religious figures of the American past as Jacques Marquette, Junipero Serra, Martin Luther King Jr., and Father Damien of Molokai.

Hemrick's brief but profusely illustrated book shows how the religious values inscribed on the hearts of Americans have been engraved on the public face of our capital -- a challenge, and a reminder, to all who work in public service.