Mendacity and the magisterium

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Bawer, Bruce

When my paternal grandmother died in 1990, I volunteered to make the arrangements for the funeral Mass. I went to the church to meet the organist and pick out hymns; later, at the wake, I sat down with a nun and selected readings. When that was done, the nun asked whether my sister and I wished to serve as acolytes at the service. I thanked her for the offer, but said I didn't think it would be appropriate. For while my grandmother had been a Catholic, I explained, my sister and I were not.

The nun fixed my eyes with a steady gaze. "I didn't hear that," she said in a near-whisper.

The message was clear. Yes, what she'd proposed was verboten; but as long as none of us said anything, it would be O.K.

I thanked her again, but again said no.

The encounter threw me. What, I mused, would Jesus have made of it? The answer seemed clear. When asked about the nature of God's kingdom, Jesus didn't serve up inflexible rules and restrictions; he told the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which was that God's kingdom isn't about separating "insider" from "outsider" but about the rejection of such distinctions. The early Christians understood this; for them, the faith was defined not by dictums and dogmas but by an overwhelming shared experience. And the nun understood, too: if she was willing to include us in the funeral service, it was because she plainly wanted to do the Christian thing. Yet had she done so, she would have been acting in violation of church law.

Today, the powers that be at the Vatican never tire of asserting that they alone possess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Yet they have falsified their institution's history, insisted on its incapability (at its highest levels) of sin or error, and demanded its members' assent to a growing list of doctrines that mock charity, strain credulity, and can seem not only irrelevant but inimical to that extraordinary feeling that bound the early Christians each to each. And while those leaders suppress and distort truth to maintain an image of moral perfection, theological correctness, and historical consistency, lower-level functionaries like that nun feel forced by circumstances to be dishonest, too, simply in order to get around the system and do the kind, decent-and, yes, Christian-thing.1

How to describe such a state of affairs? The Catholic writer Carry Wills, in the subtitle of his book Papal Sin (2000), refers to the church's "structures of deceit."2 The investigative staff of the Boston Globe, in the recently published Betrayal, uses the phrase "culture of secrecy."3 And the priest Donald Cozzens, in his new study Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church, calls it "unholy silence."4

Cozzens, alas, is caught in a bind. He wants to address this silence, yet he has chosen to do so within the very constraints one expects him to criticize. The result: a cautious little volume that acknowledges problems but hardly dares to frame them honestly, let alone propose serious changes. Cozzens doesn't even raise the central issue of papal authoritarianism until page 147; and he does so in the passive voice ("the leadership of the Pope has been criticized . . ."), carefully coupling this indirect reproach with overt praise ("the moral leadership of Pope John Paul has been undaunting"). Similarly, his chapter on women focuses on the sexual abuse of nuns by priests-a no-brainer-and high-mindedly entreats us to heed women's "faithful voices," yet keeps mum on women's ordination.5 His endorsement of Papal Sin and Mark Jordan's brilliant The Silence of Sodom (2000), both of which explore the "unholy silence" more candidly, suggests that he'd like to say much more than he dares about the Church's mechanism of silence; but in the end, ironically, his book is a case study in that mechanism's continuing efficacy.6

John Cornwell has examined the Church's "unholy silence" in several books. The first, A Thief in the Night, though dating back to 1989 (it was reissued in paper in 2001), is worth mentioning here because it brings those structures to life with unusual vividness.7 Years after the death of John Paul I, whom many believed to have been poisoned, a Vatican press officer invited Cornwell to uncover the facts; yet this was easier said than done. Members of the dead Pope's inner circle had lied profusely about the circumstances of his demise; it was their insistence on sticking to their stories, Cornwell realized, that had engendered rumors of homicide. The book reads like a first-rate detective story, recounting interviews with one colorful Vatican insider after another. (The eccentricity and dissimulation on display here bring to mind another splendid murder mystery-cum-tour de force of local color, John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.) One can hardly imagine a franker inside look at the Vatican, which emerges here as a hothouse of rumor, innuendo, ambition, and spin-a place marked, in Cornwell's words, by "a pervasive sense of pusillanimity, a reluctance to speak out and take responsibility, a meanness of spirit." A monsignor confides: "The Vatican is a court, a place of gossipy eunuchs. The whole place floats on a sea of brilliant bitchery." Eventually Cornwell grows frustrated by the powerful odor of mendacity: "Whom could I trust in this strange little world where people seemed to play fast and loose with the truth?"