True Confessions

Garry Wills is a Roman Catholic scholar of awesome erudition whose more than 20 books on politics, religion and other topics are models of brilliant rhetoric and beautiful writing. He seems to have read everything even remotely relevant to any topic. “Papal Sin,” his latest work, is the most controversial. It will generate loud cheers from Protestants, Jews, Muslims, philosophical theists and even atheists. The philosopher Richard Rorty, a secular humanist, had high praise for the book in a recent review.

Reactions by Catholics will, of course, be mixed. My guess is that those as ultra-orthodox as William F. Buckley Jr. and Pat Buchanan are appalled. Catholics as liberal as Father Andrew Greeley will praise “Papal Sin” as a courageous effort to reform the faith they each love and know so well. Though I agree with Wills’ passionate attacks on certain popes, there is something mysterious and strange about his relationship to Catholicism.

Born in 1934 in Atlanta, Wills earned a doctorate from Yale (his thesis was on Aeschylus) and is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. His writing career began at 23 when, after obtaining a master’s degree from Xavier, a Jesuit seminary, he was hired to write book reviews and drama criticism for Buckley’s National Review. In “Confessions of a Conservative” in 1979, Wills recalls being asked by Buckley, during their first meeting, if he had left the church. Buckley was relieved when Wills said no. “Being Catholic,” Wills adds, “always mattered more to him than being conservative.”

At that time, Wills called himself a distributist, G.K. Chesterton’s term for a movement in England that favored the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. Since leaving the National Review, Wills has distanced himself from Buckley by steadily moving left, both politically and religiously.

Wills’ lack of respect for certain popes of the last two centuries surfaced early in his career, notably in “Bare Ruined Choirs” in 1972. In this vigorous attack on the church’s hierarchy, Wills likens the Vatican to the “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Rome is faulted for its stubborn opposition to contraception, ordination of women and the marriage of priests. Adjectives which Wills hurls at the church include “cracking,” “weakening,” “disintegrating” and “crumbling.” As a loyal practicing Catholic, he urges his church to cast off its shackles and welcome history’s irreversible changes.

“Papal Sin” continues the themes of “Bare Ruined Choirs” with greater fury and more sordid details. In some ways, Wills resembles Martin Luther nailing his charges to a church door. In other ways, his book follows the long tradition of books, mostly by Protestants and ex-Catholics of past centuries, that trash the lives and beliefs of the popes.

The first four chapters of “Papal Sin” are scathing attacks on the church, not just for its past anti-Semitism and its horrendous pogroms but for its continued efforts to cover up this awful history. Not until 1985 did Rome officially repudiate the claim that Jews are under a special curse from God for having executed and denied their own Messiah. “Seminaries taught it,” Wills writes, “and Biblical commentaries explained it, and persecutions were based on it.”

Throughout World War II and after, Pope Pius XII privately helped many Jews escape from Germany, but not once did he speak out against Hitler or the Holocaust. He may have imagined he had good reasons for this silence, but that is no excuse, Wills argues, for the Vatican to pretend 50 years later that the church at the time did not swarm with European bishops and priests who supported the Nazis. Not until 1988 did the Vatican issue “We Remember,” a document Wills characterizes as a dishonest effort to minimize Rome’s feeble response to Hitler’s madness.

Wills tells the tragic story of Edith Stein, a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism, became a nun and died at Auschwitz. The Vatican maintains, against all evidence, that Stein was arrested because she was a Catholic, not because she was a Jew. John Paul II made her a saint and martyr in 1998. Only one miracle is required for martyrdom. In Stein’s case, it was the recovery of a 2-year-old girl from an overdose of Tylenol. Because almost all people who overdose on Tylenol recover, why did John Paul deem this a miracle? Because the girl’s parents had prayed to Edith Stein.

Wills scoffs at this. He sees Stein’s canonization as little more than the Vatican’s attempt to spread the false notion that many Catholics were also Hitler’s victims. There was a second similar effort at deceit. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest well known for his anti-Semitism, also died in a death camp. Though church officials held that Kolbe didn’t qualify as a martyr (he died for political reasons, they argue, not because he was a priest), he too was canonized by John Paul II.

Further chapters excoriate the church for its perpetual ban on all forms of birth control except the undependable rhythm method. Wills reminds us of the dreadful attitude toward sex that prevailed throughout the church’s early history. The Fathers and St. Augustine taught that sex was always sinful unless the act was strictly for the purpose of producing a child. Augustine would have considered the rhythm technique a stark violation of this rule. St. Thomas Aquinas thought that sex was immoral unless the man was on top and that using a contraceptive was worse than incest.

Paul VI’s encyclical letter “Humanae Vitae” in 1965 prohibited all forms of contraception, including the pill. Wills calls it the “most disastrous papal document of the century . . . the most crippling, puzzling blow to organized Catholicism.” The prohibition was instantly rejected by the overwhelming majority of Catholics throughout the world. “Sex is for procreation, yes,” Wills writes, “but all the time, at each and every act? Eating is for subsistence. But any food or drink beyond that necessary for sheer subsistence is not considered mortally sinful.” Although Wills thinks that every effort should be made to avoid abortion, he attributes its widespread practice to the church’s policy on contraception. Lifting this ban, he contends, would be the most effective anti-abortion plan the church could adopt.

Wills also turns his anger toward the church for refusing to ordain women. Grounds for the ban are, in Wills’ eyes, preposterous: The apostles were men; women don’t look like Jesus; Paul’s letters tell women not to speak in church and so on. It is hard to believe that the following passage, which Wills quotes from Aquinas, was ever taken seriously:

“In terms of nature’s own operation, a woman is inferior and a mistake. The agent cause that is in the male seed tries to produce something complete in itself, a male in gender. But when a female is produced, this is because the agent cause is thwarted, either because of the unsuitability of the receiving matter [of the mother] itself or because of some deforming interference, as from south winds, that are too wet, as we read in [Aristotle’s] ‘Animal Conception.’ ”

Such fantastic superstitions can be excused, Wills says, on grounds of ignorance, but today, when no one doubts the equality of men and women, the refusal to ordain women by “invoking weird and Scripturally simple-minded arguments” is a “modern sin, and it is a papal sin.”

Wills also aims his guns on the Vatican’s refusal to let priests marry. The result has been disastrous. Hundreds of priests have secret mistresses. An enormous number have fled the church to marry. They have been replaced by an increasing number of gays, 20% according to recent surveys, half of them sexually active. More than 80% of priests say that, at times, they masturbate. Not until the 12th century, Wills reminds us, was celibacy enforced. Earlier priests and bishops had wives. Even Peter, whom the church considers its first pope, was married, as were the other apostles.

The church insists that a priest’s holy duties would be severely distracted by marital obligations. Wills responds: “Do any of us feel we must find an unmarried doctor, since no other will be able to give our health his full attention?”

He hammers the church for its harsh attitude toward divorce, forcing good Catholics to risk damnation by obtaining a civil divorce and living in mortal sin with new spouse. In recent years, this cruelty has been mitigated by annulments. In the United States alone, Wills reports, 6,000 annulments are now granted annually.

Wills also surveys the church’s baleful record on homosexuality, as well as its strenuous efforts to conceal the number of priests who were and are pedophiles. Wills tells several horror tales about pedophiles. Instead of having one priest arrested, the church moved him to another parish, and his crimes were hushed up. As for gays and lesbians who lead exemplary lives, Wills sees no reason why they should not be priests.

Wills moves closer to heresy in the later sections of “Papal Sin” particularly in a chapter about Mary. Mariolatry, which refers to excessive veneration of the Virgin, he informs us, did not get underway until the 6th century. Augustine preached hundreds of sermons, but not one about Mary. Aquinas strongly opposed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was without original sin), even quoting Gospel passages in which Jesus treats his mother with curious indifference. Wills cites the Lord’s disrespectful remarks to his mother at the Cana wedding feast. Mariolatry, he writes, reached its peak on the only two occasions when a pope spoke infallibly: the proclamations as true of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX and the Assumption of Mary into heaven by Pius XII. In addition, Wills makes a startling suggestion. He believes that many of the functions assigned to Mary should be transferred to the Holy Spirit. He would like to see the third member of the Trinity called “she,” not “it.” He hopes that prayers now directed to Mary would be directed to the Holy Spirit.

Wills devotes chapters to three of his heroes in the Catholic church: Lord Acton, Cardinal John Henry Newman and St. Augustine. When Acton, a devout Catholic, made his famous remark about absolute power corrupting absolutely, he was referring, Wills reveals, not to political leaders but to popes. Newman is lauded for his opposition to papal arrogance. Augustine, about whom Wills has written a splendid biography for the Penguin Lives series, is a saint he admires far more than Aquinas.

Wills’ final chapter, “The Truth That Frees,” is surprising and none too clear. He praises Rene Girard for his rejection of the doctrine of the Atonement. Jesus did not die as a sacrifice for our sins, Girard maintained. The true meaning of his death is its final triumph over Satan:

“Jesus lets the violence of the world system defeat itself on his dying body--instead of this being a sacrifice to a vengeful torturer. The fallen world of satanic resistance to God causes the final violence, not any placatory act demanded by the Father. The only sacrifice by Jesus is his offering of his innocent body to the fury of the sacrificial system that is being canceled. This was exactly the position of Augustine. In an early work, he opposed the ransom theory of Christ’s death, the theory that Jesus was a substitute who accepted the suffering that the Father wanted to inflict on others--as if the Father could find satisfaction in causing pain: ‘The Lord’s was obviously not a death of ransom but of restoration (dignitatis non debiti).’ ”

We don’t know, of course, if these are Wills’ sentiments or if he is merely reporting what Girard and Augustine believed about the purpose of the crucifixion. If Wills has indeed abandoned the Atonement doctrine, this seems to me another instance of his constant flirtations with heresy.

Wills closes “Papal Sin” by pleading for his church to listen more carefully to the Holy Spirit, to renounce all falsehoods, to cease regarding the pope as an emperor and Mary as an empress. The real church, he insists, is not centered on the Vatican but wherever the Holy Spirit guides those who minister to the sick and poor, who oppose capital punishment and weapons of mass destruction:

“I do not think that my church has a monopoly on the spirit, which breathes where She will, in every Christian sect and denomination. In fact, She breathes through all religious life, wherever the divine call is heeded, among Jews and Buddhists and Muslims and others. But we Christians believe She has a special role to complete Christ’s mission in us. Unworthy as we are, She calls us. She even calls the Vatican. All Christians need to respond to that soliciting. Including Popes.”

This tolerance of other faiths is certainly not characteristic of orthodox Catholics who are sure that their church is the creator’s only true revelation. Wills’ words, though I find them admirable, sound more like the words of a liberal Protestant or a philosophical theist. Note that he writes “we Christians,” not “we Catholics.” Is he suggesting, perhaps unconsciously, that he is a Catholic only in some vague nominal sense?

In reviewing 10 books (one of them Buckley’s recent confessional, “Nearer, My God”) in the New York Review of Books, Wills revealed that he prays “to the Blessed Virgin, every day, often using the rosary.” In conclusion, he wrote: “Let me repeat that I write this as a Marian devotee, though not as a Mariolater. I also write as a Papist. A Papist is not necessarily a papalist. Just look at John XXIII.”

In his introduction to his book “Heretics,” Chesterton says that the most important thing to know about any person is that person’s deepest beliefs. With many eminent Christians of recent times this is not easy to find out. Aside from Protestant fundamentalists, who are never ashamed of telling us exactly what they believe about anything, there is a curious reluctance these days for Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, to inform others of their fundamental convictions.

Did Reinhold Niebuhr believe in immortality? Nobody knows. Did Norman Vincent Peale believe in the Virgin Birth? Mortimer Adler, who became a Catholic convert in 1999, wrote a learned book about angels with nary a hint of whether he thinks angels exist. The Jesuit priest Frederick Copleston wrote a marvelous multivolume history of philosophy. I have no inkling of what he believed about any Catholic doctrine. Does Father Greeley accept the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary? He has written movingly about Mary but without telling us.

I could go on for pages about the fuzziness of leading Christian theologians and writers of recent decades. We know that Wills prays to Mary and regularly attends Mass. We know how much he loves his church and wants to revitalize it. Friends constantly urge him to leave Rome, but there is no indication he ever will. “I’m still a loyal Catholic,” he once declared. “As Phil Berrigan says, ‘The Church is a whore, but she’s our mother.’ ”

Father Hans Kung, the famous German theologian, has never hesitated to make clear that he disbelieves every doctrine unique to Catholicism, yet he has opted to remain a Catholic priest (he hasn’t been excommunicated but has been forbidden to teach in any Catholic school). Had he lived two centuries ago, he would surely have been excommunicated. Is Wills an American Kung, even though, unlike Kung, he is coy about core beliefs? It seems obvious he doubts such doctrines as papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption of Mary and the mystical presence of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Yet he chooses to remain silent on a raft of other doctrines even more essential to historic Christianity. One longs to know how he would answer the following questions:

Does he believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead; that the Lord walked on water, multiplied bread and fishes, turned water to wine, cast devils into pigs and brought back to life the corpse of Lazarus and others; that Jesus was born of a virgin and had no human father; that Satan is a real person; that angels and demons exist; and that some sinners will suffer forever in hell?

Wills and I share an admiration for Chesterton. Wills’ first book was a biography of G.K., and I recently annotated Chesterton’s masterpiece, “The Man Who Was Thursday.” If Chesterton had been handed my list of questions, he would have readily answered them. Augustine and Aquinas answered all of them affirmatively in their writings. If Wills, like Kung, no longer believes any of the doctrines that are distinctively Catholic--and, especially, if he would answer “no” to my six questions--I would wonder why he does not walk out of the church and declare himself a liberal Protestant or a philosophical theist. This is the mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything he has written about his faith.