When one of America's committed Catholic scholars writes a book with such a title, you have to sit up and take notice. Wills, a Pulitzer-prize winner and author of countless books, including recent stellar books on Augustine and on freedom, has written this book precisely so that all would take notice. This book is damning, to say the least. Yet the quality of Wills' argument and the breadth of his examples demand that we pay attention.
Wills is not concerned with the sins of Renaissance popes. Instead, he frets about what he sees as a far more serious sin -- dishonesty -- which so deeply cuts against what the church hierarchy and religious faith itself should be about: For Wills, the search for Truth is the sine qua non, and he is deeply frustrated by a catalog of events and decisions that reflect what he regards as a tendency towards obfuscation instead. His concern is that for 150 years at least, since the papacy restored itself from near collapse in the temporal realm, the institutional structures of the church have been used so consistently to support papal authority, even when that entails twisting or concealing the truth. As he puts it, "the structure upholding the legacy of wrong is not invincible ignorance but a cultivated ignorance, ignorantia affectata."
On matters including birth control, women's ordination, priestly caste, and priestly celibacy, and in the way the church has accounted for its actions in the Holocaust, Wills repeatedly argues -- persuasively -- that when long-held magisterial arguments based in scripture or natural law have failed, the church has simply closed ranks to support arguments, not out of a sense of the pursuit of truth, but to find any justification to uphold its position for the sake of its own authority above all. Readers will recognize in this list a number of elements of the "liberal agenda," the sort of charges one would expect to encounter often in the National Catholic Reporter. The difference here, however, is the depth of Wills' historical resourcefulness, and the sharpness of his insight. Theologians and historians of particular eras might quibble appropriately with certain historical points or interpretations in this book. But Wills' larger argument is so all-encompassing that it is hard to quibble much in such a way as to make a dent in it.
Wills is not writing from an outsider's perspective. He is a faithful churchgoer still, and author of a number of very fine books on Catholicism. Borrowing extensively from Catholic thinkers like Augustine, Lord Acton, and John Henry Newman, he fashions himself most of all as a modern-day Acton, marshalling the immense resources of his scholarship against reactionary forces of obscurantism.
Wills book is not perfect, and at times seems unrelenting -- so much so that I was left to recall Wills' famous use of the Shakespearean image of "bare ruined choirs" to wonder about the costs of so complete a change as Wills demands.
This is a book that should be read by everyone who cares about the church. The book's thesis must be dealt with honestly. Wills' book calls me, as it will call others, to grapple even more forcefully with what it means to "think with the church," in Ignatius Loyola's famous phrase. Ignatius at least meant especially that we presume the best until we find out otherwise. What we must do if we agree that Wills is right -- or at least significantly right -- is a more difficult question.
The primary flaw, as I see it, is that the book tries so hard to make the case that it would seem as if these "structures of deceit" are the whole story, which I know they are not. That they are too much a part of the story, however, seems hard to deny. They do call out for reform and for more of the opacity that seemed to be the promise of Vatican II. -- Thomas M. Landy
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