Is
it possible? Garry Wills, probably the
country’s most prestigious and influential Catholic author, has just
turned 70. I’ve been reading him since he was in his 20s, when he
was less prestigious but far more Catholic, at least in any sense I
recognize. In those days he wrote for Bill Buckley’s
National
Review, which was then a conservative magazine. Wills broke with
Buckley and conservatism over the Vietnam War; unfortunately, he also
broke with other things at the same time — such as the papacy.
Yet he continued
calling himself both a conservative and a Catholic, for reasons it has
taken me many years to understand. There’s no disputing his talent
as a writer: Everything he writes is a feast of fine prose and provocative,
if often questionable, thought, on subjects as diverse as ancient Roman
culture, the U.S. Constitution, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Nixon,
Reagan, Chesterton, the Kennedys, Shakespeare, John Wayne, race
relations, and St. Augustine. All his books on these subjects display his
wide reading and classical studies. He has also written four books about
the Church, the last two of which spell out his views more explicitly than
ever before.
Papal Sin:
Structures of Deceit appeared in 2000 and, as its title implies,
charges the Popes with all manner of fraud and corruption. The papacy,
with false and exaggerated claims, he argues, has lied itself into a corner,
and now must keep lying in order to maintain an untenable position that
would be best abandoned. As Wills tells it, Pius IX promulgated the dogma
of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 in order to shore up papal power,
which was further fortified, at his instigation, by the Vatican
Council’s affirmation of papal infallibility in 1870.
So Wills rejected
the Immaculate Conception. Anything else? Well, yes, quite a bit:
transubstantiation, the priesthood (though he thinks women should be
eligible for it anyway), the perpetual virginity of Mary (by implication),
and the general inerrancy of the Church. He had long favored contraception,
and he has seen nothing very wrong with abortion. Some of his positions
are eccentric in other ways: He argues that the scandal of priestly sexual
abuse of minors results from the perverse requirement of celibacy, as if
allowing priests to marry would correct their homosexual tendencies
— not that he disapproves of homosexuality, mind you. In a fine
feminist flourish, he proposes that the Holy Spirit be referred to as “she.”
Maybe that is meant to atone for demoting the Blessed Virgin.
What makes Wills so
extraordinary is that though he takes what may seem to be standard and
predictable liberal positions on most everything, he gives the impression
that he derives them, somehow, less from the Zeitgeist than from his own
peculiar reading of St. Augustine, Cardinal Newman, and Chesterton, who,
to say the least, aren’t usually thought of as liberalizing
influences.
The book was a
bravura performance, but it raised a question in my mind: Why does Wills
even bother calling himself a Catholic? I wasn’t the only one to
whom this obvious query occurred: The atheist philosopher Richard Rorty,
writing in the
New York Times Book Review, heartily
applauded
Papal Sin, but suggested that it might be more
consistent of Wills simply to leave the Church.
As if he had read my
mind, Wills last year published another book,
Why I Am a
Catholic, which, however, does more to deepen the mystery than to
resolve it. In a preface to the paperback edition this year, Wills marvels,
somewhat irritably, that many readers of the book still ask why he
remains a Catholic. Well, it’s still a good question. He has
renounced infallibility, transubstantiation, and the special status of the
Blessed Virgin; which doesn’t seem to leave many of what have
been rather widely understood as the defining doctrines of Catholicism.
Drawing on much
recent scholarship, Catholic and otherwise, Wills continues his assault on
the historic claims of the papacy, beginning with the claim of
Peter’s primacy as Bishop of Rome. As he reviews the internal
turmoil of the Church’s early centuries, the attack becomes so
corrosive that the reader inevitably wonders: Where was the Holy Spirit
during all this? Are we to believe “She” was umpiring these
theological riots, in which, according to Wills, the wrong side — that
is, the papist side — usually prevailed in the end?
All Wills’s
scholarship leads him back to the position of the original Protestants,
which I found unbelievable at the time of my own conversion: that for
century upon century, God allowed the entire mass of Christians to be
misled, in fundamental matters of faith, by their leaders, with bogus
authority, false sacraments, and other snares and delusions corrupting
Christ’s pure teaching. Luther and his followers were at least
logical enough to reject the papacy and the whole idea of a visible church.
Wills, remarkably, not only adheres to the visible Church, but insists that
the papacy is, in spite of everything, essential to its unity! But why, if the
papacy has no real authority, and if its historical claims are in fact false?
But all is not lost. In
our own time, energies of redeeming change have at last been let loose,
though Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger struggle in vain to
suppress them. Like many conservative Catholics, ironically, Wills sees
the Second Vatican Council as an implicit repudiation of much of Catholic
tradition — but that’s exactly why he warmly approves of the
council’s work and the ensuing “reforms.”
Thanks to the
council, he says, ordinary Catholics now feel quite free to use
contraceptives and get abortions; a situation Wills sees as parallel to the
fidelity of the laity to Trinitarianism during the Arian crisis of the fourth
century. Once again, you see, the laity are defining true orthodoxy, while
the hierarchy are — no, I don’t quite see it either. In fact,
there could hardly be a more absurd analogy.
Wills’s
ecclesiology seems to fall somewhere between populism and pantheism.
Yes, there is a visible Church, and the workings of the Spirit are evident in
the way its faithful suburbanites won’t allow the clergy and
hierarchy to interfere with its lifestyle anymore. Catholics who use
contraceptives “are witnesses to the lived faith of the
church,” whereas the Pope who calls contraception sinful “is
out of step with the church.” Wills may find this convincing, but
surely even he can’t think it very elevating.
I try to keep an open
mind. But when someone suggests that Providence has ordained the sexual
revolution, well, as Huck Finn might say, that’s too many for me.
No Martyrs
I once saw a
hilarious TV documentary on neo-Nazism, in which one of the subjects
gave a superbly pluralistic explanation of his position: “Nazism is
the answer for me. It may not be the answer for everyone.” Not much
evangelical zeal there, but hey, this is America!
In the same spirit,
Garry Wills has given a sort of explanation of why he remains a Catholic,
but no compelling reason why anyone else should become one. If the
original Church had had the faith he describes, it would have enlisted few
converts — and certainly no martyrs. And there would be no
Catholics, or any other Christians, today.
†††
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