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'Papal Sin: Structures Of Deceit' by Garry Wills

Garry Wills unforgiving in 'Papal Sin'

Sunday, August 13, 2000

By Stephen Bede Scharper

	Papal Sin: Structures Of Deceit By Garry Wills Doubleday $25.00

How do you spell deceit? For Garry Wills, the answer might read: P-A-P-A-C-Y, especially the pontificates of the past century and a half.

In his new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Roman Catholic historian mounts an impressive barrage against the modern papacy.

While readily admitting there is nothing new about papal venality -- popes have spawned bastards, waged wars and ravenously grasped for wealth and power -- Wills, in this assiduously researched and impassioned diatribe, claims that recent popes have systematically obscured the truth in vast and tangled skeins of structured dishonesty.

With clever phrases and unremitting logic, Wills slices through modern magisterial teaching on clerical celibacy, exclusion of women from the priesthood, the Immaculate Conception, papal infallibility, contraception, homosexuality, Christian-Jewish relations and abortion, unveiling a grand mosaic of official mendacity, twisted biblical interpretation, distorted facts and outright lies.

Piercing the contorted argument against women’s ordination, for example, Wills lays bare the church’s unconvincing assertions. Why can’t women be ordained? Because the Twelve Apostles were all men.

But the apostles were married. Why can’t priests be married? Peter was married. Why can’t later bishops of Rome be married?

On this point, according to Pope John Paul II, the church cannot revert to the original situation. Christ was a man; therefore, a priest must be a man. But what about the traditional notion of the mystical marriage of Christ with his church, where the priest is the groom and the church his female bride?

Wills responds:

“When the congregation has to admit, in the course of this torturous argument, that the priest also represents the church, the female partner, the congregation plunges into this bit of Lewis Carroll logic -- the priest is the church only because he is the head of the church; and therefore the priest can only be the bridegroom even when he is the bride. Got it?”

Because the modern popes have crafted a “cultivated ignorance” and broken their own codes and creeds, these pontiffs are even more destructive than their egregious forebears, Wills says. They have waged -- and continue to advance -- a systematic assault on the truth. “If church authorities begin with disregard for truth in historical and temporal matters,” Wills reasons, “they will have coarsened their ability to handle the great truths, which are the most elusive ones.”

Two of Wills’ intellectual heroes are the Victorian Catholic paladins of the truth -- Cardinal John Henry Newman and Lord Acton. Both men assailed a papal power-grab that attempted to claim St. Peter’s Basilica as the exclusive address of the Holy Spirit, and both men paid for following the dictates of their consciences.

Wills, a former Jesuit seminarian and one-time cultural editor of William F. Buckley’s conservative journal, National Review, when asked about his biases, replied, “If I thought I had any bias, I wouldn’t have written the book.”

He added that, as an American, he shares the same fealty for democratic process and truth as did the famous American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, whose ideas helped shaped Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.

As a fellow North American white, liberal, educated, middle-class Catholic male, who is sympathetic to Wills’ critique, I nevertheless wonder how applicable such a perspective may be for a global church that is largely nonwhite, non-North American, non-middle class and only 50 percent male.

To what extent can the church ever really be transparently honest as long as it is a city-state, a separate, autonomous political entity?

Wills, despite his polemic, remains a devout Catholic, who says the Rosary, and believes in the Trinity, the Incarnation and the other tenets of the church’s credal statements. His main concern is that the pope and the magisterium be truthful. His vision of the church is reflected in former Jesuit Philip Berrigan decrying weapons of mass destruction, and Sister Helen Prejean, of “Dead Man Walking” fame, naming capital punishment as a vengeful rather than a Christian act.

Yet Philip Berrigan’s ministry is strengthened by recent papal critiques of nuclear weapons, and Prejean’s ministry is buttressed by Pope John Paul II’s condemnation of capital punishment.

While Wills is correct to critique the removal of the birth control debate from the assembled bishops at Vatican II and the ban on artificial contraception, his analysis doesn’t include the great teachings of Vatican II on the role of the church in condemning societal gaps between rich and poor, or the forceful critique of exploitative labor practices by Pope John Paul II.

While Wills amply uncovers the webs of deceit that have entwined the modern papacy, he doesn’t situate these in terms of global economic, political and societal events that have helped shape Vatican developments.

Might the papacy, seeing its political power and territory stripped away in the modern period, be buttressing its authority in a sincere but misguided attempt to preserve Catholic values?

In scrutinizing the papacy, one doesn’t necessarily uncover a random, chronic liar, but rather a political agenda. If one really wants to assail the modern papacy, one could well critique the silencing of cardinals, archbishops, sisters, priests and theologians who have threatened its culture of power.

While Wills has done a marvelous job of chronicling the papacy’s structured deceit, the social, political, and economic context of those structures remain largely unexamined. At the end of the day, “after the Mass has ended, papal sin ultimately springs from a papal agenda.”

Stephen Bede Scharper teaches Roman Catholic ethics at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.