Summary
Title: Papal Sin: The Structures of Deceit
Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Bantam Dell
ISBN: 0385494114
Pro:
• Detailed historical critique
• Not from an outsider, but from a devout Catholic
• Wills knows a lot about Catholic theology and history
Con:
• Chapters skip around a lot in a way that can be disconcerting
Description:
• Covers several major issues which plague the Church today
• Explains problems in Catholic theology and Catholic history such that outsiders can understand
• Offers potential solutions for today's problems
Book Review
Even worse, past errors are being covered up (or worse yet, perpetuated) in order to protect the image of the Church as never doing serious wrong. Garry Wills exposes all of this, bringing it to the harsh light of day. Why should this be of any interest to skeptics and nonbelievers? The Roman Catholic Church wields a tremendous amount of authority in the world today.
They have a special status in the United Nations accorded no other religious body, and they influence laws and public policy in countries all around the globe, including the United States. If, as Garry Wills argues, many of their key positions on controversial issues are ill-founded - and that Catholic authorities realize this - then implications for the future of the Church and its power are grave indeed.
Wills begins by offering a contrasting picture of the past when popes did not develop a cult of personality around them and people knew that they were quite capable of sinning greatly:
- "In the tenth century a dissolute teenager could be elected Pope (John XII) because of his family connections and die a decade later in the bed of a married woman."
And that is just a small taste of what some of the popes were capable of. Dante made a point of including papal figures suffering in the deepest recesses of hell, but can you imagine a Catholic writer doing the same today without being viciously attacked as actually being anti-Catholic? Today, any criticism of Catholicism or Catholic dogma is considered by many to be just as bad as the nastiest anti-semitism.
Wills' basic argument is not that the Catholic Church is engaging in anything quite like what Dante described, but rather something worse: it is deceiving its own members about the Church's past and the soundness of its doctrines. Why would it do that? Because if it didn't, it would require admitting that egregious errors were committed in the past - and even worse, that they have been covered up. The "sin," then, is sacrificing honesty in an effort to save face.
In what areas is the Church doing this? The first which Wills addresses is the Church's culpability in the history of Christian anti-semitism, particularly with regards to the Holocaust and World War II. Recently, the Church has been engaged in efforts to apologize for it role in what happened, but the entire project is marred by the fact the Church expends most of its effort in attempting to exhonerate itself.
According to official Vatican "apologies," like the We Remember document issued by a papal commission, individual Catholics may have been guilty of occasional acts of sin, and certainly the Nazis were guilty of not following the teachings of the Church, but the Church itself was not guilty of anything.
This, of course, requires pretending that the bishops and priests who actively supported the Nazis and their anti-semitic policies never actually existed:
- "There may (or may not) have been extenuating circumstances for some of those collaborators. But to pretend - nay, to assert - that they did not exist is to remove We Remember from any serious consideration as an honest confrontation with a complicated history. Its "memory," far from being useful to the cause of true understanding that would prevent another Holocaust, is useful only to the fictions that the Vatican wants to maintain about itself."
Part of the problem is the usage of the term "the Church." The Second Vatican Council insisted on a usage with a very early pedigree: that it refer to the entire body of believers. According to this, then, the "Church" includes all Catholics. The successes and failures of each Catholic are, thus, the successes and failures of the Church itself.
