Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Wills, is one of America’s most highly praised Catholic journalists and authors, has recently published a criticizing work against his own church’s past and its present leadership. Wills’ thesis in the “Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit” (Doubleday) is that “the life of church authorities is lived within structures of deceit.” In his book Wills puts his extensive knowledge of St. Augustine, and church traditions, to work in depicting the “structures of deceit” which he claims are built into the Roman Catholic papacy. His main idea throughout the book is that every era of papal history has its own problematic issue. For instance the medieval papacy was obsessed by lust for political power, as the popes during Renaissance were consumed by greediness for treasures. Nowadays Wills argues the structural sin feature of the papacy is intellectual dishonesty.
Wills believes that the papal system is helpless in acknowledging their mistakes. This in turn forces the system’s defenders to dive into mental gymnastics to protect dogmas for which there are no really good arguments. Taking for example women who were excluded from the Catholic priesthood because of historic beliefs that women were ritually impure and because of superiority of men. It is clear that today it is impossible to appeal to such principles, so the defenders of this veto are forced to claim that because Jesus did not accept women, thus the church can not do it. The book describes the official positions on women’s ordination from the church and other issues such as contraception, the church’s role in the Holocaust and obligatory priestly celibacy. It argues that those concerns are imperfect in their intellectual integrity and insincere in their abuse of historical confirmation. Wills writes “a man condemns himself in his own eyes if he tries to claim that he agrees with it.” Such hidden conflict, the writer suggests, is an unappreciated reason behind current lack of priests.
The three main phases are the central focus of the book. In the first one author tries to show that the official Church has lied about its treatment of Jews and its assumed silence during the Holocaust. He implies that an organization able to lie about that could and might lie about anything. The author then speaks about alleged doctrinal dishonesties regular for Catholicism. Also he states that the concept of Truth itself is discredited by the truth-claims and power of the Church. The problem however occurs when we look closed at those claims, we might notice that those three subjects are not necessarily linked, and one does not prove the correctness of the other. To Wills, though a supposed Catholic anti-Semitism is born from the same root of untruth as the Vatican’s rejection of women’s ordination, its mandatory priestly celibacy, and “homophobia”, and its indisputable belief in papal infallibility.
Wills writes that Catholic Church was poisoned with anti-Jewish outlook for centuries. He turns to a 1928 decision by Pius XI to suppress a Catholic organization called the Friends of Israel. On its account the pope protested that the group did not take sufficient note of “the continual blindness of this people” and that its approach was “contrary to the sense and spirit the church, to the thought of the Holy Fathers and the liturgy.” Also Pius XI has distinguished between religious anti-Judaism, which was tolerated by the church, and its secular form, which was not. The book goes through a number of current critical issues within Catholicism. For instance the Vatican claims it cannot manage Communion to remarried divorcees, because that would compromise the truthfulness of sacrament founded by Christ. Wills however claims that for the first four centuries of church history, there was no concept of marriage as a punishment.
Another important issue discussed in the book concerns priesthood celibacy. Wills shows that there is no basis for celibacy and points out to the fact that there is nothing said in the New Testament to support the idea of blessing the bread and wine. He claims that there is no notion of a special order of priesthood in the New Testament except from the idea of the priesthood of all believers. The author continues on to the unpleasant topic of horrible consequences of celibacy. Research has proven that about twenty percent of priests are sexually active with women at any one time, and twenty percent of priests are homosexually active. As was said before that is where the problem of decreasing number of people applying for priesthood. The general phenomenon of emptying or already empty monasteries and nunneries is a concern for the author as well and he blames all those misfortunes on the Church’s believes pattern. Wills also discusses the terrible and widespread problem of pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church. The way in which this trend has been developing and worsening in recent years is bad enough by itself, but it also has been covered up. The book survey showed that from 1983 to 1987 an average of one case a week was reported on the pedophilia issue, moreover every bishopric in America has been had a pedophilia case.
One more matter talked about in the book is contraception. In 1968 the papacy issued a unique letter on contraception which Wills describes as the most catastrophic document of the century. He shows that it has affected a great number of people, as he believes the problem with the prohibition of contraception as a lack of biblical authority.
Marian Politics is another theme of the book. For Wills, the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary is essentially a terrible mistake, which was publicized by the papacy. Wills claims that this craze has idolatrously acclaimed a mortal in the place of her Lord, oppressing women, and denigrating sexuality. According to author it also took over the proper role of the Holy Ghost, and infantilized the clergy. Mary, for Wills represents “the mother of Jesus’ weakness, not his strength.” So he has got it backward as opposed to the views of Catholics, and it seems that his only intention is to criticize and reject all doctrines held by his own church. He disregards the fact that figure of Mary might have offered the Christian world a genuine channel for the exploration of a multitude of meanings in her image. Such themes as the place of the feminine in the church, the relationship between nature and grace, and collaboration of the creature with its creator, the historical origin of the Messiah are major issues that could be explained with examination of figure of Mary. On the contrary Wills takes his reader on a tour around the art galleries of Florence, in search theological mistakes. For instance when he pauses in front of Botticelli’s Coronation of the Virgin, which portrays a unique celebration of the transfiguration of human weakness by grace, Wills merely notices a piece of papal propaganda, as he notes God the Father is wearing a papal tiara, which is an instant comparison of the pope to God as he puts it.
Although this work is a comprehensive look at the current Catholic Church’s problems, it has many misconceptions which seem to suit the thesis of the book. Thus the reader should carefully look into issues brought up in the book and decide whether it is really a vital and relevant one, or suitably added in the context.