On Garry Wills' Papal Sin

GARRY WILLS' Papal Sin appeared in late spring 2000, and at once evoked a flurry of response from many quarters and of many kinds. The book has comforted some Catholics and alarmed others, in both cases by making forceful claims about what's wrong and what's right with today's church. Most of the responses to it have focused on these claims rather than upon the historical investigations that Wills presents as grounding them. Most commentators have assumed that these investigations, presented as they are by a classicist and historian of considerable reputation, are responsible and respectable. But Wills' handling of the materials he discusses is not always what might be hoped for from a careful historian and exegete, and this needs to be shown with some clarity and detail in order that future discussion of his work might proceed upon the basis of a more adequate assessment of the nature of Wills' achievement in Papal Sin.

But assessing and responding to a book requires knowing its genre. Misjudging this will make a proper response difficult and will often result in absurdity: one does not treat a love poem as if it were a philosophical treatise. But it's not always easy to tell to what genre a book belongs. Sometimes the author is confused about the matter; sometimes a work bends genres for good or bad reasons; and sometimes genre is masked. Garry Wills' Papal Sin is a masquerade: it pretends to be a treatise but is really a diatribe, and unmasking the pretense is necessary if an adequate response is to be made.

Superficially, Papal Sin is a work of haute vulgarisation with an argumentative edge. Wills' apparent purpose is to use the findings of historical and textual scholarship to instruct contemporary Catholics of the story behind some magisterial (mostly papal) actions and documents of the last century and a half or so. To do this, he analyzes, inter alia, the composition and promulgation of Syllabus errorum (1864), Pastor aeternus (1870), Humanae vitae (1968), and We Remember (1998). He also discusses the exclusion of women from priestly office, priestly celibacy, the nature of the eucharist and the mode of its celebration, papal authority and its exercise, priestly sexual abuse and the church's response to it, the increase in the representation of gays among priests, Marian doctrine, abortion and contraception, Lord Acton's and Cardinal Newman's responses to the First Vatican Council, and Augustine on truth and lies.

This is a heterogenous collection of topics. Wills connects them by treating each as providing material illustrative of a single thesis, which is that magisterial mendacity flows inevitably from the magisterium's excessively high valuation of its own authority. Wills wants to expose the "corruptions of intellectual betrayal" (9), ¹ among which the first is deceit. His tools, it seems, are those of the sober truth-teller, the remover of obfuscation, the fearless shiner of light into dark corners; and his heroes, he claims, are St. Augustine, the defender of truth-telling at all costs, and Lord Acton, the heroic Rankean proponent of telling it like it was (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist), no matter what. Wills presents himself as a Catholic with a love for the church trying to give comfort to other Catholics by telling them the truth about some of the failings of their church. ²

But this appearance of sober historical work in the service of unvarnished truth is a mask for a genre of quite a different sort. Papal Sin is actually a diatribe, a mordantly and bitterly critical rejection of almost every element of Catholic orthodoxy in the name of precisely the church that Wills rejects. Like every diatribe, the chief concern is with persuasion and rhetorical effect; sober accuracy and sensitivity to ambiguity and complexity are not to the point and are certainly not present in the book. Jeremiah's...