|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
TRANSCRIPT:
Kim Lawton's interview with Garry Wills, author of the book PAPAL SIN.
KIM LAWTON: Why did you write this book?
GARRY WILLS: Well, I'd written about everything that is in the book in various places over the past two decades. But I wrote a book about St. Augustine, started it three years ago, and he wrote two treatises about truth in the church, which hit home and made me realize that all these other things I've talked about nuns, treatment of Jews, treatment of priests. All came under the same pressures not to tell the truth at the top of the church's hierarchy. And to Augustine, that was the greatest possible betrayal, to try to promote truth with falsehood.
So, what I did was reconsider all of those things under that heading. And it made sense about what the church was up to, that it acted in all these ways not out of anti-Semitism, not out of hatred of sex or anything, but out of a misguided attempt to preserve the credibility of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. Misguided because it backfires, you know, once you try to defend the truth with falsehood, you betray your own cause and you lose credibility, which is what the pope has done. He has certainly lost credibility on things like contraception, where the vast majority of Catholics just don't pay any attention to him, the rate of abortion among Catholics is the same as the rate among non-Catholics, the decline of the priesthood shows that many priests are not willing to submit to having to tell falsehoods of some degree. So there is a gathering crisis of credibility and truth telling and that's what makes all these things mean more than they mean singly. That came home to me that it's not simply one thing that can be changed or another thing that can be changed. There has to be a whole change in the attitude toward truth to history, truth to scripture, truth to the church's past.
LAWTON: You talk of this notion of structures of deceit built in. What do you mean by that?
WILLS: I mean, nobody starts out to lie. But there are so many pressures to try to evade the unpleasant things in the history of the church -- of which there are many -- to select what you will choose and how you will approach it in scripture, so that Paul the Sixth, for instance, was given the report of his own commission, all Catholics, all with long experienced, all very experienced and educated, who told him that the natural law argument against contraception makes no sense. Various people in the Curia came to the pope and said, if you say that, you'll say that the church has been sending people to hell for committing a sin that is not a sin, and how can the church continue? You will destroy its credibility. Well, nobody believes that now anyway, very few people, so the credibility is gone and the worst thing is that he had to lie to do it. As I said, he did not set out to lie, he probably didn't think he was lying. But there is a very interesting concept in St. Thomas Aquinas, who the Vatican likes to quote a lot, what he calls ignorantia affectata, a cultivated ignorance, that an ignorance is so useful you don't want to get rid of it. And this is not something that excuses you. It's something that is inculpating according to St. Thomas.
LAWTON: You mentioned that, that church leaders don't set out to lie. But is it your argument that in fact, that's what they are doing?
WILLS: Yeah, they are deceiving, certainly. That's what St. Augustine would call a lie. He said a lie is not something that is simply false words. It's the intent to deceive. And if you intend to hide a truth, to promote a partial and evasive substitute for it, that's a lie, according to St. Augustine, anyway.
LAWTON: That's a pretty strong statement to make as a member of the church against church leaders, isn't it?
WILLS: Well, it is. But remember, the church is not the church leaders. The church is the people of God, and the church leaders have often erred, often strayed. There have been many sinful and terrible popes, murderous popes, ones who used torture and all the instruments of the state, which they were. The whole of temporal power in the time of tyrannical government was a history of tyranny as Lord Acton pointed out. You know, his famous saying is that power tends to corrupt absolutely and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And he said that of popes. He was a good Catholic, but he knew that of course the popes have strayed and erred. And the pope's in their teaching capacity have taught things, for instance, Pius XI taught that Jews were Christ killers. Vatican Two said they are not, so in that, he was speaking falsely, then. I don't think he was lying then. On the other hand, Pius 12th, who was silent during the Holocaust for reasons that may have been valid. I'm not going to attack him on that. After the World War Two, he said that he had spoken out often. Now, that was a lie.
LAWTON: What about Pope John Paul the Second? Does he continue this pattern?
WILLS: Yes, he has picked up the positions that Paul the Sixth and others had formed on the ordination of women, on married priests, on contraception, on all those things, and reemphasized them and strengthened them in some cases. And that's deceptive. For instance, it was said by Paul the sixth that the church failed to ordain women not because it thought that women were inferior or impure, but because Jesus didn't ordain women. That's a fundamentalist Bible argument that was brought in at the last minute because in fact, century after century after century, the church did teach that women were inferior and that they were impure, that they had ritual impurities due to menstruation which meant they couldn't officiate at the altar. And there's no question about that. The record is very clear. It's said over and over and over. St. Thomas Aquinas said only the best is good enough for the Lord and women are second best, so they can't be priests. It had nothing to do with scripture at that point. It had to do with Aristoltean nonsense about women's make-up being inferior to men's.
LAWTON: Cardinal Newman spoke about the development of doctrine.
WILLS: Sure it always happens. The reason priests came in, for instance, they are not in scripture is development of doctrine. It made sense at the time. But this pope will not argue that. He goes back to a fundamentalist argument and says actually that Jesus ordained priests. He didn't. It's nowhere in scripture. There weren't any priests until at least the fall of the temple because the early Christians still believed that the priest in the temple was the only priest that they recognized apart from the priesthood of Jesus and the people of God. So, development of doctrine does take place, and the church could actually defend some of its positions better by arguing that. But there is this attempt to go back to a fundamentalist argument to say Jesus didn't ordain women or that the early priests were celibate. Not all of them but most of them. Which is not true. So development of doctrine is something that depends on your theology of the spirit, that the Holy Spirit is guiding the church. And it will change under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But these modern papal positions are against change. They're for saying, no, no, we have to stick to the literal word of Scripture, and it's not even the literal word.
LAWTON: Some people have said, though, that the Holy Spirit is guiding the current leadership to take those positions.
WILLS: Well, if it is, it's guiding him them to very strange positions. Uh, the Holy Spirit guides the people of God. What Jesus said, the Holy Spirit will come and teach you. He said it to all of the Christians. And protect you and comfort you. The Paraclete will always be with you. And even the statement on the infallibility of the pope of Vatican one, which John Henry Newman pointed out, says that the pope has that infallibility that Jesus meant to give his church. If he acts apart from that infallibility, then he's not infallible. So it's only in conjunction with his church that he's infallible. And that means there are going to be long stretches where the hierarchy is not the best voice of the spirit. The Spirit infuses the entirety of the Catholic body, of the Christian body.
LAWTON: How do you see all of this affecting the church, lay people, local congregations?
WILLS: A lot of these things are unbelievable to them and so that leads to a kind of split within the church among what Catholics actually do and what the pope says they should be doing. That's true even of his own church in Poland. And it also means that because there is this refusal to recognize the dignity of women, or the importance of marriage or the validity of homosexuals who are responsible sexually as heterosexuals have to be, that the priesthood, the nuns are gone, they're just plain gone. They're dying out. And no wonder. The whole conception of the nun was obedient to the priest. The nun was always the nurse and never the doctor, the nun was the teacher of the textbook, never the writer of it. Well, that doesn't work any more in the modern world. The priests are going, they're disappearing very rapidly, because they can't marry, because they have qualms of trying to convince people about what they know is not true, so that's how it affects the ordinary laity. And until there is a return to telling the truth to each other, that these problems will continue. But I think because of the spirit, these things will change.
LAWTON: I've been talking to various people about your book. Some of your critics say, if Garry Wills has so much trouble with so many positions that the church is taking, why does he stay a Catholic?
WILLS: Yeah.
LAWTON: Why doesn't he join another church that believes like he does. Why do you stay a Catholic?
WILLS: That makes a very simple mistake. It assumes that papalism is Catholicism. That if you disagree with the pope, you're not Catholic. Many, many people disagreed with the popes. Saints, holy men, theologians. And when they say I disagree with the teaching of the church, I say the creed, I believe every clause of it. I believe in the Trinity, the Incarnation, in the Redemption and the Resurrection and the mystical body of Christ. That's nothing? They think that I should care about contraception and get out of a church when those are the core truths that I believe that the church has taught for century after century. That's what makes me a Catholic.
LAWTON: To what extent did this book come out of your Catholic faith?
WILLS: Oh entirely. As I say, I've been writing about these things for years because I am an active Catholic and these are troubling matters, troubling not only to me but to many people. And I think it's the duty of a loyal Catholic to say, I believe in the church, I believe in many things, but I don't believe in this because I can't, it's, it's, it makes no sense.
LAWTON: Some of your friends--people who agree with you on some of the positions--even they were a little taken aback by the tone of the book. Some of them say it seems like such an angry book. Are you angry?
WILLS: No, no. As I say, the question is truth. And it's a very simple matter. If you don't tell the truth, you're not serving the truth. And that came home to me very strongly. As I say, I've written about all these things. And it's not so much anger that is different here, it's that they are all one thing. That I now see them all as a matter of telling the truth. And the urgency with which Augustine wrote about that, he only wrote two treatises on the truth and they were both occasioned by people who were lying for the church.
LAWTON: I marked a couple of spots, but let me read just one to say, I mean, you argue this pretty forcefully. (begins to read.) "How can one be in service to others, yet peddle to them religious truths whose truthfulness rings so obviously hollow?" That's pretty strong language.
WILLS: Well, what else can you say about the argument on contraception? You know, there is nothing in Scripture about contraception. It's supposed to be natural law, perspicuous to natural reason. Nobody believes the pope's arguments on that, except a few people in the Curia, perhaps. Catholics don't. Non-Catholics certainly don't. The whole point of it is silly, to say sex can only be engaged in for procreation. Now, if you're going to take that, and Augustine did, then you have to say, you can't have sex after menopause, you can't have sex if you're impotent, you can't have sex in all kinds of situations. Then they say, you can have sex in the infertile period, so you are dodging procreation, but you can't have sex with a condom, because that's dodging it in a quote 'artificial' way, not a natural way. Those are concepts that make absolutely no sense at all. And even bishops I've talked to can't really defend them.
LAWTON: What impact do you hope this book will have?
WILLS: I don't know. I never think in those terms. I hope some people at least will read St. Augustine after this. And that they'll begin telling the truth. You know, if we all tell the truth to each other, it will become impossible for the hierarchy to continue not telling the truth.
 Back to Article Finder: Stories by Week
© 2000 Educational Broadcasting Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Prepared by Burrelle's Information Services, which takes
sole responsibility for accuracy of transcription. No license
is granted to the user of this material other than for research.
User may not reproduce any copy of the material except for
user's personal or internal use and, in such case, only
one copy may be reproduced, nor shall user use any material
for commercial purposes or in any manner that may infringe
upon Educational Broadcasting Corporation's copyright or proprietary interests in the
material.
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
