Garry Wills is one of the few viable candidates in this country for the assignment (honorable abroad, at least) of public intellectual. His many works, whose topics run a curious gamut from Augustine to Macbeth and Monticello to Gettysburg and many other unexpected destinations in between, usually manifest an Olympian, erudite, and ever idiosyncratic view of the subjects under his restless purview.
But WHY I AM A CATHOLIC (2002) is an angry book written, I suspect, in hot blood. Ostensibly, it is a response to the chorus that clamored, in the controversy following publication of its predecessor, PAPAL SIN (2000), to know why Wills bothered to remain a Catholic. Spiritual reactionaries, he says, "informed me that I hate the church, that I stay in it only to harm it, that I should get out before I do it irreparable damage." At the other end of the spectrum, his progressive friends asked the same question: "Why are you keeping up this pose?" But the book is largely a broadside against the first group.
Why is Garry Wills a Catholic? His apparent annoyance at having to answer the question rings in the challenges he throws down to these critics. There is nothing defensive about this long book that gives them their answer. On the contrary, much of the work is an implacable offensive against his opponents.
WHY I AM A CATHOLIC may be conveniently divided into three sections of unequal length: a biographical introduction, a historical survey of the papacy, and, finally, Wills's effort to answer the question of Catholicism's enduring appeal for him. In the first 50 pages, he lays out his Catholic credentials, sketching a childhood in the pre-Vatican II Church, a failed vocation in (but a splendid education from) the Society of Jesus, and a flirtation with the conservatism of Catholics such as William F. Buckley Jr., followed by a steady move to the Catholic left and the more congenial company of the Berrigan brothers and others.
In this section Wills reprises some of the same themes he covered more unkindly in his stimulating but now curiously dated reflection on the Church in upheaval, BARE, RUINED CHOIRS (1971). There he sketched a Church undergoing convulsive change in the aftermath of Vatican II, when it was still unclear whether it was going down for the third time or evolving into a new institution. Generally, Wills approved of the changes but betrayed distaste nonetheless for the enthusiasm of some of the standard-bearers of change. Thirty years later the question has been settled. The Church saved itself, and Wills turned his gaze on the institution that has been the greatest impediment to its evolution -- the papacy.
This brings us to the second part of the book, which in a broad sense historicizes Wills's furious attack on the deceits, great and petty, of the modern papacy by bringing them back to the dawn of the Christian era. Ostensibly Wills offers this section, the largest of the book (some 250 pages), in order to identify and celebrate the genuine Petrine charism -- the true role of the pope and papacy in the Roman Catholic Church. Like Lorenzo Valla, the 15th-century humanist and (at least for a time) scourge of the papacy and debunker of the forged Donation of Constantine, Wills heaps up every evil, all the pretensions, every squalid worldliness, and each bad deed in a garish portrait. It is a sorry catalogue indeed. He structures the section in roughly chronological sequence and adopts the format of uncovering the venial and mortal sins of the papacy while drawing on a wide reading in the historical literature, souring it throughout with a sustained contrarian stance and stitching it together with savagely funny asides that remind us he has a bone to pick with the current pope ("Chadwick said that only a pope like Pius IX could have canonized a man like Pedro d'Arbus [the notorious 15th-century Spanish inquisitor]. I suppose that only a pope like John Paul II could have beatified a man like Pius IX").
The specter of the papacy overshadows everything in the book. Wills's treatment of Christian origins devastates in minute detail any sort of claim the papacy has for a scriptural warrant. To this end, he devotes considerable attention to invalidating the pope by ridiculing the Peter of St. Paul and the Gospels. All of the pope's pretensions toward being the rock of the Church turn to sand when Wills lets us in on the joke. Christ is the rock of the Church, and when Jesus calls the notoriously foolish -- "less a Moses than Mister Magoo" -- Simon (Peter) the rock of the Church, Wills wonders: "Was Jesus teasing Peter when he called him 'Rocky,' naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person 'Einstein'?"
The diatribe seems especially forced, since later Wills treats Peter to a curious rehabilitation as a reproach to the excesses of the papacy of Leo X (1513-1521): "If one reads again the Gospel passages on Peter ... it is hard to think of the Vatican's triumphal celebrations of the Renaissance popes as anything but an insult to the apostle's memory. What has Peter -- the symbol of love, unity, and service -- to do with this mélange of idolatry, blasphemy, and simony?" Mister Magoo as a symbol of love, unity, and service? The attentive reader is reminded of the fabled Catskills resort where the food was terrible -- and in such small portions.
One can certainly cavil against Wills's argumentation, and sometimes Wills does find it difficult not to be the smartest kid in the class. Still, those who try uneasily to dismiss him must respond on the ground of historical fact, and there his case is remarkably strong. Such weaknesses as may be found in the book stem from simplification or generalization. For example, whatever one wishes to say about that tireless and ambitious pontiff, Innocent III (1198-1216), he requires a more ample pigeonhole than "the wager of the Cathar Crusade." And do you exhaust the significance -- not to mention the complexity -- of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) by linking it with Vatican I and labeling both as "conservative slam-dunks"?
In the final 40 pages, however, Wills turns to his reasons for being a Catholic by offering, like the Catholic and Protestant catechists of the 16th century, exegeses of the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer. Of course the Apostles' Creed is not uniquely Catholic and, moreover, it is necessary but not sufficient as a statement of orthodoxy, since the apostolic fathers (not yet in papal clutches) felt the need to augment it at Nicaea and then Chalcedon. Still, the question posed is not what Catholicism is, but why Garry Wills is a Catholic -- a question he can answer as he pleases. Yet in this section the fire goes out of the book completely, and I found myself clutching at shadows in his thoughtful, sometimes obscure reflections. One must be made of stern stuff indeed to be a Catholic on account of St. Augustine's complex and ingenious Trinitarian theology, and I was grateful that Wills kept offering his beloved G. K. Chesterton in balance.
