Product Description

"The truth, we are told, will make us free. It is time to free Catholics, lay as well as clerical, from the structures of deceit that are our subtle modern form of papal sin. Paler, subtler, less dramatic than the sins castigated by Orcagna or Dante, these are the quiet sins of intellectual betrayal."
--from the Introduction

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills comes an assured, acutely insightful--and occasionally stinging--critique of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy from the nineteenth century to the present.

Papal Sin in the past was blatant, as Catholics themselves realized when they painted popes roasting in hell on their own church walls. Surely, the great abuses of the past--the nepotism, murders, and wars of conquest--no longer prevail; yet, the sin of the modern papacy, as revealed by Garry Wills in his penetrating new book, is every bit as real, though less obvious than the old sins.

Wills describes a papacy that seems steadfastly unwilling to face the truth about itself, its past, and its relations with others. The refusal of the authorities of the Church to be honest about its teachings has needlessly exacerbated original mistakes. Even when the Vatican has tried to tell the truth--e.g., about Catholics and the Holocaust--it has ended up resorting to historical distortions and evasions. The same is true when the papacy has attempted to deal with its record of discrimination against women, or with its unbelievable assertion that "natural law" dictates its sexual code.

Though the blithe disregard of some Catholics for papal directives has occasionally been attributed to mere hedonism or willfulness, it actually reflects a failure, after long trying on their part, to find a credible level of honesty in the official positions adopted by modern popes. On many issues outside the realm of revealed doctrine, the papacy has made itself unbelievable even to the well-disposed laity.

The resulting distrust is in fact a neglected reason for the shortage of priests. Entirely aside from the public uproar over celibacy, potential clergy have proven unwilling to put themselves in a position that supports dishonest teachings.

Wills traces the rise of the papacy's stubborn resistance to the truth, beginning with the challenges posed in the nineteenth century by science, democracy, scriptural scholarship, and rigorous history. The legacy of that resistance, despite the brief flare of John XXIII's papacy and some good initiatives in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council (later baffled), is still strong in the Vatican.

Finally Wills reminds the reader of the positive potential of the Church by turning to some great truth tellers of the Catholic tradition--St. Augustine, John Henry Newman, John Acton, and John XXIII. In them, Wills shows that the righteous path can still be taken, if only the Vatican will muster the courage to speak even embarrassing truths in the name of Truth itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #265597 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06
• Released on: 2000-06-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
"Catholics have fallen out of the healthy old habit of reminding each other how sinful Popes can be," notes Garry Wills in the introduction to Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. In his book, Wills alludes occasionally to the most egregious papal scoundrels: "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." But most of the author's energy is devoted to an incisive analysis of recent popes' doctrinal pronouncements, which Wills believes have eroded the Church's moral authority and contributed to the drastic decline in vocations to the priesthood today. "The arguments for much of what passes as current church doctrine are so intellectually contemptible that mere self-respect forbids a man to voice them as his own," Wills writes. "The cartoon version of natural law used to argue against contraception, or artificial insemination, or masturbation, would make a sophomore blush. The attempt to whitewash past attitudes toward Jews is so dishonest in its use of historical evidence that a man condemns himself in his own eyes if he tries to claim that he agrees with it."

In chapters that address all of the matters just mentioned, and many others (including women's exclusion from the priesthood and clerical celibacy), Papal Sin considers "the connection between a Christian's truthfulness and Christ's truth." Wills argues that "the New Testament link between the two is brought about by the Spirit when he fills Christians so they speak without restraint." A final chapter, of great rhetorical and spiritual power, finds hope for Catholicism in a "church of the Spirit" where "the poor have the good news brought to them (Matthew 11:5)." Wills is one of those rare and exceptional writers who can clearly discern and describe both sin and righteousness, and can boldly speak the truth about power. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Wills, one of America's foremost writers on religion, were mildly disappointed with his 1999 biography of Saint AugustineDnot because it was anything less than brilliant, but because it was so short. They needn't have worried. In his new book, Wills puts Augustine to work against the "structures of deceit" he sees built into today's Roman Catholic papacy. Wills postulates that the papacy in every era has its own besetting sin. In the medieval period, it was political power; in the Renaissance, money; today, he argues, it is intellectual dishonesty. Because the papacy is incapable of admitting error on doctrinal matters, Wills believes, it forces apologists into mental gymnastics to defend doctrines such as an absolute ban on birth control. Throughout, Wills weaves in observations from Augustine and other Church fathers, showing that the "unbroken tradition" on these issues invoked by Church authorities is an ideological, rather than historical, construct. Wills contrasts Augustine's love of parrhesia, or bold honesty, with what he sees as the papacy's habitual mendacity on issues such as the Holocaust, priestly celibacy, homosexuality and the political function of Marian devotions. He also suggests that the crisis of conscience engendered by a Church that asks its leaders to defend dishonest positions is an unacknowledged contributor to the priest shortage. Though his rhetoric is at times a bit sharp, and his historical formulae a bit too sweeping, Wills's passion is excusable since this is a philippic directed at the Church by one its ownDa sincere, faithful Roman Catholic. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Pope John Paul II recently acknowledged past sins of the Roman Catholic Church and asked the forgiveness of God and humanity. While controversial, this unique confession also met with satisfaction. Wills's timely new work briefly introduces the blatant sins of murder, power mongering, and avarice characteristic of the medieval papacy while emphasizing the subtler "structures of deceit" we see in contemporary times. This sensitively written book is not in the attack genre but is a soulful and intelligent discussion addressing perceived ecclesiastical dishonesty and passive suppression of the Truth. Wills, author of Saint Augustine and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, considers the historical dishonesties surrounding the Holocaust, women, and sexual ethics, as well as 11 doctrinal dishonesties, including "Excluded Women," "Conspiracy of Silence," "Marian Politics," and "A Gay Priesthood." He concludes with two marvelous sections acknowledging the truth tellers (Augustine, Newman, and John XXIII) who have helped direct popes, pastors, and laity back to the liberating Gospel dictum that "the Truth shall set you free." All sections are skillfully argued and completely documented. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-DJohn Leonard Berg, Univ. of Wisconsin, Platteville
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Wise As Serpents?
It is a hard time to be a compassionate, intellectually disciplined, forward looking Catholic. The papacy of John Paul II has grown increasingly humorless, pessimistic, autocratic, and fideistic over the years. In recent weeks alone the Vatican declaration on the supremacy of the Catholic Church, coupled with the trial balloons involving canonizations of the Piuses IX and XII, have caused thoughtful Catholics to wince in embarrassment.

Reformers in the Church need a rallying point. As it becomes more politically dangerous for career pastors and theologians to lead such a renewal, the task may very well fall to a new breed of Catholic thinker, the lay philosopher-theologian beyond the pale of ecclesiastical harassment or sanction. Gary Wills is certainly such a candidate. His passion, his research, his breadth of insight, and his religious faith are beyond question.

But Papal Sin? A provocative title, to be sure. Too many Catholic reformers over the past half-century have discredited themselves from the starting block by letting their angers gestate whining diatribes that, for all their erudition, sound like the ranting of petulant teenagers. Papal Sin teeters on the edge. This is an angry work which portrays the popes of the past two centuries as constitutionally incapable of leading the Body of Christ with beatific purity of heart. For Wills the papacy has consumed its best energies in a titanic effort to preserve its own past, heaping generations of misrepresentation, disingenuous readings of Scripture and history, and outright lying.

A scathing indictment, yes. But his arguments are, at the very least, salient. The first section of Papal Sin is devoted entirely to Catholic relations with the Jews. The timing of this could not be more fortuitous, given the recent Vatican declarations on world religions and the recent appearance of a spate of books defending Pius XII. [One might include here the nomination of Joseph Lieberman as the Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency, for that matter.] Wills avoids getting snagged into the tedious arguments of what Pius XII did or did not do during World War II. Rather, he traces the behaviors of the popes toward Jews through Pius IX, citing among other examples Pius IX's "kidnapping" of Edgardo Mortara through John Paul's motivations for the canonization of Edith Stein. Pius XII's behaviors are examined in this fuller historical context. Wills divines a cultivated attitude of Catholic hegemony in its behavior toward the Jews, as when he views the canonization of Stein as a papal effort to hijack the Holocaust from the Jews and establish a cult of Nazi persecution of Catholics.

Much of this work, however, is an in-house examination of the papacy's management of birth control, priestly celibacy, the shrinking numbers of ordained ministers, annulments, priestly pedophelia, homosexual priests, excesses of Marian dogma and devotion, abortion, and infallibility. In nearly all of these chapters Wills draws attention to the discrepancies between papal practice and the evidence of Scripture and history. His research is provocative and colorful, but there is little new ground broken here. Intellectual Catholics have lived with this discrepancy for centuries. What is distinctive is the author's bluntness in charging that the recent popes have been guilty, at the very least, of culpable ignorance, and in some cases, worse. John Paul II in particular, perhaps the most gifted thinker of the past two centuries, appears to be singled out as the pope who really should have known better.

Not for three hundred pages do we find the spiritual soul of this book. While John Henry Newman gets honorable mention, not surprisingly it is Wills' hero, Augustine, against whom modern popes pale. Papal Sin describes Augustine's ten year battle with Jerome for intellectual honesty in interpreting the Bible, and his straightforward handling of a case of mishandling of funds entrusted to his stewardship in his own diocese. There is in this section an almost desperate desire on the part of the author for a pure and dependable teaching authority, a hint of Luther's passionate search for bedrock of confident faith. The Newman-Augustine treatments put into context Wills' sense of outrage at the pragmatic modus operandi of the Vatican bureaucracy.

There are theological flaws here. Wills venerates honesty as something of a beatitude, forgetting that in theory and practice the Church has approached the beatitudes as ideals, not institutional operational principles. He appears to have difficulty with another of Augustine's teachings, that of pervasive original sin. [Jesus' dictum that his disciples be wise as serpents would not cut the mustard in this book.] Wills complains that standard Vatican language carries the message it is above the Church, not part of it. But if the papacy is indeed of the common clay of the church militant, then it should come as no surprise that popes share the sinfulness and duplicity of its members. Wills shows great sympathy for the "victims" of papal dishonesty, particularly loyal parish priests. But would not modern psychology have something to say about those who choose to live in chronic victimhood? Nor does Wills put forward anything resembling a self-reforming model of church leadership. [As a graduate student, I asked my canon law professor how a more democratic might look. "Like the 1972 Democratic Convention," he quipped.]

Papal Sin is not a banner for discouraged Catholics. It is the sincere outcry of a Catholic layman who wants better example from those who would lead his communion of faith. It is not an unreasonable request.

Should The Pope Read This Book?
Disclaimer: I am neither a practicing Catholic nor was I raised as a Catholic.

I noticed this book on the bargain table at a local book store, read the jacket and the table of contents and I was intrigued. The book is divided into four sections: Historical Dishonesties; Doctrinal Dishonesties; The Honesty Issue; and The Splendor Of Truth. I recommend using the "search inside this book" option to review the table of contents and the first chapter.

I found this book a challenge. I read a chapter or two and then did not pick up the book for weeks. At times reading Papal Sin was laborious, yet like physical exercise the mental exercise was beneficial. Of particular interest were the chapters on women (Excluded Women), celibacy of priests (The Pope's Eunuch's and Priestly Caste), priests as sex offenders (Conspiracy of Silence), homosexuality (A Gay Priesthood) and contraception (The Gift of Life).

To a non-Catholic, Papal Sin is educational and fascinating. To a devote Catholic who believes in the infallibility of the Pope, this book is likely blasphemous.

Four plus stars.

Just Read the Book First!
I can't believe this book is causing as much controversy as it is when so many people obviously haven't even read the book in the first place! Wills is a scholar of the highest standing, and while this book is passionate and provocative it is NEVER offensive or anything less than scholarship of the highest order. People's reaction only further proves his point that the Church has become an all or nothing entity wherein anyone who doesn't agree with something the Pope says is condemned by unthinking people as a bad catholic! Anyhow, I really did enjoy reading this book, particularly his chapter on the Holocaust and on the ordination of women. Read it and give it some serious thought--you won't be disappointed.