Garry Wills doesn’t like popes very much. His distaste embraces not just the so-called “bad popes” of the Middle Ages, but popes of the last 150 years, too. Why is he so negative? Part of the reason is that he feels the popes have been liars. As the dust jacket of Papal Sin explains:

Wills describes a papacy that seems steadfastly unwilling to face the truth about itself, its past, and its relations with others . . . Wills traces the rise of the papacy’s stubborn resistance to the truth, beginning with the challenges posed in the 19th century by science, democracy, scriptural scholarship, and rigorous history.

Wills slightly modernizes Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, which was first promulgated in 1864, not 1869. And his description of the canonization process is out of date. He claims that “the general rule now is two miracles needed for beatification of confessors, and two more (different ones) for canonization.” Actually, it is now one miracle for beatification, and an additional one for canonization. Pope John Paul II made that change early in his reign, with an eye to clearing out the cobwebs surrounding the stalled candidacies of bona fide saints.

A problem with the truth
But now this brings me to my greatest disappointment with Papal Sin. I knew going into the book that Wills, an ex-Jesuit seminarian who has elsewhere described himself as a church-going Catholic, disagrees with many Church teachings. Indeed, in the book he rejects Catholic positions on contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, priestly celibacy, male priesthood, papal infallibility, transubstantiation, and Marian devotion. (He describes the Mary of devotion as “this idol goddess.”) I knew that he likes to criticize the Church and sees other dissidents as allies; the book gratefully acknowledges the help of James Carroll and Eugene Kennedy, two ex-priests-turned–Church-critics, for reading his entire manuscript and “offering valuable suggestions.” It did not shock me to find out that Wills’ “bad guys” are Popes Pius IX, Pius XII, and John Paul II. Nor was I surprised that his heroes are Sister Helen Prejean (for opposing capital punishment), Daniel Berrigan (for caring for those with AIDS), and Philip Berrigan (for opposing the arms race).

No, those are not the real defects of this book. The most disappointing thing about Papal Sin is the author’s unwillingness to open his eyes and try to see people as they are, rather than as he wishes his enemies would be. For instance, surely Pope John Paul II—not Sister Prejean—has done more than anyone else to build resistance to the death penalty, in the Church and in the world. I know for a fact that the Pope’s public opposition to the death penalty has changed many minds and hearts in this country. Why does Wills fail to recognize that fact?

As we noted before, Wills officially endorses truth. So why can’t he see the current pope as the most courageous upholder of truth in the world? Pope John Paul II, in this Jubilee Year 2000, has just engaged in an unprecedented public act of contrition for the sins of churchmen over the centuries, which was dramatized by the Pope’s placing the prayer for pardon in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. This is the Pope who has repeatedly called on people not to be afraid to “open wide the doors for Christ,” who is Truth. The official Catechism of the Catholic Church was amended by his decision to read: “Lying consists in saying what is false with the intention of deceiving one’s neighbor.” There is no fine print in this definition. Any suggestion that the person to whom a lie is told must have the “right to the truth” has been eliminated. So St. Augustine’s definition of lying and the moral absolute against it, which Wills claims to admire, have been formally promulgated by this Pope in the Catechism.

Whatever else Papal Sin is, this is not history sine ira et studio, objective and dispassionate. The attack on almost all modern popes from Pius IX to John Paul II—virtually all of whom are notable for their holiness of life—makes this book a kind of Daddy Dearest, overflowing with disillusionment borne of what the Boston Globe calls “devoutness.” When Wills says that deception “is a cold act, achieved by careful maneuvering and manipulating, a calculated blindness, a shuttering of the mind against the Light,” he is actually engaging in an unconscious description of his own book, which amounts to a “structure of deceit” in its own right.

Absurd analysis
Wills’ venom must account for his more serious factual errors, which distort both history and theology. Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, once wrote a biography of St. Augustine. So why are his references to St. Augustine in Papal Sin selective and misleading? Wills, for instance, mocks the theologians of the Middle Ages for meaning “literally the virgin birth when they used those words —that Christ was somehow delivered without breaking Mary’s hymen.” He neglects to mention that his hero St. Augustine taught this as well: “the virgin conceived . . . the virgin gave birth . . . after giving birth she still remained a virgin.” He even tries to enlist Augustine, a Doctor of the Church, in his war against transubstantiation! But as Pamela Jackson, of Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Maryland, notes in a perceptive article in the new Augustine through the Ages Encyclopedia:

In his homilies instructing the newly baptized, Augustine tells them explicitly that what they receive in the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ which he shed for the forgiveness of sins, on one occasion urging them to “recognize in the bread what hung on the cross, and in the cup what flowed from his side.”