Defender of the Faith

Whatever else can be said in praise of Garry Wills, no one can quibble with his sense of timing. If someone had asked me what kind of book I’d most want to read right now, one called “Why I Am a Catholic” would have been extremely high on the list. We Catholics have had a horrendous year.

The unraveling of the chicanery, corruption, clericalism and downright criminality in the upper reaches of the hierarchy have largely shattered what was left of lay Catholics’ faith in the formal institution others call the church. So it is with real gratitude that one reads a book affirming soberly and resolutely that the discredited hierarchy is not synonymous with the church. The church, as the Second Vatican Council definitively argued, is comprised of “the people of God.” And one of the--yes--miraculous phenomena of these harrowing times is the tenacity of that other institution: the real, breathing, human church, a people still passionate about our faith, whatever the iniquities of our authoritative representatives.

But Wills is too intelligent to fall into the trap of Protestantizing what Vatican II understood. He shows the inherent Catholicism of the second council the hard way--through painstaking history. His argument is not about debunking Catholicism in favor of some ephemeral, modern watered-down alternative. It’s about restoring the other Catholic tradition that has been obscured in which the institutional church was the servant of the faithful and not the other way around.

The bulk of this book is therefore a slow, sometimes pedantic, ecclesiastical chronology. Drawing on a plethora of contemporary (and old) scholarship, Wills shows how the papacy emerged alongside the church as a critical facilitating institution for the people of God. The problem of the church’s current crisis, Wills argues, is therefore not the papacy as such. It is the anachronistic and stunted view of papal autocracy.

And here, the key to Wills’ Catholicism is found in the writing of St. Augustine, interspersed with solid helpings of G.K. Chesterton and Cardinal John Henry Newman. The founding stone of Wills’ faith is the founding stone of the church itself: Peter, the first Christian leader, the weak, clumsy, vacillating liar chosen as the first shepherd of Jesus’ flock. Some Catholics have viewed the famous Gospel passage in Matthew in which Jesus vests authority in Peter as the rock on which his church will be built as the beginning of a singular and unquestionable papal authority, stretching seamlessly from the first pope to the current one. Wills begs to differ. And he quotes Augustine to show how:

“When Peter was told, ‘I will give you the keys of heaven’s kingdom, and what you tie on earth will have been tied in heaven, what you untie on earth will have been untied in heaven,’ he was standing for the entire church, which does not collapse though it is beaten, in this world, by every kind of trial, as if by rain, flood, and tempest. It is founded on a Stone [Petra], from which Peter took his name Stone-founded [Petrus]; for the Stone did not take its name from the Stone-Founded, but the Stone-Founded from the Stone--as Christ does not take his name from Christians, but Christians from Christ.... Because the Stone was Christ.”

This isn’t mere wordplay. It’s critical. The pope is not the stone, just as the church is not the pope. The founding stone is Christ, of which Peter is a mere unifying servant. The papacy is a critical symbol of the unity of the church, but it is not the source of actual, unimpeachable authority. It is an institution of inclusion, not dictatorship. Because the papacy is such a human entity, it also errs. This is not an exception to the rule of the papacy; it is the rule itself. And when you think of the sometimes sordid, sometimes inspired and sometimes downright murderous history of the papacy, you see how that must be. We are obliged as Catholics to differ from the pope in many ways and at many times in history--since he is merely the human symbol of the church’s call to shepherd Christ’s flock, and he will sin and lose his way as Peter did. He may even deny the very savior he is supposed to represent, as Peter did. But the church prevails because the papacy is not the church; it is not even the stone. But it is “Stone-Founded.”

Why not just reject the “stone-founded” and become a Protestant? The answer is an obvious one: Because Jesus instituted this unifying element in the church and because we have no other source of authority. But what about the Bible, as Protestants argue? Because, quite simply, the Bible is not independent of the church. It was compiled by the early church; its very contents were arrived at by a process of debate and chance and institutional combat. The Bible is a product of tradition--not the other way round. Our very faith as Christians is dependent on a legacy of fallible human beings remembering, believing, questioning and praying. We have no other way to know the meaning of the God of the New Testament. This is our human inheritance--of a divine revelation.

Once Wills has established this argument--and, sadly, it takes him far too long--we can see why his own explication of his faith makes sense. And what struck this reader was his obvious and passionate love for this faith and this institution, his commitment to stick with it, because, as Chesterton put it, “the severed hand does not heal the whole body.”

Wills is so right that there is something simply bizarre about a church committing suicide because there can be no compromise over such a minor, administrative matter as priestly celibacy, while the vast majority of its faithful disagree on nothing substantive in its actual creed. This is a skewing of priorities which is in itself a function of a doctrine of papal authority gone bad. And one of the oddest things about the most ferociously orthodox of today’s Catholics is how close they are to the view of many ignorant non-Catholics: that the church is (in historian Paul Johnson’s words) “a divine autocracy,” that the pope is the infallible dictator, that he cannot err, that unthinking obedience and silence is the correct posture of any believing Catholic, that disagreeing on minor matters is indistinguishable from differing on major issues and so on. This is not merely philistine and anti-intellectual. Properly speaking, as Wills powerfully argues, it is anti-Catholic.

But one arrives at the end of Wills’ argument with a sense of fast-accelerating disappointment. The book is 342 pages long (without the index and notes), but it is only by Page 295 that we actually get Wills’ explanation of his own faith. The disappointment is even more intense because the next 60 pages are full of tantalizing thoughts and ideas, only cursorily explored. Sure, the book opens with a diverting glimpse of Wills’ own childhood and adolescent emergence as a Catholic, but the core of his adult faith is still provided almost as an afterthought.

When Wills captures something in theology, it can be exhilarating, a reminder of what good priests used to do from the pulpit. Take his description of the Trinity, where he again deploys Augustine to memorable effect. Augustine is discussing the mystery of how God can be three beings in one. He argues that this three-part divinity, in some sense, must be true if God is, as Christians believe, the profoundest manifestation of love. God the Father cannot father himself; but if his fatherhood is bound by time and place, as it is for human fathers, then at some time he wasn’t a father, and the love he expresses didn’t have an object. So the Son always had to be there as an object of love--eternally. And the relationship--the act of loving--is equally eternal. As Augustine saw: “Love is the act of a lover and the love given to a loved person. It is a trinity: the lover, loved and love itself.” God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

Similarly, in Wills’ own words, “The Christian doctrine of the Trinity means that it is not good for God to be alone. He is a society, a dialogue, a set of interrelationships that impel him out from himself toward himself. He is pure act, and the divinity is a raging field of energy, of self-emptying to fulfill the self.”

I wanted more of this. And I wanted it because it is so rare these days in a church bent on the destruction of its own priesthood. I wanted it because it reminds me of what Catholicism should be--a rapturous relationship of the faithful with the divine, together, thinking and praying and arguing, and doing so in an atmosphere of openness and hope, of humility but energy. Wills has shown how this can be so. The rest of us now have to insist that it lives and breathes in the wounded, faltering church we now inhabit.