The Papacy Today
Deedy, John
THE PAPACY TODAY Francis X. Murphy, CSSR MacMilan, $13.95, 269 pp. John Deedy Francis X. MURPHY'S survey of the last eighty years of the Catholic church from the perspective of the papacy reads...
...John Deedy Francis X. MURPHY'S survey of the last eighty years of the Catholic church from the perspective of the papacy reads with the ease and interest of those old Xavier Rynne New Yorker articles, spared the distractions of pages of ads for the affluent...
...No one has spoken that frankly in public and face-to-face to a pope, since when...
...None of this is said to demean Murphy's book...
...54 and p. 101...
...Having had one message of protest suppressed by Mussolini, Pius XI was not about to risk suppression of the encyclical in which he defended Catholic Action and excoriated the youth program of the Fascists...
...In the topics he does handle, the reader could generally not ask for more...
...Of Pius XII and the Jews, he says that although ex post facto criticism may be aimed at Pius's judgment, he cannot be scored for lack of compassion or failure in courage...
...The book was written before the assas-sination attempt on John Paul II, so it contains no speculation on how that experience might have scarred the Pope psychologically...
...However, the incident is worth but one paragraph in the book with the follow-up observation that the pope "seemed to have anticipated her objection...
...As an example, Murphy curiously omits from his summary of John Paul II's 1979 talk in Philadelphia that pope's explicit rejection of women as being eligible for ordination...
...His is a strong overview of the papacy from 1900-1980, but, much as I hate to say it, it is very much a male clerical overview...
...So knowing and himself so omniscient is Murphy that it is fun to catch him in one small slip...
...The conditional verb saves the comment from being objectionable...
...Nor does he speculate on where a less robust John Paul II will leave his papacy, and accordingly the church...
...Murphy would like to see married priests, for instance, but he comes through as no crusader for women's ordination (if that's to be classified as a radical cause...
...However, as a junior aide in the Vatican Secretariat of State, Spellman in 1931 did bring Pius XI's Non abbiamo bisogno secretly to Paris, where it was released by Spellman to the world press...
...Some of the spit and polish of the New Yorker copy desk might be missing from Murphy's book, but the New Yorker mark is mere, and Murphy has the touch, or magic wand, tt is' as if he were capable of resurrecting Rynne at the touch of a typewriter key...
...Those who devoured Rynne's Vatican II pieces (which of course became books) will relish Murphy's historically broader look at the world of popes and prelates, starting with Leo XIII and carrying through to John Paul II...
...MOrphy is judgmental throughout, gently so and always fairly...
...Between the lines seems a vague worry about a return to the omniscient, triumphalist attitudes of the Pacelli church...
...Perhaps since the time of Pius VII in the early 1800s...
...Murphy, by the way, has barrels of Vatican corn, and he pops the kernels with exquisite generosity: who alienated whom...
...They were as much astonished as the rest of us with Sister Kane's frankness...
...Incidentally, the standing episode is not mentioned either...
...A primary interest of readers will be with the papacy of John Paul II, a papacy too much in its infancy to be definitely analyzed as yet...
...The book is engrossing throughout, and not to be faulted so far as substance is concerned...
...Pius XI's 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge was not brought clandestinely to Hitler's- Germany by young Monsignor Francis Spellman for distribution there, as Murphy tells us twice (p...
...Which is to say that Murphy's book is no mere narrative of the histories of papacies...
...In 1937, Spellman was serving as auxiliary bishop and a pastor in Boston...
...Beyond that minor point, and maybe the women's thing, I would not want to challenge Frank Murphy, Vaticanologist superb, on anything.rb, on anything...
...Murphy argues that John Paul must exhibit the commonsense of John XXIII and the forbearance of Paul VI if ever he is to regain the momentum of his original witness to the internal and external involvements of the church...
...Murphy is liberal in the sense of a person's having embraced Vatican II and now being anxious to see the church move on more progressively in areas of dogma and discipline...
...Murphy is engaging, enlightened, and often provocative...
...But it is to suggest that even he may unconsciously suffer something of the myopia that has characterized the church's vision from time immemorial on women in the church, and women religious in particular...
...Would that all writers were so fortunate in evoking role models...
...the viewpoint insistently liberal...
...This was the talk, of course, that set up the historic confrontation a day or two later at the National Shrine in Washington, when Sister Theresa Kane turned to the pope and spoke of sisters as being "second-class citizens of the Kingdom of God," adding that justice demanded the church provide the possibility of "women as persons being included in all ministries of our church...
...It's all there, or so it seems...
...Murphy has written a good book, and the reader will find it fascinating down to its most incidental item of gossip...
...No one anticipated Sister Kane's remarks, not even the fifty-three sisters who stood throughout the pope's National Shrine talk in protest over the remarks in Philadelphia (though they were widely accused of knowing...
...Like the rest of us, Murphy is hard put to explain the change from John Paul II's indulgence and openness in the first year to severity and conservativeness in the second...
...Not radical, mind you...
...The form, again, is familiar, very Rynneese...
...what Italian cardinal lied to the public, then was confronted by an interviewer's cassette...
...what American curia official was carried in office ad nutum (under the pope's discretion...
...This is not to say that Murphy is a male chauvinist...
...the details massive...
...He can be critical of Pius XII for his "absolute phobia against atheistic communism," but he can also admit that without the Pacelli papacy, with all its positive features, the achievement of John XXIII would have been unthinkable...
Vol. 108 • November 1981 • No. 20
