Correspondence: Wills & testaments
State of tension Thank you for Shawn Zeller's article, "Dignity's Challenge" [July 14]. It is well researched and does a good job of summarizing the current state of the tension between gay and...
...JIM GERWING Fremont, Calif...
...To subscribe: send an e-mail to commonweal-subscribe@egroups.com 9 A marvelous Commonweal of enticing topics arrived in today's mail...
...And a family matter...
...it would condemn Saint Paul at Antioch as intolerable...
...I am not sure which sources he is referring to or which of their propositions are too simplistic to be relied upon...
...The issues Wills raises yet again-about Rome's role in the American church's life, about a church culture that celebrates its deposit of "truth" while it denies reality--are more alive than ever, and American Catholics need to hear the issues raised by intelligent, responsible Catholics...
...Duffy appears to believe that Wills is too simplistic and tendentious in his approach...
...No one can expect them to have the temperament of administrators...
...Dishonesty in high places Even if it is true that Wills gave no balanced account of the papacy, that does not permit us to ignore the point he makes: that there is entirely too much fundamental dishonesty in the upper echelons of the church's structure...
...For example, it is important to point out that most priests are good and dedicated men, but their example should not minimize the crime of priests who abuse children...
...TOM BAKER Princeton, N.J...
...STEPHENM . O'BRIEN Staten Island, N.Y...
...Duffy is himself one of Wills's historical sources...
...But, having said that, I guess I need a good liberal, Americanist diatribe now and then, and Wills's righteous anger warmed my heart...
...May even be effective...
...BOB MIAILOVICH Arlington, Va...
...Sometimes offenses are so egregious that someone must speak out against them...
...For, taken thus, it would stamp Our Lord himself, as a deplorable rebel...
...This is a grave matter...
...Duffy seems unwilling to deal with the problem which is the thesis of Wills's book--that truth is the bedrock of any authentic Christian life or structure, and that the past two centuries of playing fast and loose with it in order to preserve papal authority has seriously harmed Catholics, and many others...
...And he names abundant provocations for that anger...
...Duffy confounds Eamon Duffy's review of Garry Wills's Papal Sin is a great disappointment [July 14...
...That's how good her piece "Thinking Catholics" [July 14] was...
...JOE MCMAHON Seaford, N. Y. 9 I agree with Joe McMahon's comment that the Duffy review of Papal Sin dismisses it too high handedly...
...Unfortunately, to make a point, writers often resort to one or the other of the extremes...
...9 I am sure that Garry Wills is perfectly capable of defending himself, but I would like to provide some words of support for him by taking exception to Duffy's review of Papal Sin...
...However, a balanced approach can also be a code term for a cover-up or a glossing over of serious failings...
...The ground has been gone over and over again...
...Duffy also criticizes Wills for his reliance on "standardized works of biblical commentary or popular history...
...I do...
...JEROME F. DOWNS San Francisco, Calif...
...Pope Jo Although I believe in Christian feminism, I don't think that it requires acceptance of the position that the church has the power to ordain women to the priesthood...
...Wills merely brings the situation up to date...
...I am pleased to learn that a copy of Jacob Lawrence's work is to be placed in the renovated Times Square subway station...
...Duffy stresses the complexity of the issues Wills is treating...
...Duffy's idea that Newman would not have liked Wills's book is based on nothing more than Duffy's own prejudice...
...In Papal Sin, Wills appeals to John Henry Newman, and Duffy concludes his own remarks by attacking Wills's idea of Newman, saying that Newman "would have hated this book...
...He refers to Cardinal Newman's idea that there is a "complex interplay--and tension between the elements of prophet, priest, and king" in the life of the church...
...All these issues need to be raised and discussed among us, or we're abdicating responsibility for the church to the leaders who are imposed on us...
...It may be, rather, that Newman would have hated the disheveled formulations of our ecclesiastical eunuchate, which have driven so bright and believing a man as Wills into occasional intemperance of tone...
...I think Garry Wills deserves more than a dismissive review from one perspective, and that as Commonweal has done for other books that are much talked about, we could have benefited from other opinions and reactions...
...Duffy's most serious criticism of Papal Sin is that Wills's indictment of the papacy is "a monologue, which attributes no worth to opposing positions...
...A more balanced approach would give credit where credit is due to the good men and women who have served humanity in the name of Christ over the centuries...
...Finally, Cardinal Newman--if he were living in the year 2000--might appreciate Wills's efforts more than Eamon Duffy thinks...
...A little exasperation in brother Wills is to be expected...
...But the pope's contemporaries, including Catholics outside of ecclesiastical Rome, strongly and almost universally condemned him...
...Duffy claims to be concerned about "the profoundly polarized state of American Catholicism...
...He should not be surprised that the human beings who run the church are still error-prone--a characteristic of all human beings...
...But even the extremes reveal bits and pieces of the truth...
...It's true that the book has its faults--little new ground is broken, and there isn't much in the way of ideas or a constructive agenda...
...They won't hear much debate, after all, in church, or from their bishops, or in the general press...
...This position of Newman's, which Duffy seems to endorse, was effectively dealt with by Baron Friedrich von Hfigel in a letter to Newman's biographer Wilfrid Ward: "I cannot but feel, more strongly than formerly and doubtless quite finally, one, to my mind quite grave, peculiarity and defect of the cardinal's temper of mind and position...
...It's an angry book, a diatribe, in fact...
...And certainly this way of taking things can hardly be said to have done much good or to have averted much harm...
...Many Catholics share it...
...LAWRENCE BARMANN Saint Louis, Mo...
...His, apparently absolute, determination never to allow-at least to allow others--any public protestation, any act or declaration contrary to current central Roman policy, cannot, simply, be pressed, or imposed as normative upon us all...
...Those who have the mission to do so will be recognized by their spirit of outrage against the abuses and their passion for reform...
...Duffy even defends Pius IX's kidnapping of the little Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, by saying that "a nineteenth-century pope might sincerely have conceived his responsibilities in terms other than those that seem self-evident to a twentieth-century American...
...The truth resides in a quiet place somewhere between hagiography and jeremiad...
...PETE GREEN Yonkers, N.Y...
...And this present pope intends to beatify Pius IX in the autumn...
...CHRIS CONROY Montclair, N.J...
...At the moment, I feel that Eamon Duffy insufficiently recognizes the contributions of Garry Wills in Papal Sin...
...9 To the contrary, I thought Duffy perfectly distinguished between the "truth" of Wills's positions and the consistent mean-spiritedness with which Wills presents them...
...Nevertheless, if female ordination were possible and I were the pope, I would want to ordain Jo McGowan and immediately make her a cardinal...
...Duffy precedes that remark by comments on Newman's lectures on the prophetical office of the church in which he misrepresents what Newman actually wrote...
...Remember the soldier's explaining why he belted his army mule over the head with a twobyfour...
...It is well researched and does a good job of summarizing the current state of the tension between gay and lesbian people and the Catholic church...
...But his use of the "L" word in the statement that Wills targets are a "predictable roundup of liberal Catholicism's usual suspects" can only aggravate that problem...
...JAMES COSGROVE Wantagh, N.Y...
...The man is angry...
...Continued on page 4) Commonweal 2 August 11, 2000(Continued from page 2) The following comments come from a discussion among our e-group participants of Eamon Duffy's review of Garry Wills's Papal Sin [July 14...
...I predict that history will record that Papal Sin was one of the forces instrumental in bringing about the inevitable reform of the church...
...The donkey family Eamon Duffy writes that Cardinal Newman "would have hated" Garry Wills's book on the church...
...Just getting his attention, sir...
...and censure many a great saint of God since then...
...Newman, however, would have been unhappy with the publication of Papal Sin (as opposed to its ideas) because Newman, who in private and in his diaries said things quite as scathing as anything Wills says about the Vatican, thought that one should not criticize ecclesiastical authority in public...
...I agree with Duffy that this isn't a book likely to reduce polarization in the church, and certainly Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's Common Ground initiative was more inspiring as a vision of the future...
...Updating saints and sinners Eamon Duffy's excellent history of the papacy, Saints and Sinners (Yale), catalogs many papal deceits, frauds, and intellectual dishonesties over the centuries...
...Paul Baumann's movie reviews are incisive...
...Commonweal 4 August 11, 2000...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
