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 I am a Catholic and suggest that Wills read the book "POPE FICTION" by Protestant turned Catholic Patrick Madrid. In Pope Fiction Madrid describes all of the good, bad and ugly in papal history. The church does not deny John XII or Alexander VI for that matter. My point is simple - that people fail to take to the time to understand the "infallibility" issue. It doesn't mean that the Pope knows the next lotto numbers or whether it's going to rain next Thursday. It means that on issues of FAITH AND MORALS (speaking from the chair of Peter and when in-line with the bishops) - he speaks infalliably. Every generation raises up and says "the Catholic church is dead" - our generation is no different. If you want to understand the papacy -begin at the beginning - Matthew 16:18-19 - Peter (not a perfect man) was given "keys" (see psalm 22:22) it means authority, and a promise from Christ himself that "the gates of hell would not prevail against it ..." We are on our 265th consecutive Peter - AMAZING 265TH - unbroken history - With all the various nations, principalities, wars, .... change in the world during 2000 years, the church remains - it must be divine. Finally, the Bible didn't fall from the sky one sunny day. Anyone who believes the Bible is the infallible word of God (which the Catholic church professes in every century) puts their faith - like it or not - in the Catholic church of the late 4th Century (Councils of Hippo - 393 AD and Carthedge 397 AD) to allow the Holy Spirit to work through them to infallibly pick which books belong in the Bible (it didn't come with a table of contents).
Wills, for example, attacks Pius IX for alleged anti-Semitism. But the use of the evidence is selective. Pius IX was in fact praised by the Jewish community of the mid nineteenth-century for his work in destroying anti-Semitic segregation. As soon as he became pope, he ordered the walls of the Roman Jewish ghetto to be torn down. He invited Jews to live where they wanted in the papal states and to leave the old ghetto restrictions. He ordered the papal states police to guard Jews who had been threatened by Gentile neighbors in their new neighborhoods. He also ordered protection for Jews during the Carnival season, when anti-Semitic hoodlums routinely attacked Jewish merchants. He authored numerous laws and decrees expanding the civil rights and legal protection for the Jews. The Jewish press warmly praised the pope for his efforts. Wills, of course, simply ignores this evidence. He focuses instead on the case of Edgardo Morata, who was removed from his Jewish family in Bologna. A Catholic teenage maid had baptized Edgardo when the infant fell seriously ill. (This baptism clearly violated the rights of the parents and canon law.) The law of the papal states required a baptized Christian to be raised in a Christian environment. Since the family (rightly) refused to raise the child as Christian, the child was placed in the custody of the church. Pius IX became a personal friend of the child, who ultimately became a priest and who was reconciled with his family. This separation was an outrageous violation of parents' rights, but this law covered all citizens in the papal states: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Moslem, indifferent. Jews were not singled out. Wills then suggests that somehow this removal of the child indicates pedophilia on the part of the pope! This is an outrageous charge with no evidence whatsoever. The entire book is composed of such distortions. This is malice disguised as scholarship.
Where do you begin? The author criticizes the pope for canonizing Edith Stein as a martyr for the Catholic faith. But she was. The Nazis spared Dutch Jews of Catholic descent until the Dutch bishops courageouly denounced the anti-Jewish persecution from the pulpit. The next day the Nazis arrested Catholics of Jewish descent and many Catholics of non-Jewish descent who opposed anti-Semitism. Edith Stein, A Carmelite, was among those arrested. She was killed precisely because she was both Catholic and Jewish. The Church rightly honors her. "Pro-choice" Wills claims that the early church didn't oppose abortion. He misquotes Augustine and completely ignores the categoric censure of abortion present in the earliest Christian texts: the Didache, Tertullian, etc. The rest of his "history" is full of such howlers. Even on noncontroversial issues he can't get his facts straight. Where in the world is the "infancy narrative" in the gospel according St. Mark? And who was Pope John Paul VI? This screed did have one salutary effect. I founded the Pius IX Fan Club after reading the book. Wills's book helped me to savor every step of the good man's beatification on TV.
The Papacy is an institution based on a lie; it is Caeser resurrected in the guise of Christ. Unlike the author, I don't think the Catholic Church can be reformed. Fortunately there are other, Bible-based, evangelical and vibrant churches in the world. |
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.
