Willful Deceit
Why I Am a Catholic
by Garry Wills
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002
(390 pages; $26.00, hardcover)
reviewed by William J. Tighe
Garry Wills’s earlier book, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, was written to expose what the author believes to be a systematic pattern of papal deceit and self-deception in refusing to acknowledge the changeable nature of Catholic doctrine and practice and in refusing to embrace what he sees as much-needed changes. These changes include making clerical celibacy optional, ordaining women, accepting contraception and homosexual practice, and at least ceasing to condemn abortion, if not actually accepting “conscientious” decisions to have an abortion (on this subject Wills is anything but clear).
Both those who applauded the book and those who objected to it asked how a man of his views could remain a Catholic, and he responded with Why I Am a Catholic. It is not an orthodox Catholic response, nor one that would be likely to appeal to those—Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike—who wish to stand within the Christian Tradition as they understand it, as something received rather then recreated. But it outlines what Catholicism seems, in the end, to amount to for Wills.
I write “seems,” for he is far from precise. Though he sometimes writes as if Catholicism had an objective and unchanging authority (as witness his view of the Creed, which I will describe in a moment), he also approves the refusal of “Catholics at large” to accept papal statements as “dispositive,” even when such statements reaffirm what has been taught “everywhere, always and by all.” He assumes that “the experience we had of what our Catholic lives meant at their deepest level” is determinative, and that “if the pope said something that claimed we could not be living that life of faith, then the pope would have clearly been wrong.” (The emphasis here and in the rest of the review is Wills’s own.)
Using as an illustration a woman using contraceptives who continues to receive the sacraments, which the Catholic Church believes a mortal sin, he writes that if such people “are told they are doing what ‘the church’ forbids, they respond that they are the church, they are the people of God.” In these cases, he insists, “the pope is out of step with the church.”
One has to search through the book quite thoroughly to find the answer to the question the title poses. It consists of five parts, and the fifth, “The Creed,” offers a detailed treatment of his reasons for believing the Apostles’ Creed. He regards it as “the church’s central message, against which the importance of other things is measured” and states that there are certain doctrines “which one must believe in order to be a Catholic.” There is trouble even here, though.
Wills’s Answer
Witness, for example, his obscure, not to say evasive, treatment of the phrase “born of the Virgin Mary.” After a quotation from the late Catholic Scripture scholar Raymond E. Brown seeming to denigrate any emphasis on a “literal” or “biological” virginity, Wills insists that it is her “spiritual” virginity that is important—without clearly specifying what such a “spiritual virginity” entails as regards her real virginity.
He then insists that the early Christians cannot have believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary, since “they calmly accepted the fact that Jesus’ brother James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem”—a position, though accepted by many Protestants today, regarded as heretical by both Catholics and Orthodox and condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 432.
Even on his own chosen ground of “The Creed,” Wills’s attempt to vindicate his orthodox Catholic credentials would thus seem to be a failure. At best, he does not speak of its claims with the clarity one expects of orthodox Catholics, and one has to suspect that for him there is some other measurement against which the Creed itself is to be measured.
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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