Shelf Life: The Triumph of Wills

IN 2002, Garry Wills-the distinguished NATIONAL REVIEW alumnus long renowned for his dissents from Vatican orthodoxy-published a book titled Why I Am a Catholic. (“Some who have read this book,” he later admitted, “still ask why I am a Catholic.”) His answer in that volume boiled down to an effort to disengage the concept of Catholicism from that of the papacy, and the idea of the papacy from the papacy as it has actually existed. This distinction between Catholicism-as-idea and Catholicism-as-organization has been much favored by liberals in recent years, but it has been useful even to conservatives. In a recent Weekly Standard article, for example, First Things editor Joseph Bottum marveled at the contrast between the vigor of Catholic philosophy in the American public square (as represented by, among other things, the prospective Catholic majority on the Supreme Court) and the weakness of the Catholic institutional hierarchy: “We may be seeing the emergence of one of those uniquely American compromises: A Catholic philosophical vocabulary is allowed to express a moral seriousness the nation needs, on the guarantee that the Catholic Church itself will not much matter politically.”

What distinguishes Bottum’s analysis here from that of Wills is a clear sense that Catholicism has a unique contribution to make to the general project of Christianity. Wills’s Catholicism, in contrast, often reduces to a “mere Christianity” in which Catholic distinctives, while they can certainly be preserved for sentimental rea sons, exist chiefly to provide a rich target for debunking. Take, for instance, the classic text from Matthew 16, used by Catholics for centuries to defend the institution of the papacy: “You are Peter [rock], and on this rock I will build my church.” Wills has puckishly suggested an alternative interpretation of this passage, one based on the Gospels’ portrayal of Peter’s inconstancy: “[W]as Jesus teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?”

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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IN 2002, Garry Wills-the distinguished NATIONAL REVIEW alumnus long renowned for his dissents from Vatican orthodoxy-published a book titled Why I Am a Catholic. (“Some who have read this book,” he later admitted, “still ask why I am a Catholic.”) His answer in that volume boiled down to an effort to disengage the concept of Catholicism from that of the papacy, and the idea of the papacy from the papacy as it has actually existed. This distinction between Catholicism-as-idea and Catholicism-as-organization has been much favored by liberals in recent years, but it has been useful even to conservatives. In a recent Weekly Standard article, for example, First Things editor Joseph Bottum marveled at the contrast between the vigor of Catholic philosophy in the American public square (as represented by, among other things, the prospective Catholic majority on the Supreme Court) and the weakness of the Catholic institutional hierarchy: “We may be seeing the emergence of one of those uniquely American compromises: A Catholic philosophical vocabulary is allowed to express a moral seriousness the nation needs, on the guarantee that the Catholic Church itself will not much matter politically.”

What distinguishes Bottum’s analysis here from that of Wills is a clear sense that Catholicism has a unique contribution to make to the general project of Christianity. Wills’s Catholicism, in contrast, often reduces to a “mere Christianity” in which Catholic distinctives, while they can certainly be preserved for sentimental rea sons, exist chiefly to provide a rich target for debunking. Take, for instance, the classic text from Matthew 16, used by Catholics for centuries to defend the institution of the papacy: “You are Peter [rock], and on this rock I will build my church.” Wills has puckishly suggested an alternative interpretation of this passage, one based on the Gospels’ portrayal of Peter’s inconstancy: “[W]as Jesus teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?”