Bad Faith Arguments
When a book’s dust jacket describes its author as an "award-winning investigative reporter" and the author begins by describing his work as "an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church," readers might expect that, by the end of the book, something strikingly new would have been revealed. But in this case (to borrow from Richard M. Nixon) "That would be wrong." For Philip Shenon gives the game away two sentences later when he defines "the battle for the soul of the church" in these terms: "It pits Catholics desperate for a more tolerant church—one, that in the words of Pope John [XXIII], dispenses the medicine of mercy instead of severity—against those who see that vision as heresy."
Right.
How Shenon came to that conclusion—the Platonic form of the New York Times’s view of the Catholic Church—is clarified in the book’s Acknowledgments where, after claiming the Catholic Church is more "secretive" than the Mossad, authorial thanks are rendered to a Who’s Who of the Catholic Left, living and dead. At the end of an extensive list of those who wrote books of papal history (12 of the 14 being firmly on the portside of things Catholic), the author gives a nod to my "deeply researched biographies of John Paul II"—after proffering a trigger warning that "I … fundamentally disagree with the views of the author George Weigel." And while I’m mildly gratified that Philip Shenon thinks my books "important additions to [his] library," that seems a low bar to overcome, given some of the fabulists (e.g., Malachi Martin) and progressive spin-doctors (e.g., Austen Ivereigh, the late Richard McBrien, Massimo Faggioli) whose work he evidently found far more agreeable.
"Investigative journalism" is not synonymous with scholarly balance and judicious judgment as Jesus Wept amply, if achingly, demonstrates. On the book’s second page, Shenon condemns the Crusades as "genocidal," seemingly oblivious to the best contemporary scholarship on the subject, which stresses the complex interaction between parties both given to blood-letting. A page later, we are informed that the Roman Curia includes "hundreds of cardinals and bishops"—dozens, would be more like it—and that the curial Dicastery for the Clergy "administers the priesthood" (it doesn’t). A page later, we are informed that "many historians think it unlikely that [the apostle] Peter ever made the perilous, twelve-hundred-mile journey to Rome from ancient Judea"—no scholars’ names are given, perhaps out of an unconscious concern that such ahistorical silliness would be embarrassing to those identified with it. On page 7, we are told that the alleged successor of Peter in Rome, the pope, is "infallible" (true, but on a very limited range of subjects under very strict conditions) and "all-powerful" (not true, the pope being bound to the doctrines of the faith and the natural moral law we can know by reason, to name but two constraints that distinguish the papacy from czarist autocracy).
Three pages later, the reader is informed that "the Swiss theologian Hans Küng [was] perhaps the most influential Catholic thinker of the last century," which is like saying the Edsel was "perhaps the most successful new car model of the last century." No one with even a rudimentary knowledge of 20th century Catholic theology would put Küng (whose most serious theological work was his 1957 doctoral dissertation on Karl Barth) in the same league with Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, Servais Pinckaers, Josef Fuchs, Bernard Häring, Romano Guardini, John Courtney Murray, Karl Adam, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange— men whose influence (for good or ill) continues today. The mediagenic Küng is more a figure in the history of publicity than in the history of theology; yet he occupies almost two-thirds of a page in Shenon’s index, while Congar and Rahner each merit two lines of citation, Murray gets one reference, and de Lubac, Guardini, and Fuchs are wholly absent—which tells you something about Shenon’s grasp of modern Catholic intellectual history.
But then Shenon is far less interested in the dramatic battle of ideas that shaped 20th century Catholicism—and that continues to frame Catholic debates today—than he is in "gotcha" references to this, that, or the other clergyman’s love life. Those references are often based on gossip of the National Enquirer sort. Even when sources are available, a slyly salacious interpretation is placed on them, as if to suggest that a Church of 1.4 billion adherents is hypocrisy incarnate. This authorial tic blends into Shenon’s discussion of the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, which he believes was caused in part by the discipline of clerical celibacy: as if marriage were a crime-prevention program; as if denominations with a married clergy do not have serious sexual abuse problems; as if the great majority of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the United States has been documented as a matter of sexual predation on teenage boys and young men.
As Jesus Wept unfolds through a history of the modern papacy, it may be useful to identify key misrepresentations of six popes surveyed.
Pius XII is pilloried as a tacit accomplice in the Holocaust. But there are no references in Shenon’s bibliography to books that explore Pius’s willingness to cooperate in German plots to assassinate Hitler, nor does the text reference Pius’s orders to hide Roman Jews in Catholic institutions or his sheltering of thousands of Jews at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. Pius’s 1950 definition of Mary’s Assumption is dismissed as "widely ridiculed," without any substantiation of that absurd claim. Thus we get the cartoon Pius XII: not the man whose teaching was the most cited source at the Second Vatican Council after the Bible, but the ethereal Roman autocrat oblivious to the world around him.
Shenon’s John XXIII, to whose memory Jesus Wept is dedicated, is the jolly old Italian grandfather of progressive Catholic fantasy, not the man of deeply traditional piety (as revealed in his posthumously published diaries) who opened Vatican II by calling the Church to a greater Christ-centeredness, and who said that the Council’s "greatest concern" must be that "the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine … be more effectively defended and presented … whole and entire and without distortion." John XXIII knew that his Council had no authority to reinvent Catholicism; what the Council should do is to find ways to propose the enduring truths of Catholic faith in ways that modern minds could engage. Shenon thus makes a cartoon of his hero.
In another cartoon, Paul VI is portrayed as an indecisive worrywart, a caricature that blithely ignores the fact that he was likely the only candidate for the papacy in 1963 who could have brought Vatican II to a successful conclusion. Pope Paul’s 1975 call to the Church to recover the Christocentric thrust of Vatican II and reawaken its missionary vigor is ignored. But a cascade of deprecatory ink is spilt over his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility—without, however, mentioning that the encyclical taught the moral obligation to plan one’s family, and without conceding that Pope Paul made an important point in arguing that a contraceptive culture would lead to widespread abortion and family breakdown as sexual love was reduced to another contact sport (my term, not the pope’s!).
Shenon fails, moreover, to grasp the gravamen of the Humanae Vitae controversy: the effort of Catholic progressives to use the birth control
controversy to enshrine the moral theological method known as "proportionalism" (which teaches that there are no "intrinsically evil" acts, i.e., acts that are always and everywhere wrong) as the Church’s official moral theology. Untutored people with normal moral sensibilities intuitively understand the absurdity of this: What could ever justify rape or torturing children? But many theologians in Paul VI’s time didn’t get it, and more than a few today—prominent in the Rome of Pope Francis—don’t. Had Paul VI, that allegedly weak and indecisive man, caved to the progressives’ proportionalist agenda, Catholic moral teaching would have been eviscerated. (In an aside, Shenon tacitly defends a proportionalist tract, Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, without mentioning that the book could not bring itself to declare bestiality immoral.)
I am, of course, a suspect witness in the matter of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, having written extensively about both men. That caveat being offered, I cannot recognize the men I knew and studied for decades in the cartoons drawn of them in Jesus Wept. The theological and pastoral creativity of John Paul’s epic pontificate is ignored. There is no mention of World Youth Days or John Paul’s extensive pilgrimages to Africa. His two historic addresses to the United Nations go unremarked. The first-ever papal encyclical on Christian anthropology (Redemptor Hominis) gets short shrift as "vaguely worded," although its first sentence—"The redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history"—can hardly be considered ambiguous. The great 1991 social encyclical Centesimus Annus, with its call to living freedom nobly rather than as an expression of willfulness, is unreported, as is John Paul’s call for a New Evangelization and his epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2000.
The Ratzinger/Benedict XVI cartoon is perhaps the cruelest in Jesus Wept. Readers get page after page of the "God’s Rottweiler" caricature but are never informed that Ratzinger was arguably the most learned man in the world, capable of respectful and mutually stimulating dialogue with secularist philosophers like Jürgen Habermas. Hans Küng’s trashing of his former colleague is duly noted, including his catty comment that, while he was "enormously disappointed" with Ratzinger’s election as Benedict XVI, "the papacy is such a challenge that perhaps it can even change Joseph Ratzinger." That Ratzinger did more than any Vatican figure of his time to clean the Church of what he called the "filth" of clerical sexual abuse is unacknowledged.
Pope Francis, whom Shenon admires, is also reduced to a cartoon, albeit of the progressivist variety: the man who said, "Who am I to judge?" Even that remark is ripped from its context—involving an individual striving to live an upright life after a fall from grace—and turned into a tacit abandonment of Catholic moral teaching. The pope’s insistent and welcome calls for the Church to be a vehicle of God’s mercy are properly highlighted; but there is no acknowledgment that this summons to be a healing Church was a major theme in the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Francis’s lapses in dealing with sexually abusive clergy are noted, however, not least in respect of the serial predator Father Marko Rupnik, whose case is still dragging on in the Vatican.
The fundamental flaw in Jesus Wept is the (admittedly agnostic) author’s inability to understand the Catholic Church as both a human institution and a supernatural reality. One wonders if Philip Shenon has ever heard of Hilaire Belloc’s remark about the Church: that an institution run with such "knavish imbecility" would "not have lasted a fortnight" were it not a "work of God." That fundamental flaw is magnified by Shenon’s inability, or unwillingness, to recognize that the Church he seemingly favors—a Catholicism imitating liberal Protestantism in its embrace of the woke zeitgeist and the polymorphous peculiarities of the sexual revolution—would be, like liberal Protestantism everywhere, doomed. For the consistent sociological evidence, around the world, is that Christian communities with a clear sense of their doctrinal and moral identity and boundaries can thrive under modern and postmodern cultural conditions, while Christian communities whose boundaries become so porous that one cannot tell whether one is "in" or "out" wither and die.
The Catholic Church is open to everyone willing to accept Christ’s challenge—"Repent and believe the Gospel" [Mark 1.15]—and willing to seek the divine mercy when, as all Catholics do, we fail at times to meet that challenge. Framing Catholicism’s 21st-century divide as running between those who favor a Church dispensing mercy and those who consider a merciful Church a "heresy" is thus worse than silliness. It is calumny.
Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church
by Philip Shenon
Knopf, 590 pp., $35
George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center. His 30th book, Pomp, Circumstance, and Unsolicited Advice: Commencement Addresses and University Lectures, will be available from Ignatius Press in May.
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