FORMER PRIEST, GARY WILLS' BOOK, BARE RUINED CHOIRS, WRITTEN IN 1972 WITH A COMMENTARY ON IT IN THE SAME YEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES; THIS TELLS YOU HOW QUICKLY THINGS BECAME RADICAL IN THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY AT THAT TIME AND HOW THE SAME PEOPLE ARE STILL CAUSING THE SAME HAVOC IN 2020!

October 29, 1972

Change Was the Church's Dirty Little Secret

By JOHN GARDNER

BARE RUINED CHOIRS Doubt, Prophecy and Radical Religion By Garry Wills

hough here and there a little wild and wrong-headed, "Bare Ruined Choirs" is one of the most interesting books of the year, a brand new stick-waving Old Testament prophet's careful analysis of the crisis of the Roman Catholic Church -- a crisis linked to that of American civilization as a whole. What happened? asks the prophet of the Lord, Garry Wills (political columnist and author of the highly praised "Nixon Agonistes"). One moment "the two Johns" are reigning serenely -- Kennedy in the White House, making Americans proud of their country; Pope John in the Vatican, convincing not only Catholics but "all men of good will" that Mother Church is the noblest of first-ladies. The nest moment America is a network of official and unofficial bomb-factories, and the Jesuit schools, intellectual front-line of Catholicism, are closing down, wrecked by mere human marriages. Soon the only zealous "faithful" (though they hate the Mass in English) are F.B.I. men tracking Berrigans. What power could so easily smash the majestic age-old church?

Why, the church, of course -- the true, passionate, apostolic church! If the answer sounds silly and embarrassing, then a proof of Wills's power is that he pretty well makes it stick. He makes a case so strong and original that only the prejudiced or obstinate will be able to dismiss him. His book is sure to become study material for church groups of all denominations; it's not just false religion in the Vatican that Wills is out to smash.

His book-long argument is built very much like a medieval sermon -- I hope not by accident. The analysis begins with a fine evocation of how it felt to grow up Catholic: the textures of things, the smells, the mysteries, above all the sense of apartness, safety in the timeless immutability of the church. The evocation lets the non-Catholic in on how it felt and thus on how it feels to have lost all that forever; but it does more. It sets up in dramatic form (a sermonic exemplum) the causes of collapse.

One of them, the essential one, is well-meant dishonesty, "the pretended faith that makes real faith impossible." To make the church the one fixed point in a fluctuous world, churchmen slipped into the pretense that doctrine has never changed, that ritual never changes, that priests and nuns partake, even physically, of the purity of doctrine. (The habit of the nun denies that she has breasts. That nuns should use toilets comes to be, for the Catholic child -- or at least or the novelists Garry Wills quotes -- unthinkable.) Wills loads on evidence like a scholastic philosopher, then nails it down with rhetorically driving analysis and comment:

"Thus, though it was a world of faith, it was a world of deceptions too, and deliberate blindnesses; of things one should not see, and of consequent pretending not to see them. the attitudes, no matter how carefully inculcated, were strained -- like the rapt composure one strove for on that mystic journey back from the communion rail. ... One had been trained to put a different face on, for the proprieties -- which meant, in practice, for the sake of others. And in time the whole of one's own faith could be held for other people. Doubts were hidden for the sake of the children; or a priest's for the sake of his flock; or the flock's doubts were minimized 'in front of Father.' ... The outcome was grisly -- Catholics believing for the Muggeridges of the world, becoming live sacrifices to the desire that some one believe in something."

Change, Wills says -- and surely he is right -- was the church's "dirty little secret." Vatican II let the secret out when, in an almost unwitting return to orthodoxy, it suggested that certain questions (pastoral ones -- relating to the duties of the clergy) were open to discussion. The result has been disastrous, now as it as in St. Augustine's day, but institutional psychosis was always (and is always) the alternative. Wills shows in detail, and with elaborate proofs, what made the apparent invitation so shattering: ignorant parish priests (mortgage payers, not Bible students), a feminized piety transmitted by sisters, a superstitious concern with ritual alongside a loss of intellectual and spiritual roots (the Bible and the living, historical church of contention, doubt and courageous martyrdom).

One of the most striking sections of Wills's analysis concerns and liberal Catholic's movement into "the world." In the sixties, Harvey Cox provided the theory and John Kennedy the political impetus for the sanctification of the secular -- a process that involves, among other things, adoration of the specialist. Inventing "the moral issue" and gathering religious leaders to lobby for his beleaguered civil-rights program, Kennedy meant to win a political victory -- that is, to solve a problem in his usual pragmatic way by the use of compartmentalized specialists. (But it was a moral issue, you may object. Shut up.) The specialist brought together to deal with this one problem proved that there are no problems isolated from other problems; reality is a swamp, an endless interaction. The President who invented "the moral issue" inadvertently gave drive to a Christian movement already under way, in black Southern churches especially, the movement of church against immoral state, God against Caesar. Kennedy thus accidentally invented the radical antiwar Berrigans and in the same stroke the Catholic F.B.I. agent who, capturing Dan Berrigan, cried "Ad majorem Dei gloriam!" -- "For the greater glory of God," the Jesuit motto -- suggesting that the agent, a theological nincompoop, was the true Jesuit, and Berrigan a fraud. Thus Kennedy, whatever his intentions, split the church.

At other points in his book -- again like a medieval preacher -- Wills argues (superbly) by reference to patristic tradition, by exacting and scholarly scriptural exegesis, by "meticulous refutation of the heretical text" (as Hugh of St. Victor would say) and by mortifying scorn. (Wills crucifies ex-Sister Jacqueline Grennan [Wechsler], once of Webster College, now of Hunter, for her skatty grammar.) What he proves by these methods is the continuing value of antique devices. for Wills as for Augustine, the method serves to lay truth bare and make fools of false theologians who write from stupidity, bad faith or tyrannic cowardice. Wills uses the meticulous refutation method on Pope Paul's encyclical condemning contraception. A brilliant piece of Jesuitic wit -- also devastating. If the Pope reads Wills's book and has an ounce of sense, he will instantly retire.

Wills's demolition of Pope Paul is merely an interlude, however. Contraception and priestly celibacy are "Mickey Mouse issues," as the Berrigans say. In his closing chapters, Wills turns to the real issues -- Christian conscience, ferocious integrity, readiness for martyrdom in the cause of right. Here he presents an uptown "Lives of the Saints" which includes, besides fighters like the Berrigans, nonviolent radical Protestants and Jews. One agrees with it -- all of it -- yet feels vaguely uneasy. Wills's world is very grim, like that of John the Baptist (though Wills's biting jokes are funny). He closes with a hymn to men who have gone underground (he calls it "Immersion") and ends, leaning over the pulpit like a crane:

"The best things in the church, as in a nation, or in individuals, are hidden and partially disowned, the vital impulse buried under all our cowardly misuses of it -- as the life of a nation lies under and is oppressed by its crude governing machinery; as the self lies far below the various roles imposed on or adopted by it; as covenant and gospel run, subterranean, beneath temple and cathedral. Life's streams lie far down, for us, below the surface of our lives -- where we must look for them. It is time to join the underground."

I'm not persuaded. Long live the Berrigans; nevertheless, what's best in me personally, I give you my word, is by no means what I've "hidden and partially disowned," nor is the cryptarch what's best in people like John Kennedy, Sister Jackie or even that tortuous old clown, Pope Paul. Who says all churches, nations and individuals are wretched things in which the good lies hidden? Who says human beings invariably make cowardly misuse of vital impulse?

Hell-fire, guilt-loving Christians, that's who; medieval cringers so busy with the notion of original sin that they miss the news about redemption and joy and the god who (stupid as it seems to Wills) loves even Sister Jackie. Momentarily blasted out of sense on the winds of rhetoric, Wills would move Christians from the church of dead ritual and mortgage payment of the old-time church of self-mortification. Surely if he'd stop waving his arms and think, he would agree that the thing to do is stop the war in Vietnam, keep the mortgage paid and, if possible, convert the Pope.

John Gardner is author of the novels "Grendel," "The Wreckage of Agathon" and "The Sunlight Dialogues" (published next month) and is professor of English at Southern Illinois University.