c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Kim A. Lawton is managing editor of the PBS television show “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.” A version of this story first appeared on the program.)

(UNDATED) In the provocative new book “Papal Sin” (Doubleday), author Garry Wills charges that the modern Roman Catholic hierarchy _ from the papacy on down _ is permeated with what he calls “structures of deceit.”

According to Wills, popes in previous eras were guilty of sins such as murder, greed and sexual immorality. In modern times, he argues, the papacy has been characterized by a more subtle and perhaps more insidious sin: dishonesty in matters of theology and church history. He says it’s a sin that continues with Pope John Paul II and filters down through the entire church hierarchy.

“They are deceiving certainly,” said Wills, adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. “That’s what St. Augustine would call a lie. He said a lie is not something that is simply false words. It’s the intent to deceive. And if you intend to hide a truth, to promote a partial and evasive substitute for it, that’s lie, according to St. Augustine.”

The charge _ and the passion with which the charge is rendered _ has made Wills’ books one of the most talked-about of the summer, generating sharp criticism and strong support.

“Nobody starts out to lie,” Wills told Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, the PBS television program. “But there are so many pressures to try to evade the unpleasant things in the history of the church _ of which there are many _ to select what you will choose and how you will approach it in Scripture.”

In the book, Wills accuses the church of “rewriting history” when dealing with the Holocaust. He says “We Remember,” the 1998 Vatican statement on the Holocaust not only ignored the role of Catholic teaching in promoting anti-Semitism, but also “usurped” Nazi persecution of Jews by emphasizing Catholic victims.

But Wills devotes the majority of the book to an indictment of what he calls “dishonesties of doctrine” perpetrated by church leaders against the Catholic faithful. He questions current church positions on a host of issues including birth control, homosexuality, the ordination of women and the celibacy of priests. He argues church leaders offer falsehoods when they try to defend policy for which he says there is no sound theological justification.

The result, Wills says, is that local priests are in the uncomfortable position of teaching things they don’t really believe, while lay people are alienated from their leaders.

“A lot of these things are unbelievable to them, so that leads to a kind of split within the church among what Catholics actually do and what the pope says they should be doing,” he said.

Some of his most biting criticism is aimed at church teaching against contraception and the encyclical on the subject issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968.

“You know, there is nothing in Scripture about contraception. It’s supposed to be natural law. … (but) nobody believes the pope’s arguments on that, except a few people in the Curia, perhaps,” he said. “Catholics don’t. Non-Catholics certainly don’t.”

The Rev. Andrew Greeley, a priest and sociologist who has written on some of the same topics as Wills, said he believes the book will generate controversy.

“Oh, I think it might stir up a lot of talk,” he said. “They’ll be taking about it all night and into the next morning, they will.”

But the book has also drawn sharp dissent from some critics who find both Wills’ arguments and tone wrong.

“It’s a very bitter and very angry book,” said the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of the magazine First Things. “With this book, `Papal Sin,’ it’s simply that, `I know that this is wrong, and the people in charge, the pope and the others responsible for the teaching of the church, must also know that it is wrong, and therefore they are lying.

“It kind of sent, not a chill down my back, so much as a sadness,” he said.

Even many of those who agree with some of Wills’ assessments were taken aback by his passion.

John Allen, Jr. is Vatican Correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, a liberal independent newspaper, said he believes Wills “is writing this book out of passion, out of anger and I think that spills over into most of its pages. And I think therefore it is going to be inaccessible precisely to the people who need to hear the argument. That is, the people who are most,

who style themselves, as most loyal to the pope.”

Greeley, too, said he found the book “angry and intemperate”at times, but added, “if Wills believes these things are true, and I’m sure he does, than anger may be justified.”

Wills, however, denies that he is angry.

“As I say, the question is truth,” he said. “And it’s a very simple matter. If you don’t tell the truth, you’re not serving the truth.”

Wills also raises questions about Catholic teaching on doctrines such as what happens in Holy Communion, papal infallibility and whether popes and bishops are really part of a priestly succession that stretches back to the early church.

Neuhaus said he found Wills’ dismissing of such core doctrines troubling.

“I mean, he just with a flick of his wrists, just dismisses doctrines that are absolutely foundational to the Catholic faith: that Christ instituted a priesthood, that the pope is successor to Peter, that the body and blood of Christ are indeed transformed, changed, in the Mass,” Neuhaus said.

Some critics wonder why, if Wills has such strong concerns, he doesn’t leave the Catholic church and join another that agrees with his interpretations. He said he finds the suggestion insulting.

“It assumes that papalism is Catholicism,” he said. “That if you disagree with the pope, you’re not Catholic. Many, many people disagreed with the popes. Saints, holy men, theologians.

“I believe in the Trinity, the Incarnation, in the Redemption and the Resurrection and the mystical body of Christ. That’s nothing? They think that I should care about contraception and get out of the church when those are the core truths that I believe that the church has taught for century after century. That’s what makes me a Catholic.”

DEA END LAWTON