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Title: Why I Am a Catholic by Garry Wills ISBN: 0-618-13429-8 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: July, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.08 (36 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: former seminarian like Wills...
Comment: Wills' ideas are untested and unoriginal. [Lack of originality got him the 1 star.]
"Why I am a Catholic" Surely Wills or his editor understood and discussed how this redefinitive phrase adds tension...like the tension that an opportunistic news story does just before it sells us products it doesn't know we need. I doubt it coincidence that such a book appears at a time of popular media circus regarding the Church. I am a fairly young man but I am looking for an intellectual, not someone who appears just at a precise moment to stoke the flames of controversy.
Wills' demands of the Church coupled with his definitive "definition" equates to a monolithic understanding of what a Catholic can be, so thereby he is hypocritical as he declares the Church monolithic. He demands his structure be established as he rejects the structure already established. Rather than simply offer his [unoriginal] views, Wills demands. He can only demand, as his ideas are simply a rehash of others'. I admit other than a few television interviews, I've only heard him talk at length about and debate his views with a Jesuit that seemed to expose Wills' confusion, reducing Wills to hems and haws and finally silence as he stared at the floor and thought. To slide by on the oil slick of temporal popularism is not the catholic way, and not a way to impress any but the impressionable. If we are to assume Wills is halfway smart as I do, then he has accepted this opportunism at the sacrifice of the impressionable. The true intellectual I will listen to writes quietly, and like Aquinas simply puts it down on record, to blossom as history lives through and discovers it's truth. I pray for Wills.
Rating: 4
Summary: Thoughtful examination of faith
Comment: There certainly seems to be a lot of polarization in the readers' responses. I cannot believe the vitriol some folks lob at the author. Serious lack of charity involved, it seems to me. I found the book to be interesting and definitely a worthwhile examination of why, with all its faults, the Catholic Church still provides a spiritual home for the author. I trust folks who believe it is possible to question and doubt and still affirm faith. For those who are afraid ever to examine or doubt, one wonders what it is they fear. . . perhaps their faith isn't as strong as they believe. But this author is not afraid. And he is a good catholic.
Rating: 4
Summary: Answer: Born & raised Catholic
Comment: At bottom, I think Wills argument boils down to that the best reason for remaining (as distinguished from becoming) a Roman Catholic today is that one was born and raised a Roman Catholic. He continues to base his faith on the Creed (Apostles' Creed, the baptismal creed), and after all, anyone born & raised Presbyterian could probably say the same. So Will's book may be an apologia pro vita sua, but no argument for some one who wasn't born & raised in the Roman Church. Perhaps the title should have been "Why I am Still a Catholic."
He states that the papacy is a "sacrament of the unity of the Church." At most, he must mean sacrament equals symbol. Certainly not sacrament as generally understood in classic Catholic terminology, which defines a sacrament as "the outward sign of an inward grace", or as a symbol or symbolic action that actually has the power to achieve what it symbolizes (e.g. baptism actuates the salvation of the baptized.)
Far from being a sacrament of unity, or actuating the unity of the Church, the papacy has been from its beginnings, and continues to be today, one of the most divisive institutions or ideas in Christianity, compared to which the ancient theological arguments over the filioque pale to a semantic quibble. The current occupant and his Curial cohort of papal absolutists continue to issue pronouncements dividing the Roman Catholic remnant into sheep and goats (right thinkers and deviants, obedient children and heretical rebels), and erect new barriers to inter-faith understanding (e.g. the recent canonization of a priest who saved Christian European Civilization from the infidel Turks.) The papacy can't even unite the Roman Catholic "Church", let alone Christians (the bibical meaning of "Church"). It would have been more plausible to cite Baptism, or even the Creed, on which Wills pins his continued self-identity as Catholic, as symbols ("sacraments" in the classic sense) of the unity of Christians.
Thirty years ago, when I was a newly minted American Roman Catholic (from a devout and educated Protestant background), an elderly Irish Catholic neighbor profoundly shocked me by informing me that I would never be "a real Catholic" because I wasn't born and raised one. I have been coming to the conclusion that she was right after all. There are just too many issues that would require me to (in Wills' phrase) "check my brains at the church door" and out of some kind of misguided loyalty force myself to give "religious assent" to concepts that fly in the face of reason, history and reality. Speaking only for myself and no one else, as long as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church continues to foist such propositions on the rest of the body, I find it increasingly difficult to view silent acquiescence as faithful loyal opposition instead of self-delusion or hypocrisy.
That said, Wills' book makes a good read, interesting stuff in there about the history of the papacy, and his understanding of the Creed and Lord's Prayer, arising from his knowledge of Greek.
I was also intrigued by his account of Jesuit education; it went a long way toward explaining something that puzzled me when I was a new convert, namely why a young Jesuit priest I approached with theological questions and a desire for spiritual direction (expecting from the Jesuit reputation for education and Ignation spirituality that any Jesuit would be expert in such matters) instead fled like I'd made an indecent proposal. The poor man had probably not advanced to the stage where theology is studied, and his spiritual training probably didn't go beyond the Jesuit boot camp run through of the Ignatian Exercises.
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Title: Papal Sin : Structures of Deceit by Garry Wills ISBN: 0385494114 Publisher: Image Books Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Catholic Church : A Short History by Hans Kung ISBN: 0812967623 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) by Garry Wills ISBN: 0670886106 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: A People Adrift : The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America by Peter Steinfels ISBN: 0684836637 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 05 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie ISBN: 0374256802 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 05 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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