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Overview
Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills has been asked more than once why he remains in the Church, especially in the wake of his bestselling book Papal Sins, which examined the darker side of the religion’s history. In Why I Am a Catholic, he offers some persuasive and heartfelt answers.
Beginning with a reflection on his early experiences as a child, and later as a Jesuit seminarian, Wills reveals the importance of Catholicism in his own life. He discusses G.K. Chesterton, a personal hero whose writings brought him comfort after he left the seminary. He goes on to challenge, in clear and forceful terms, the claim that criticism or reform of the papacy is an assault on the faith itself. For Wills, a Catholic can be both loyal and critical, a loving child who stays with his father even if the parent makes mistakes.
Why I Am a Catholic also goes beyond his personal experiences to present a sweeping narrative covering two thousand years of Catholicism, revealing that the papacy, far from being an unchanging institution, has been transformed dramatically over the millennia—and can be reimagined in the future. At a time when the Church faces various crises and struggles, Garry Wills offers an important look at both its past and its future, in a book that is “one part autobiography, three parts history, and one part confession of faith” (Booklist).
“It is a great satisfaction to have the Church’s history analyzed by a mind so critical but still so in love.” —The New Yorker
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547526676 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 820,118 |
| File size: | 636 KB |
About the Author
GARRY WILLS, a distinguished historian and critic, is the author of numerous books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, Saint Augustine, and the best-selling Why I Am a Catholic. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he has won many awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is a history professor emeritus at Northwestern University.
Date of Birth:
May 22, 1934Place of Birth:
Atlanta, GAEducation:
St. Louis University, B.A., 1957; Xavier University, M.A., 1958; Yale University, Ph.D., 1961Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Saint Mary's and Campion
THERE IS something eerie about having total strangers describe to you the inmost recesses of your soul. I opened letter after letter explaining to me in some detail why I hated my church, had it in for the Blessed Virgin, and dismissed the Holy Spirit. This was news to me, and would be to Catholics who know me, including the many nuns and priests who have been guides and helpers all my life. I am a born Catholic. I have never stopped going to Mass, saying the rosary, studying the Gospels. I have never even considered leaving the church. I would lose my faith in God before losing my faith in it. In fact, the closest I have come to disbelief in God was when I was deepest in the social coils of the church, as a seminarian studying to be a priest. Before that, my upbringing had made me as little questioning as most of the Catholics around me in the 1940s.
I had no reason to doubt the good will and piety of those who cared for me. It was the Catholic part of my life — the Irish Catholic side of the family — that was most supportive and stimulating. My younger sister and I much preferred our mother's parents, Con and Rose Collins of Atlanta, to our father's parents, Garry and Ginny Wills of Oak Park. The Willses were originally Episcopalians from Norfolk, but Garry was an agnostic and Ginny had become a Christian Scientist by the time we knew them. When our grandmother Wills babysat us, during our parents' absence, she tried very hard to improve us — our manners, our diction, our reading habits (out with the comic books). She loved us, I suppose, but in a cold and fussy way, a kind of love we found it hard to reciprocate.
The Irish side, by contrast, was all love and little improving. The Collinses had their faults, some recognized (the drink), some not (the racism), but they made children feel instantly at home. They had thick Southern accents (my mother's returned when she went back home), outgoing ways, and an unpretentious but omnipresent piety. Their house contained a large statue of the Sacred Heart that awed us, and many pictures of the Virgin. In Lent and on holy days we knelt down and said the rosary together. It was a Catholic home, even in stereotypical ways. It held a large family — Rose had eight difficult childbirths, though four of the babies were either stillborn or died soon after delivery. Only one boy lived, Bernard. He entered a Jesuit college (Spring Hill) but had to withdraw almost at once, since Con lost his job during the Depression. Of the three sisters, only the youngest, Anne, finished high school, since the Depression was over by the time she reached her teens. The extended family on both the Collins and the Driscoll side was thick with priests, who dropped in for some of Rose's wonderful cooking, making friendly priests a part of my social world from the outset. When at Christmas or Thanksgiving we visited Atlanta — or later, when the Collinses moved there, Louisville — the house was webbed with aromas from Rose's kitchen, and there were more people than beds. My sister and I slept on the floor — we thought that a great adventure. The Wills home seemed sterile by contrast, full of boring classical music and of objets d'art we could not touch (Ginny was an amateur artist of some talent).
Though my father, Jack, was not a Catholic (he became one after we had grown up), he honored the pledge he took to raise his children in the church, so our mother, Mayno, brought us up in the atmosphere of the Collinses. After my birth in Atlanta, my father had to travel north looking for work in the Depression — first to Fort Wayne, then to Beloit (where my sister was born), then on to Albion, Michigan, and finally to Adrian, Michigan (just across the Ohio border from Toledo). In Albion, my parents ran a boardinghouse on the edge of Albion College, renting rooms to college boys. I was two at the time, and in the boarders I had a house full of big brothers who taught me to tie my shoes, throw a ball, and be a lure for neighborhood girls who came to gush over me and flirt with them. My mother was not happy at the fact that Albion had no Catholic grade school; but by the time for me to enter first grade we had moved to Adrian, which had a very good school (Saint Mary's), run by Dominican sisters whose mother house (Siena Heights) is in Adrian.
I was lucky to have a teacher there who remained a lifelong friend. She had been born on Bastille Day in Augusta, Georgia, and baptized Marie Antoinette in honor of the day — she went by the second name, but shortened it to the less pretentious Anne. Her father, John Joseph O'Connor, was a graduate of the Jesuit college at Spring Hill (the same one my uncle attended briefly), and she had worked for the Willys-Overland car company in Toledo before entering the convent in Adrian. In honor of her father she took as her religious name Sister John Joseph (we kids called her Johnny-Joe behind her back). She was in her thirties when she taught me. In her fifties, when she had resumed her own name, she became the provincial superior of her order in California, and she had to steer women's colleges through the stormy sixties, which she did with a wise flexibility.
Most of my childhood memories revolve around the Adrian parish of Saint Mary's and the school attached to it. I later tried to re-create my days there in an essay, "Memories of Catholic Boyhood," which I included in my book Bare Ruined Choirs. It was an exercise in nostalgia that obviously spoke to many who had shared my experience, since I have had more requests to reprint it, or get copies of it, than for anything else I have written. Some excerpts will give a sense of the upbringing I am trying to describe now. Of going to pre-school Mass on a weekday, I wrote:
We came, in winter, out of the dark into vestibule semidark, where peeled-off galoshes spread a slush across the floor. We took off gloves and scarves, hands still too cold to dip them in the holy water font. Already the children's tin lunch boxes, left to steam on the bare radiator, emanated smells of painted metal, of heated bananas, of bologna and mayonnaise ... Girls without hats hair-pinned Kleenex to their heads — it fluttered as they strode to the communion rail, like a raffish dove illperched on each sharer in the mystery ... Scapulars like big postage stamps glued here and there on kids in swimming pools. JMJ [for Jesus Mary Joseph] at the top of schoolwork. The sign of the cross before a foul shot. Fishing pennies and dimes out of pockets pebbled with the fifty-nine beads and assorted medallions of a rosary ... Nuns who moved in their long habits with stately calm, like statues rocking. The deferential "ster" pinned to all sentences ("Yester" for "Yes, Sister") ... Holy cards of saints with eyes so strenuously upturned as to be almost all white. The Infant of Prague bulkily packaged in "real" clothes. The sight, in darkened churches, of a shadowy Virgin with hands held palm-out at the level of her hips, plaster cape flowing down from those hands toward blue votive lights unsteady under her like troubled water. Sand under the votive candles for putting out tapers; and a box of large kitchen matches, for lighting tapers, stuck into the sand. The momentary waxen strangle of St. Blaise day, as crossed candles bless one's throat.
I concluded, fondly: "It was a ghetto, but not a bad ghetto to grow up in."
Beneath this weave of churchy incense at the school, there was a strict discipline supporting good teachers who stressed the basics. Grammar was instilled by endless outlining of sentences. Rhetoric was shaped by giving rhythmic breakdowns of the same sentences. In a way, this system worked almost too well with me. When, at age ten, I had to transfer to a public school, I was so far ahead of those who missed this kind of drill that another of my very good teachers, Mildred Byfuss (later Mrs. Duckworth), pitied my boredom in class (and countered my tendency to fool around for lack of other occupation), telling me to go to the school library and read books she suggested to keep me busy. Teachers, I suppose, could not get away with that today.
Though I loved to read, I missed the nuns — I was back in Albion, where, since there was still no Catholic school, we were sent to Saturday catechism classes taught by laymen. My father had been drafted, despite his two children, for the final stages of World War II. This meant he could no longer commute from his Adrian job (selling gas appliances) to maintain the boardinghouse in Albion. So my parents rented the house in Adrian, and my mother moved back to Albion, where, helped by her sister, she could look after the boardinghouse. I acquired again that protective huddle of older brothers from the college, who now rode me around on the handlebars of their bikes and let me play catch with them on the college campus, just across the street from our house. (These days, I suppose, my mother would be criticized for letting the college boys give me rides without a helmet.) I had older friends than those I was going to school with — an arrangement that was repeated, in a milder way, when Miss Byfuss persuaded my mother to let me skip sixth grade.
But when we returned to Adrian, after a year, the private reading Miss Byfuss had directed put me ahead of my fellow students at Saint Mary's, and Sister John Joseph said I should skip another grade. My parents, rightly opposed to my getting too far out of my age group, said no to this. She then recommended that I go to a more demanding school. She idolized her older brother, who was a Jesuit priest, so she suggested that I be sent to a Jesuit boarding school, Campion, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. I began my freshman year there in 1947.
Campion
The Dominican nuns, who had treated me well, sent me on to the Jesuits, who were even better to me. For one thing, they dispelled any notion I might have that I was precocious. At Campion there were many people as smart as I or smarter, and I was privileged to have a number of them as friends. Some who went on to distinguished careers are Joe Schorck as a classical scholar, Bill Birdsall as an economist at the University of Michigan, Greg Lucey as a university president, Bob Baker in the CIA, Lewis Ellingham as a poet. We were given an anachronistic education in humane letters, part of the Jesuits' already-fading Renaissance traditions. Those of us in the honors program had four years of Latin and two years of Greek. We were back to outlining sentences, but in two new languages. There was great emphasis on memorizing, elocution, and debate. We were among the last to have this kind of training, since the key factor in it — Jesuit "scholastics" — has now disappeared. Scholastics were Jesuit seminarians who interrupted, after the seventh year, their thirteen-year preparation for ordination to the priesthood. They were given time out to teach for three years in a Jesuit high school. Now there are too few Jesuit seminarians to sustain such a system, and the training of those who still exist has been shortened or altered to meet other needs, making the hiatus for high school teaching a rare exception instead of a regular part of the training. But while that system lasted, it was a great way to inspire and test adolescent boys.
The scholastics — men still in their twenties, immersed in studies they enjoyed, highly motivated, many of them athletic enough to play with us (and beat us at will) in sports — made ideal teachers. They were not only bright and hardworking in the regular classes. They had energy left over to run informal seminars on things like music appreciation, or to conduct reading groups, or to give extra-credit courses in everything from theater to theology. They got us interested in new books as well as old. When the article on which Evelyn Waugh based The Loved One ran in a special edition of Life, the scholastics quickly passed it around to each other and to those of us they thought would like it. Almost all my later interests — in Greek drama, in the New Testament, in Shakespeare, in opera, in movies, in authors like Newman and Ruskin and Chesterton — were initiated or accelerated by my four years at Campion.
I didn't love everything about Campion. Compulsory ROTC courses were taught by military hacks, whose dullness was made more grating by contrast with the scholastics in our regular classrooms. As a freshman, I joined the debate team, whose star was Bill Sullivan, then in his senior year — he would soon enter the Jesuits and became a distinguished theologian (later the president of Seattle College). My first day out for ROTC drill, when I saw Bill Sullivan, my fellow debater, strutting about in an officer's uniform with a silly-looking saber, I snatched the sword and made him run after me to get it back — which he did not think very funny. He didn't think much, either, of my dating his sister Kathy (the Sullivans lived in Prairie du Chien). When I met Kathy as a sophomore, I asked after Bill, who was by then a novice at the Jesuit seminary. She told me she was amused by the way novices addressed each other in Latin as Carissime ("dear fellow"), which they pronounced Criss-Me. Since Kiss Me, Kate was still a new show then, I addressed my first letter to her as "Criss-Me Kate." I wrote her on Sundays whenever I could not go into town to see her because I had a "lost weekend."
That was another problem for me at Campion — its system of "jugs" and "lost weekends." A jug punished minor infractions by depriving the culprit of recreation time, consigning him instead to the memorization of long poems, which he must recite in order to be released. (I still remember scraps of those many verses.) A certain number of jugs within a week led to a lost weekend — in which all one's recreation time on Saturday and Sunday (the only days we could go into Prairie du Chien) was spent sitting in a chair in the hallway outside the office of the school's president, Carl Reinert, S.J. I ran up record totals of jugs, often because I had missed daily Mass, for which we were forced to rise at six A.M. I was insomniac in my youth — doctors in those carefree days of pharmacology gave me strange mixtures of medicines for it — so I often ended up, after early lights-out, in the one room lit on each floor, the john, reading in a stall, lifting my legs when anyone entered, in case it was a Jesuit checking the room. Then I would sleep through Mass in the morning. After my jugs reached a certain total, I was expelled from the senior residence hall, where we got private rooms in our fourth year, and sent back to the juniors' dormitory.
That experience led me to a realization that my idolized scholastics were not all "the best and the brightest" men that the church had to offer. There was one genuine psychopath among them — he did not last long, I was later told, but I wondered how he had got that far. He had a grudge against the "honors boys," which he took out in naked hostility. One night he caught me, after my expulsion from the senior residence, roaming its halls after dinner, when the building was out of bounds for all but its inhabitants. He said with manic glee, "Now I really have you." He had been part of my getting expelled in the first place, and I did not know what new penalty he could inflict, but I was undoubtedly obnoxious when I laughed at him and said, "No you don't." I produced a written permission for me to be there preparing for a debate with my partner, Bill Birdsall. The scholastic's face was instantly contorted with pure hate, and he lunged at me. I ran down the stairs to the first floor, out onto the porch and down its stairs, and off across the length of the football field that lay beside the hall. Sheer panic gave me speed, since he was clearly in a murderous mood and he just kept coming. At last I wore him down (he was not one of the athletic Jesuits). It was a bitter winter night, and I had left my coat in Birdsall's room, but I stayed out for as long as I could bear the cold, and then circled the long way back to my dorm, in case he was lying in wait for me (I think he was).
This one exception to the general excellence did not tarnish my view of the scholastics. Nor did I ponder much the difference between these young men and the older Jesuits, already priests, who held administrative and some teaching posts at the school. The energy and curiosity of the seminarians had faded into odd hobbies or rote performance of duty in many of these elders. It is true that the president, Father Reinert, had great vigor, but much of it was expressed in bullying, not only of students but of the scholastics, so we had an unspoken sympathy for each other's plight. I did not know then, but learned later, that the year before I came to Campion, Father Reinert had forced reluctant scholastics, under holy obedience, to become informers on a group of students who protested an unfair example of mass punishment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why I Am a Catholic"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Garry Wills.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Key to Brief Citations,
Introduction to the Mariner Edition,
Introduction,
BORN CATHOLIC,
Saint Mary's and Campion,
Jesuit Days,
Chesterton,
Encyclicals,
CHURCH WITHOUT PAPAL PRIMACY,
Peter,
Paul,
Rome Mediating,
Rome Meddling,
Rome and the East,
Rome Turns West,
FORMS OF PAPAL PRIMACY,
Forgeries and Populism,
Rise of the Secular State and the Church Council,
Renaissance and Reformation,
Trent and England,
Ancien Régime and Revolution,
War on Democracy,
Reign of Terror,
THE VATICAN II CHURCH,
The Great Rebirth,
Born to Set Times Right,
Fighting Vatican II,
Living Vatican II,
The Pope's Loyal Opposition,
THE CREED,
I believe in God ...,
... the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth ...,
... and in Jesus Christ our Lord, the only son of God ... He descended into hell ...,
... conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary ...,
... shall come to judge the living and the dead ...,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Author,
Related Subjects
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