Recently a Rotarian friend asked me to read and comment on Garry
             WIlls's new book, PAPAL SIN: STRUCTURES OF DECEIT. 

             Wills is professor of history at Northwestern University and also a 
             practicing, notably liberal Roman Catholic. PAPAL SIN is a popular
             book which draws selectively on scholarship both solid and
             speculative, biblical, historical and theological, using up to date
             sources. It dashes angrily across too many topics: contraception,
             abortion, a celibate priesthood, the role of Catholics in the Holocaust,
             freedom of expression and on and on. 

             Professor Wills complains that the Roman Catholic church has
             become needlessly over centralized and administered top down. This
             makes the church too prone to the book's  subtitle, "structures of
             deceit." These structures predispose clerical leaders to mislead rather
             than admit that the church has been seriously wrong at any time on
             any issue. 

             Wills does, nonetheless, identify individuals who stood out against 
             boneheaded errors by top officials and who were later judged correct
             by the consensus of the faithful. The list of heroic deeds begins with
             Paul publicly rebuking Peter in Antioch for backsliding on what Jewish
             customs pagan converts to Christianity must practice (Galatians 2:
             11-14). St Augustine of Hippo took on St Jerome of Jerusalem over
             this very passage. In 1870 Lord Acton, John Henry Newman and many
             bishops were appalled by Pope Pius IX's deceptive and dishonest
             tactics promoting papal infallibility . 

             Garry Wills argues that the entire Church must follow Jesus who is
             Truth and be led by a Holy Spirit breathing the New Testament Greek
             grace of parrhesia: etymologically  "pan-rhesia" or "speak all," i.e.,
             "holding nothing back." For spiritual sins are vastly worse than bodily:
             lying more soul-killing than fornication. 

             In moral situations the church should stop teaching with false
             precision when solutions are not apparent, notably in key areas of
             sexuality. 

             Wills offers the following principle from Epistle 190 of St Augustine: 

                    "When a thing obscure in itself defeats our capacity, 
                        and nothing inScripture comes to our aid, 
                it is not safe for humans to presume they can pronounce on it."

             Both Augustine and Newman fought for a church in which God speaks
             to and through everyone: clergy and laity alike. Our knowledge is
             always provisional, in unceasing outreach for ultimate truth. 

             -OOO- 

             for Asheville TRIBUNE