Is the character and identity of the Catholic Church best described by juxtaposing “the people of God” to “a monarchical line of popes”? Were Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI really opposed to “the spirit of Vatican II”? Did Pedro Arrupe, the former superior general of the Jesuits, “turn the order around”? Did the revelations of clerical sexual abuse cause “millions” to leave the Church? Did Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in terris help end the Cold War?
All these assertions are made by the journalist and author Mary Jo McConahay in her New York Times review of Philip Shenon’s Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. I have not read Shenon’s book, which, as McConahay describes it, is a familiar rehash of battles between so-called reformers and so-called traditionalists over the legacy of Vatican II. Evidently, Shenon also thinks the Church’s handling of sexual abuse by priests, bishops, and the papacy is still the defining issue of Catholicism. “Nothing is spared,” McConahay writes, “in recounting their odious criminal acts and the cowardly machinations of the church’s leadership to hide them.”
No one doubts how odious those acts were or how cowardly and clueless the Church’s leaders often turned out to be when faced with abuse allegations. But it has now been more than twenty years since the U.S. bishops adopted their Dallas Charter, and there is good reason to believe that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests is no longer the threat it once was, at least in the United States. Was the abuse crisis terrible? Of course. But a book about the Catholic Church’s modern history that places clerical sexual abuse at its center and suggests that nothing important has changed is anachronistic and misleading.
McConahay depicts the battles over Vatican II as a simple fight between those who want the Church to “effect change and let fresh air in” and those who want to keep the windows firmly shut. She and, apparently, Shenon believe Pope Francis represents the “continuation of Vatican II,” while John Paul and Benedict were determined to obstruct implementation of the council. But Vatican II was a far more complicated event than McConahay’s review indicates. She mentions its outreach to other Christian Churches and other religions but not its unambiguous Christocentrism. The council’s welcome emphasis on the priesthood of all the baptized did not keep it from upholding episcopal hierarchy and papal supremacy. These sorts of tensions and paradoxes run throughout the council’s documents. While it is fair to say that Vatican II lifted the Church out of the defensive crouch it had been stuck in since the French Revolution, one can easily exaggerate its innovations and departures from tradition.
McConahay depicts the battles over Vatican II as a simple fight between those who want the Church to “effect change and let fresh air in” and those who want to keep the windows firmly shut.
The council underscored that the clergy and the laity have different but complementary roles and responsibilities. It is not necessary to choose, as McConahay implies, between the people of God and the pope. Nor is it true that John Paul and Benedict were opposed in any fundamental sense to Vatican II. Both, in fact, had serious roles at the council. When it comes to Fr. Arrupe turning the Jesuits around, I’m not sure what exactly McConahay has in mind. Yes, Arrupe imbued the order with a new regard for the poor. But is the Society of Jesus thriving? I’ve known some wonderful Jesuits and was for several years the grateful beneficiary of the order’s hospitality. But there is no denying that, at least in the United States, the Jesuits—like many other religious orders—are in decline. As for McConahay’s claim about Pacem in terris, a wise and valuable document, it’s highly unlikely that any papal encyclical hastened the end of the Cold War. For that, we can mainly thank Soviet corruption and incompetence. Nor is it obvious that sexual-abuse revelations are the principal reason millions have left the Church. Surveys suggest that most left for other, often more mundane reasons.
To her credit, McConahay does take issue with the way Shenon emphasizes disputes over Church teaching about sexual morality, noting that sex is mentioned or alluded to on 400 of his book’s 514 pages. “The reader might think that sex,” she writes, “is the main preoccupation of the modern church.” Yet she then adds, “Weary Catholics may agree.” So, the reader may ask, is Shenon right or wrong to give the subject so much attention?
One thing that wearies this Catholic are articles and book reviews in the New York Times that fail to challenge its readers negative assumptions about Catholicism. In that regard, it is not surprising that the only mention of Jesus in McConahay’s review has to do with Shenon’s title, which imagines Jesus weeping over sexual abuse. What goes conspicuously unmentioned is what the Church professes about Jesus and why that matters to the millions of Catholics who have not left the Church. At Mass the day I read McConahay’s review, the second reading was from 1 Corinthians. As it happens, that Mass was being offered for my former dentist, who had died a few weeks before. I hadn’t seen him in years but remember him fondly. In the reading, St. Paul reminds us that “[i]f the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain; you are still in your sins.” If you are looking for the soul of the Church, and what keeps people coming back to Mass week after week, look there.
Like all human institutions, the Church has often failed. But it is more than its failures, and much more than the endless quarrels over Vatican II or the papacy or sexual morality. It is first and foremost about the belief that “Christ has been raised,” and that those who “have fallen asleep in Christ”—a lovely phrase—will also be raised to new life. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all,” St. Paul concludes. That remains the heart of the faith after Vatican II, Humanae vitae, and the sexual-abuse crisis, seismic as these were. That the Gospel comes first is something about which Popes Francis and John XXIII, the heroes of Shenon’s book, and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, its villains, would all have agreed.
Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal from 2003 to 2018, is Commonweal’s senior writer.
Reproduced with permission by Commonweal Magazine.
