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My Take on Gary Wills' New Book By Msgr. George G. Higgins The Yard Stick July 17, 2000  Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Wills, one of America's most highly acclaimed Catholic journalists and authors, has just published a diatribe against his own church's past and present leadership, "Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit" (Doubleday). Wills' thesis is that "the life of church authorities is lived within structures of deceit." The author has achieved a well-deserved reputation as a thinking-person's journalist. This book, however, while making a number of valid points, is as a whole woefully lacking in a sense of balance.  Wills' literary conceit here is that virtually everything the church did before and has done since Vatican Council II has been duplicitous. But in the case of many issues taken up, the reality is merely that the hierarchy has not adopted the position that Wills (and, in some cases I, too) would like to see it adopt.  Wills has erected a 'straw church," a caricature shorn of its actual complex mix of good and bad, moral success and sinfulness, to create a portrait of almost total darkness and evil. But as fellow journalist Tad Szulc remarked in an otherwise uncritical review, surely a community and institution that has survived two millennia and claims the adherence of a billion people must have done something right somewhere along the line.  Take Catholic-Jewish relations, to which Wills devotes the book's first four chapters and through which, therefore, he frames his indictment against the church. Wills stridently attacks Vatican II's justly famous declaration "Nostra Aetate," the fourth section of which was devoted to radically reforming church teaching on Jews and Judaism. As one who was there and followed the debate about "Nostra Aetate" hour-by-hour during all four council sessions, I resent Wills' dismissive attitude toward that remarkable achievement.  Wills makes much of the fact that the final draft of "Nostra Aetate" does not use the word "deicide" ("killing God"). What the text did was to clearly condemn the concept of "deicide," and by using the language it did ("The death of Christ ... cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today"), the council denounced not only a single, arcane term, but all subtler forms of collective Jewish guilt too.  Wills argues that a watered-down conciliar declaration had no effect on church life and that to claim otherwise is deceitful. The basic test of Wills' thesis should be whether the actual teaching of the church changed. It happens that a solid and painfully objective study of how Catholic religious education materials treated Jews and Judaism was done in the late 1950s for St. Louis University by Dominican Sister Rose Thering. Her results were grim and were submitted to the drafters of "Nostra Aetate," who wrote what they wrote precisely to render such negative portraits of Jews and Judaism impossible in future Catholic textbooks. Did they succeed?  Two subsequent doctoral dissertations, one by Eugene Fisher for New York University (1976) and one by Philip Cunningham for Boston College (1992) show that they did. The council's vision of a positive teaching about Jews and Judaism is a reality in our classrooms. Unfortunately, Wills' treatment of Catholic-Jewish relations went to press before Pope John Paul II's historic visit this year to the Holy Land. Nevertheless, it is not too late for Wills to admit that his total rejection of "Nostra Aetate" and its post-Vatican II implementation looks rather silly in retrospect.  At least he should be willing to stipulate that because of "Nostra Aetate" and post-Vatican II developments we have advanced light years beyond the teaching of his all-time favorite theologian, St. Augustine, who specifically rejected the possibility of salvation for Jews. What would Wills say if Vatican II had validated that teaching in "Nostra Aetate"?   Papal Social Encyclicals   Other Catholic Social Teachings General Articles of Interest  Catholic Worker Connection Msgr. George Higgins  Home Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre