Keeping the Faith

That the abused child will defend its parent is no arcane phenomenon of child psychology--hell, we've seen it on Law and Order. Regardless of the degree of abuse involved, or the appurtenant, wholesale betrayal of trust and responsibility, even the most misused kids define themselves so wholly with their abusers that to point an accusing finger is often beyond their capacity for self-definition. This has always seemed to me a pretty good analogy for why most Catholics--and I share the faith--defend their church.

Garry Wills is not most Catholics, of course. And most Catholics aren't Garry Wills. One of our more muscular thinkers and prolific writers on politics, art and religion, and their attendant crimes--most notably in his recent, occasional, scab-ripping New York Review of Books pieces on the church's sex-abuse scandal (which is what prompted Houghton Mifflin to move up the publication of Why I Am a Catholic by three months)--the writer is also a devout believer, one who regularly attends mass, says the rosary and actually has a belief system that justifies his belief system. Which is, again, more than you can say for most Catholics. Or most people.

But in 2000 he published Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, a scathing treatise on the recent papacy's intellectual offenses and reign of terror against all things Modernist. Wills must have known he'd have to answer for his "sin," so to speak--even though, in the introduction to Why I Am a Catholic, he calls the new book "unintended."

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