Catholic Chic
Bare Ruined Choirs.
by Garry Wills.
Doubleday. 272 pp. $7.95.
Bare Ruined Choirs is a collection of articles by an “involved” journalist reporting on the last ten years of the history of American Catholicism. It is a story that has been told many times before: sweet memories of a Catholic boyhood with its certainties, its quotes from Chesterton, and its romantic medievalism; then the promise of Catholic liberalism in the 50's with its social encyclicals, its liturgical changes, its Thomistic philosophical revival (Gilson and Maritain), its “Catholic Action” movements; then the intense excitement of the two Johns—the Pope and the President—and the dazzling array of “new” Catholics who were discovered in the 60's—Teilhard de Chardin, John Courtney Murray, and (somewhat improbably) Jacqueline Grennan; and finally the tremendous letdowns of Vietnam and Pope Paul and the rekindling of faith and hope in the radical religious protest of the brothers Berrigan.
Toward the first two periods of his Catholic life Mr. Wills feels only nostalgia and toward the third, only bitterness. And savage bitterness it is. Everyone connected with the Catholic 60's is demolished cleverly, cruelly, and unfairly, their words torn out of the context of their own intellectual ambience and made to look foolish, their deeds made to look short-sighted in the light of unanticipated and unintended consequences represented in retrospect as inevitable effects.
It is, for example, easy to find in the policies of John Kennedy the seeds of the 1965 escalation in Vietnam and resulting disasters. But it does not follow, save in the simple, moralistic world of people like Mr. Wills, that John Kennedy “caused” the escalation. One could also find in the Kennedy perspective seeds of the opposite policy and could argue plausibly that such a shrewd and suspicious Irish politician would have vetoed the escalation. In point of fact, Kennedy neither escalated the war in 1965 nor vetoed further escalation, because he was dead. All else is speculation—and frequently vicious speculation.
It is also true that in Pope John's vision of the papacy there was the possibility of the tragic mistakes Paul VI has made. There was also the possibility of all sorts of alternative developments. To see the Pauline response as an inevitable consequence of the Johannine papacy is to engage in a kind of historical determinism to which Mr. Wills (who is, after all, a classical scholar by training) should be superior.
Nor do we know how John Courtney Murray would have developed his theories on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the United States if he had lived. But to see him as a theologian of the cold war is a gross caricature. Moreover, to denigrate his work because certain young Jesuits feel he was irrelevant during his last years is to substitute youth worship for serious analysis. Which is exactly what Mr. Wills does here and also what he does in his cruel annihilation of Mrs. Jacqueline Grennan Wexler (now that, as president of Hunter College, she is no longer a hero to the students).
_____________
Mr. Wills, of course, does not pretend to be fair or balanced. He is telling us how he himself feels. But he also wants to persuade us that his own feelings about Catholicism in the 60's are a description of the underlying spiritual reality of the time. The way he feels is also the way things really are. Nevertheless, little of what he describes has anything to do with the Catholic masses, about whom he knows nothing and cares less.
Most of the Catholic population was affected only slightly by the Council and its reforms. All evidence is that Catholics like the English liturgy, ecumenism, and the retreat from strict canonical morality. They do not take to the self-pity of some former priests, “swinging” nuns, and draft-board-raiding radicals. Whatever the faults of the Catholic tradition, it has usually managed to remain relatively immune to self-righteous moralism no matter where it comes from. Nor do most Catholics like the birth-control encyclical. But having made up their minds about birth control long before Paul VI did, they do not take the encyclical any more seriously than they do Mr. Wills's friends, the brothers Berrigan.
Catholics are more likely to practice birth control than they used to and somewhat less likely to go to church, particularly if they are young. But they are also more inclined to wonder explicitly about fundamental religious issues. Unfortunately, many of the clergy are busy trying to ape the style if not the deeds of the radicals whom Mr. Wills admires; hence they have not found the time to address themselves to basic questions of meaning and to reinterpret the Catholic symbol system in terms that have pertinence for contemporary problems of faith and hope.
In the meantime the Catholic population has arrived definitively in the ranks of the middle class (despite the myth about the blue-collar ethnic), has moved decisively to the Left politically (despite the myth of the Catholic backlash), has been more likely to oppose the war in Vietnam than has the general population (despite the myth of the Catholic super-patriot), and has elbowed its way into the upper reaches of the university world (despite the myth of Catholic anti-intellectualism).
These are immense social changes of great importance not only to American Catholics but to the rest of the nation. Yet instead of trying to interpret these changes either for Catholics or for the rest of the country, Catholic intellectuals like Mr. Wills are interested only in talking about themselves and their little coterie of friends on the evident assumption that their own religious doubts and attitudes are somehow closer to the truth about Catholicism in the 60's than what has been happening to fifty-million American Catholics. In this view, Jesuits from Woodstock who are working on stage design are more important than the priests and nuns who are staffing the only available alternative school system in the inner cities of the country, and protesters in front of the Harrisburg federal courthouse are of greater interest than graduate students trying to articulate the Polish-American experience for the first time to an academic world that is not quite sure that Poles are capable of experience. It used to be that only bishops counted, now only intellectuals count.
The American-Catholic community, then, has finally succeeded in producing an intelligentsia so taken with itself that it either does not know anything about the Catholic community as a whole or simply thinks that the masses are too dull to bother with. In this, as in so many other respects, Catholics are becoming just like everyone else. Yet there is still one big difference, which is that, as usual, Catholics have made it into an avant-garde position just when that position is being deserted by everyone else. For here is Mr. Wills elevating the feelings and the problems of the intellectual elite to representative status just at the moment when the non-Catholic intellectual elites—in the wake of the McGovern disaster—are beginning to wonder whether they should really be paying more attention to the rest of America. Still, Catholics are getting more agile. We catch up more quickly than we used to. In two or three years Mr. Wills and some of his friends will doubtless be celebrating the glories of Polish-American culture.
