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| Garry Wills |
What is one to make of Garry Wills? Some years ago I reviewed his book, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit.
It’s a tendentious tissue of half-truths that, taken as a whole,
amounts to willful distortion, which is quite ironic in a book that
self-righteously presents itself as exposing the Church’s lies. There’s a
lot of angry bluster in Garry Wills, but little else.
Recently, he was being particularly adolescent on the Colbert Report, leading Fr. Matt Malone, S.J., to make the following comment on the America website: “It is not really Mr. Wills’s unorthodox views that give us cause to question his Christian commitment; it is his manifest lack of charity.”
But his books play an important ideological role, which
is why this inflated man continues to have currency. In America,
Christianity remains a powerful cultural and political force, and
Catholicism is often its most visible institutional form. For
progressives of all stripes, it’s therefore ideologically important to
discredit Christianity and Catholicism. That’s what Garry Wills sells.
Link (here) to the full article by R.R. Reno at First Things
1 comment:
Astonishing that the problem Fr Malone finds is not that Wills clearly denies the whole sacramental structure of Catholicism --the Mass and the priesthood-- but that he does it insensitively. Would it have been ok if he he'd been nice?
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