Wills book champions church reform
In his latest book, “Papal Sin,” Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian Garry Wills applies his formidable scholarly talents to the
“structures of deceit” that make the papacy and the Catholic
hierarchy fundamentally dishonest in modern times. Called by Commonweal
“America’s most prominent Catholic intellectual,” the fiercely
polemical but thoroughly researched book has given Wills a wide platform to
discuss its message in the press and in radio and TV interviews all over the
U.S. He covers many topics — infallibility, celibacy, clerical pedophilia,
women’s ordination, contraception, homosexuality, anti-Semitism and the
Holocaust — arguing not only that the official Church has been wrong, but
that its unwillingness to admit mistakes only compounds the dishonesty.
Reviewing the book for AMERICA, distinguished Jesuit historian John
O’Malley calls it “a serious book by a serious author that must be
taken seriously."
