Book Review
Why I Am a Catholic

By Garry Wills
Reviewed by Julie R. Monroe
from the January 2004 Newsletter

I confess. I did not read every page of Garry Wills’ book, Why I Am a Catholic. Wills is one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, and I am not—to paraphrase an old Chevy Chase Saturday Night Live routine. As with the only other Wills book I’ve read, Nixon Agonistes, I took what I could and am better for it. While none of my friends or colleagues who know I am a practicing Roman Catholic have asked me why I am a Catholic, it is a question I have asked myself. In this book, Wills answers this very personal question through a combination of personal history and superior scholarship.

Why I Am a Catholic is divided into five sections: Born Catholic, Church without Papal Primacy, Forms of Papal Primacy, The Vatican II Church, and The Creed. Personally, I found the third section, Forms of Papal Primacy, most difficult. It is an abridged history of the papacy from the beginning to the present, and while Wills’ learnedness is extremely impressive, my interest simply flagged as he progressed through the centuries. This is not to say that I did not discern that this section is extremely effective toward his point that “support of the papacy is possible for the conscientious only if certain things are recognized,” namely that both the papacy and the church itself are “deeply flawed” institutions; that there have been many papacies; that one is obliged to differ from the papacy; and that the papacy, like the church, changes, just to name a few. (p.282)

For me, the most readable section was that devoted to Wills’ personal history as a “cradle Catholic” who nearly became a priest. He evokes the period of his childhood and youth with precise and smooth prose that reads like a novel. But the section that made the biggest impression on me as a conscientious Catholic was that devoted to the Apostle’s Creed, which he describes as the church’s “core of beliefs, always affirmed.” (p. 295)

Church teaching on such matters as contraception or the ordination of women is not “in the same sense that the creed is” church teaching, he argues, adding, “I find it odd that some Catholics treat peripheral things as if they were more important than the essential truths. They do not ask me if I believe in the divinity of Christ, but if I believe the pope when he says priests cannot be married.” (p.296) For Wills, the creed is the “church’s central message, against which the importance of other things is measured.” (p.296) Wills, therefore, concludes Why I Am a Catholic with an explanation of what the creed means to him personally, “and how others have helped me to accept it in that meaning.” (p.297)

In this section, Wills examines each clause of the creed, confidently blending its doctrinal basis with the arguments of Catholic theologians who helped shaped, if not the truth of the creed, then certainly the truth of Wills’ profession of it. It is a succinct section that ends with an examination of the Lord’s Prayer, which is as significant to Wills’ belief as is the creed, largely because it conveys the eschatology of his faith in which “eternity is continually intersecting – literally, cutting across – time. We are created now, at every now. Christ comes now; the Incarnation is now. The great judgment is now...That is the good news Jesus came to bring. Believing it is what makes me a Catholic.” (p.339)

Why I Am a Catholic is available from the Latah County Library District, and at BookPeople in Moscow.

Julie R. Monroe, an independent historian, writer, and editor also works as a Technical Services Assistant at the University of Idaho Law Library, and is a member of Moscow’s St. Mary’s parish.

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