Shelf Life.(two books about religion)

Justus George Lawler gives every impression of being a lefty on Catholic Church matters: He refers to Pope John Paul II's belief about contraception -- namely, that it is connected to a contemporary "culture of death" -- as "ludicrous" and "a diabolic fetishizing of condoms"; he stresses the need, among local bishops, for greater independence from Rome; and he has all the customary liberal views about the environment, capital punishment, nuclear disarmament, and so on.

All of which makes it simply amazing that he has written a very good book attacking today's most famous Catholic lefties -- James Carroll, Garry Wills, John Cornwell, and all the other usual suspects -- for vitriolic bias and shoddy scholarship. In Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (Continuum, 252 pp., $24.95), Lawler examines the recent attacks on Pope Pius XII and on the current Church hierarchy, and finds them seriously wanting both as accounts of the truth and as blueprints for Church reform. He catches the erudite Wills, for example, in a number of scholarly errors; but much more importantly, he raises some deeper questions about the Willsian project: "The fundamental flaw in [Wills's] invocation of structural sin or structural deceit as the explanatory device for all aberrant acts, all failures and errors [of] the contemporary church . . . [is] that it removes the church from its historic reality as a temporal institution undeniably progressing, by fits and starts like any other institution, over two millennia of growth."

In the work of Wills and others, says Lawler, this broad-brush denunciation of the Church hierarchy shows an indifference to "the human element" in the people they are attacking:

To publicly deploy texts and interpretations that are clearly distorted, or to bring overcharged rhetoric to the arraignment before one's private bar of justice of bishops and popes, past and present . . . smacks less of the creation of an informed public opinion than of playing to the gallery, less of calm conversion and regeneration than of mobocracy and religious "McCarthyism" -- if not of mere self- aggrandizement.

Lawler proposes another model of Church reform, one based on telling the truth as one sees it -- and remaining patient. (His book is dedicated to two controversial theologians -- Yves Congar ...