The Theater and the Mass.

Ex-Atheist Leah Libresco reviews Gary Wills' "Why Priests?"

Wills sees the pomp and circumstance of church as drawing our attention away from the God who became Man and directing it towards just one particular man, swathed in robes and standing front stage center. But when an actor puts on costuming and grease- paint, she does it to become someone else, both to the audience and to herself. A director I worked with once told me to start working on a show by getting different shoes, or, failing that, by putting a pebble in mine during rehearsals—anything to set this space off from ordinary life.

A priest doesn’t vest to draw attention to himself, but to what he does. In vestments, priests become a little anonymous. The sacraments work ex opere operato, from the work done, not the merits of the person carrying it out. The ornate robes tell us what work the priest is prepared to do, just as oxygen tanks and helmets mark out firefighters.

The uniform of a first responder is functional and battered. But Wills is correct to note that vestments are superfluously beautiful. They are more than seems necessary, more than we would ask for ourselves. They are meant to remind us of grace.

The Sacraments, which are (primarily, but not exclusively) administered by priests, are outward signs of inward grace. A sinner may be forgiven without the sacrament of reconciliation; the ritual is, to a certain extent, superfluous. Ritual doesn’t limit the ways God can act in the world, but it expands humans’ ability to understand or address the Infinite.

Why doesn’t he just go to a Baptist church and call it a day?

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Liberal Fizbin - You are a racist if you mention Obama's anti-American pastor, but Gary Wills gets to "question" whether Mormons are just a bit too deferential to the "original" Constitution...

...i.e., the one with slavery.

Ann Althouse points out:

Garry Wills, he's not anti-Mormon. He just has questions. A lot of questions. Can't blame a man for asking questions, can you? I'd say you can. This is an effort to smear Romney with some really silly insinuations. Why would the fact that the President is a Mormon — even assuming Wills states the belief correctly and Romney himself holds that belief — affect what the Constitution means, what non-Mormons will be able to think about what it means, and how the Supreme Court would interpret it?

In any case, isn't the belief that the framers of the Constitution were divinely inspired fairly common? Where does it get you... other than to profound reverence and dedication? What's wrong with that? The President is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution. The original Constitution is structured around the existing institution of slavery, but what's the point of bringing that up? Wills is asking questions, not making arguments, which let's him be very slippery. He knows that the part of the Constitution that liberals care about is all in the amendments, and perhaps he'd like to separate the good part of the Constitution — the amendments — from the bad part — the part with slavery... and all the structural safeguards that conservatives would like to see enforced.

Here is Gary Wills' ruminations:

"Will a Mormon president treat constitutional clauses as divine injunctions? If so, what grounds will we non-Mormons have for interpreting with secular arguments what is presented as God’s will? For that matter, what right will the Supreme Court have to treat the document as anything less than a divinely inspired covenant? Does the First Amendment actually separate church and state, or does that not count, since it is merely an amendment, not the original word of God? But why, then, did a mere amendment change the first inspiration that made slaves less than full persons?

Jeepers, I don't know, Gary. You're a Catholic. Do you think it is fair to aks whether a Catholic president might take orders from the Pope?

Fargin' bigot.

We've had Mormon elected officials for one hundred years. Is there anything in their behavior that suggests they don't understand how the game of American pluralism is played?


Do we have to go through this every time some new group - one that is not an official part of the Democrat sodality - makes a play for the gold ring of the Presidency?

Even liberal Mormon feminists like Joanna Brooks is getting the message:

But if there’s no time for phone calls or web searches, well, at the very least, there are fact-checkers. And here’s a modest proposal for the editors at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and every other publication that will be running a lot of Mormon content this campaign season but has no Mormons on its editorial staff: Hire a Mormon fact checker.

There are a number of advanced graduate students in Mormon Studies—many studying at very fine secular institutions. They know Mormon history, doctrine, and culture. They know it from scholarship, and they know it from experience. Real good kids. (And some of them have kids of their own to feed.) Put one or two of them on retainer through December. Let them proof your Mormon-related copy for you. They have their work cut out for them.

Accuracy and Fairness - now there's an idea.

Gary Wills is an anomaly - shrill and unreflective as an observer of modern politics or modern Catholicism...

...but insightful and a beautiful prose stylist when it comes the past.

Wills' "Lincoln at Gettysburg" is a treasure for anyone interested in the power of a carefully crafted sentence.

Jean Bethke Elshtain at the American Conservative recommends Wills' "Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography":

Wills puts paid to much nonsense in this briskly written text, including the claim that Augustine was obsessed with sex. The record supports none of this: Wills points out (citing Augustine biographer, Peter Brown) that in the massive work The City of God out of 16 lines devoted to deliberate human sins, only two refer to sexuality. Augustine eludes his commentators and he stymies his most bitter critics. He was, Wills concludes, inventing a new form “and people try to read it as something other than the unique thing it is—as an autobiography, or as a treatise, or as an amalgam of different genres with different purposes.” And that is one reason so few read about the Trinity in the final books of the Confessions. Yet this, Wills insists, is key to the whole work: “It should be not be surprising that a long prayer should end in the presence of the God being prayed to.”

I've more or less ignored Wills' books on Augustine because one never knows when one is going to be sucked into the fever swamp of a leftist screed. This review encourages me to check them out.