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Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy and Radical Religion
"The Catholic Church was the only the Church, according to Lennie Bruce — the extreme taken as a type, the most fixed part of religion's stable landscape. If the forces of change can make it crumble, then what social institutions can hope to stand?"
Mr. Wills takes the disarray of the Catholic Church as a model of institutional breakdown, tracing parallel agonies in church and state. A crisis of authority has followed on the false optimism of the Second Vatican Council, just as it did on the empty hopes of President Kennedy's "Camelot." The demise of liberalism, the rise of radicalism, the hardening of reaction — the same story unfolds in its sacred and secular versions.
The author combines reportage and analysis in a way that makes this book a supplement to Wills' study of social change in Nixon Agonistes. He asks whether life can rise again from our institutional ruins, and finds promising signs of this, not only among Catholic "prophets," but Protestant and Jewish ones as well.
Mr. Wills takes the disarray of the Catholic Church as a model of institutional breakdown, tracing parallel agonies in church and state. A crisis of authority has followed on the false optimism of the Second Vatican Council, just as it did on the empty hopes of President Kennedy's "Camelot." The demise of liberalism, the rise of radicalism, the hardening of reaction — the same story unfolds in its sacred and secular versions.
The author combines reportage and analysis in a way that makes this book a supplement to Wills' study of social change in Nixon Agonistes. He asks whether life can rise again from our institutional ruins, and finds promising signs of this, not only among Catholic "prophets," but Protestant and Jewish ones as well.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Garry Wills
113 books267 followersGarry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 18, 2024
Amazing writing, section about the Berrigans is really moving.
June 13, 2016
This may be read as a companion piece to Wills' Nixon Agonistes , originally published two years earlier. At the risk of gross over-simplification, one is a spiritual critique of American politics and the other is a political critique of American religion. Both are structured in five acts, like a Jacobean tragedy, which is almost certainly intentional (Wills' Yale PhD dissertation was on tragedy). Both books are brilliantly written, although each reads more like a collection of essays than a unified whole. This is surprising because Wills' greatest strength as a writer and thinker is in making connections.
This drawing of connections is particularly clear in the second chapter of Bare Ruined Choirs, which is a sympathetic but critical appraisal of attempts by American Catholic intellectual and romantics in the period immediately before the Second Vatican Council to create a sort of bespoke boutique Catholicism that blended mixture of patristics, neo-Mediaeval aesthetics, an ultramontane interest in Papal Encyclicals (particularly, at this point in time, Rerum Novarum), the poetry of Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel with the novels of Graham Greene, devotional works by Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges and theology by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Inevitably, and surely correctly, Wills identifies Thomas Merton as the guru of this group. Indeed, I wonder whether anyone other than Merton and the young Wills (in his days as Jesuit scholastic, before his voluntary laicisation) ever embodied the this concept of American Catholic intellectualism in its fulness, even if parts of it are recognizable to this day in the sort of people who read Commonweal or the Tablet (and I must here confess myself guilty).
The tragedy of Catholicism in 1970s America, as Wills sees it, was that the Second Vatican Council answered neither the demands of the intellectual-romantics nor those of the majority of people in the pews. In the end, the American Catholics who had reached such heights in the early 1960s (under 'the two Johns' — Kennedy and XXIII) were left decidedly unprepared for the late 1960s, which pitted Catholic conservatives against radicals like the Berrigan brothers.
Non-American readers may find this book rather provincial in its focus. Even American Catholics may find the focus on the Jesuits to the near-exclusion of all other orders, the secular priesthood and the laity, to be rather curious (although wholly understandable given Wills' background in the Order). Furthermore, it is clearly a book of its time. Sex features, but almost always in terms of whether the Church is too negative about human sexuality, which here always means heterosexuality. Far from being a period piece, however, the issues Wills raises continue to be relevant nearly half a century later, and not only to American Roman Catholics but to all who are interested in the often fraught relationship between spiritual and temporal power.
This drawing of connections is particularly clear in the second chapter of Bare Ruined Choirs, which is a sympathetic but critical appraisal of attempts by American Catholic intellectual and romantics in the period immediately before the Second Vatican Council to create a sort of bespoke boutique Catholicism that blended mixture of patristics, neo-Mediaeval aesthetics, an ultramontane interest in Papal Encyclicals (particularly, at this point in time, Rerum Novarum), the poetry of Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel with the novels of Graham Greene, devotional works by Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges and theology by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Inevitably, and surely correctly, Wills identifies Thomas Merton as the guru of this group. Indeed, I wonder whether anyone other than Merton and the young Wills (in his days as Jesuit scholastic, before his voluntary laicisation) ever embodied the this concept of American Catholic intellectualism in its fulness, even if parts of it are recognizable to this day in the sort of people who read Commonweal or the Tablet (and I must here confess myself guilty).
The tragedy of Catholicism in 1970s America, as Wills sees it, was that the Second Vatican Council answered neither the demands of the intellectual-romantics nor those of the majority of people in the pews. In the end, the American Catholics who had reached such heights in the early 1960s (under 'the two Johns' — Kennedy and XXIII) were left decidedly unprepared for the late 1960s, which pitted Catholic conservatives against radicals like the Berrigan brothers.
Non-American readers may find this book rather provincial in its focus. Even American Catholics may find the focus on the Jesuits to the near-exclusion of all other orders, the secular priesthood and the laity, to be rather curious (although wholly understandable given Wills' background in the Order). Furthermore, it is clearly a book of its time. Sex features, but almost always in terms of whether the Church is too negative about human sexuality, which here always means heterosexuality. Far from being a period piece, however, the issues Wills raises continue to be relevant nearly half a century later, and not only to American Roman Catholics but to all who are interested in the often fraught relationship between spiritual and temporal power.
November 1, 2024
As usual, Garry Wills has a colorful style and profound points to make. Unfortunately this book is topical and the reader has to be familiar with the important individuals (thinkers and actors) in American and world Catholicism in the 196os up to 1972. Very interesting, nonetheless.
October 3, 2023
provocative analysis of the Church’s position immediately pre- and post-Conciliar reforms. Wills is an excellent writer and journalist but I suspect much of his theology…
August 31, 2023
Another Wills banger. I tussled and argued with Wills more in this book than in his other ones. I think his analysis of the preconciliar and postconciliar American Catholic Church is mostly correct. I am sympathetic to his arguments on the contraception question but was in very strong disagreement with his priestly celibacy thesis. Ultimately, the most moving sections were those in the “Hope” section of the book. Here, Wills does his best writing, especially when he is talking about the Berrigans. The line that really floored me was this: “So Rome is always dying (partially) from head down, while being (in part) resurrected from feet up. New forms of life have come from unexpected places- from Athanasius at local councils, Benedict in the monasteries, Albertus and Thomas in the universities, Francis of Assisi in the lanes and roads, Ignatius alone with a penitent making The Spiritual Exercise, Xavier and Rocco out at the rim of the world, Acton and Newman in pamphlets and journals.” There were so many others but I loved this one in particular. As Wills says in the final line of the book, “it is time for us to join the underground.”
September 7, 2014
This was a little more interesting than Confessions of a Conservative but it still didn't move me.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews