ROSS DOUTHAT’S ANALYSIS of religion in America is more sophisticated than the analysis of, say, Rick Santorum—but not by much. There are many ways to be simplistic and coarse. In contending against what he sees as an America afflicted with too many heresies, Douthat’s book, like Santorum’s speeches, is riddled with mistakes of fact and interpretation that would make any learned person blush.
Some of Douthat’s mistakes appear trivial. He seems to think that Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950) was responsible for the silencing of the Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J., but it wasn’t. He writes of pre-Vatican II Catholicism that “the Church’s abundance of vocations meant that a life of vowed poverty occupied a place of honor in Catholic communities,” although most priests then, as now, were diocesan clergy who do not take a vow of poverty. Only priests, sisters, and brothers who belong to religious orders take vows of poverty, and many bishops built magnificent mansions for themselves in the pre-Vatican II days to demonstrate the Church’s increasing prominence. Douthat refers to “Baltimore’s Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle,” but O’Boyle never lived nor worked in Baltimore.
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