Garry Wills's Failure of Imagination

Despite his book’s subtitle, Garry Wills never tells us clearly why he thinks that the Catholic priesthood is a failed tradition. That it is merely a “tradition,” one that has no reason to exist besides arbitrary clerical self-importance, he reminds us at every turn. The answer to the title question is that it is unanswerable. There are no reasons, according to Wills, that Christians should have priests. But none of this really tells us why priesthood, and the whole Catholic sacramental system, has failed.

That the priesthood, or the sacraments, might not be a failure is not really something that enters Wills’s imagination, despite his repeated insistence that he has nothing personal against priests. And it is this failure of imagination that clouds the whole book.