Is the character and identity of the Catholic Church best described by juxtaposing “the people of God” to “a monarchical line of popes”? Were Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI really opposed to “the spirit of Vatican II”? Did Pedro Arrupe, the former superior general of the Jesuits, “turn the order around”? Did the revelations of clerical sexual abuse cause “millions” to leave the Church? Did Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in terris help end the Cold War?
All these assertions are made by the journalist and author Mary Jo McConahay in her New York Times review of Philip Shenon’s Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. I have not read Shenon’s book, which, as McConahay describes it, is a familiar rehash of battles between so-called reformers and so-called traditionalists over the legacy of Vatican II. Evidently, Shenon also thinks the Church’s handling of sexual abuse by priests, bishops, and the papacy is still the defining issue of Catholicism. “Nothing is spared,” McConahay writes, “in recounting their odious criminal acts and the cowardly machinations of the church’s leadership to hide them.”
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