The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith by James Carroll

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith by James Carroll Peter Steinfels The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith. By James Carroll. New York: Random House, 2021. 383 pp. $28.99. In August of 2018 something in James Carroll “snapped” (25). He stopped going to Mass. The cause, surprisingly, was Pope Francis. In Carroll’s view, the pope’s statements in visiting Ireland of shame and sorrow at priests’ molestation of minors was shockingly insufficient and Francis’s denial of previous knowledge about the harsh church-run Magdalene asylums for unwed mothers was preposterous. Carroll’s response was this exposé of what he considers the “essential pathology” at the root of all these abuses—the priesthood itself and its poisonous clericalism (57). His book weaves together church history, theology, and personal memoir of his own anguishing journey in and out of the priesthood. In fact, James Carroll’s anguishing over his Catholicism began, it seems, at age six or seven when he learned about heaven, hell, the need for Confession, and the doctrine of “no salvation outside the church.” He lived, by his account, in dread of eternal hellfire, in dread of the damnation of his Jewish best friend, and later in adolescent dread of a nuclear armageddon. Rescued from this “God of doom” by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, Carroll sought ordination to the priesthood (157). Then, as a campus chaplain in the late sixties, he took his anguish public, joining demonstrations against the Vietnam War, denouncing the American hierarchy’s acquiescence in the war, and challenging the [End Page 85] church’s refusal to ordain women with liturgical improvisations. After five years, he left the priesthood. He took his anguish, however, to a wider audience as a writer for the Boston Globe and New Yorker, and in a prize-winning 1996 memoir, An American Requiem. Carroll traces the church’s corruption, first, to the anti-Jewish turn of early Christianity in its struggle with emerging rabbinic Judaism and, second, to the assumption of imperial roles after Constantine. But the main sources are “the two most controlling works of Christian theology ever written”: (104) St. Anselm’s “inhumane theology” (103) of atonement and St. Augustine’s theology of original sin. “Augustine and Anselm together gave to us a doom-threatening monster God,” as well as “totalitarian sexual repressiveness” (118), misogyny, and mandatory celibacy. “Humans are fallen. God damns sinners. God damns sex, especially female sex” (104). “From this omnipotent, sadistic God, as Catholics are taught, only a Catholic priest can offer rescue—a deep-seated theology that undergirds clericalism and its worst abuses” (104). Carroll’s alternative to this hateful God and abusing church veers from the familiar to the radical. He can, finally, wax positively about Pope Francis, call for expanding the diaconate to women and the priesthood to the married, welcome the “popular” Catholicism of devotions and prayers, look forward to the continuing work of Catholic schools, universities, hospitals, and religious orders—while simultaneously advocating an “anti-clericalism from within,” a magisterium-free, lay-run, do-it-yourself church that reads very much like the self-styled underground church of the 1970s and 1980s. He also declares the need to radically reinterpret “key symbols of revelation,” including Jesus and the Godhead—eliminating some traditional beliefs while stoutly protecting but perhaps significantly recasting the language of others (274). His “explicitly Christian affirmation of a kind of secular faith” is frustratingly brief and ambiguous (275). Its bottom line is “In Jesus, we know we are not alone—not even at death,” but he offers no explanation of what that might actually mean (263). For Carroll, the personal is often the paradigmatic. Not every Catholic child lived in fear of damnation, even in benighted pre-Vatican II days. More than a few nuns were kind enough to explain that to get to hell you had to do something really bad, like rob a bank or murder your brother. If they mentioned “no salvation outside the church” at all, they were quick...