Garry Wills - Religion

Religion

Wills is a practising Roman Catholic and, with the exception of a period of doubt during his seminary years, he has been a Roman Catholic all his life. He continues to attend Mass at the Sheil Catholic Center in Northwestern University. Furthermore, he prays the rosary every day, and wrote a book about the devotion (The Rosary: Prayer Comes Around) in 2005.

However, Wills has also been a critic of many aspects of church history and church teaching since at least the early 1960s. He has been particularly critical of the doctrine of papal infallibility, the social teaching of the church as regards homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, and the church's reaction to the sex abuse scandal.

In 1961, in a phone conversation with William F. Buckley Jr., Wills coined the famous macaronic phrase Mater si, magistra no. The phrase, which was a response to the papal encyclical Mater et Magistra and a reference to the then-current anti-Castro slogan 'Cuba sí, Castro no', signifies a devotion to the faith and tradition of the church combined with a skeptical attitude towards ecclesiastical authority.

Wills published a full-length analysis of the contemporary church, Bare Ruined Choirs, in 1972, and a full-scale criticism of the historical and contemporary church, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, in 2000. Wills followed up the latter book with a sequel, Why I Am a Catholic (2002), as well as with the books What Jesus Meant (2006), What Paul Meant (2006), and What the Gospels Meant (2008).