Among the Ruins: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Church, by Paul L. Williams

The opening of The Vatican's Apostolic Archive, including papers from the World War II years--https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/what-vaticans-secret-archives-are-about-reveal/607261/--makes a blog on Williams' book timely. I am writing about this particular book because it remains so strongly fixed in my mind two and half years after I read it, while other books have passed as wispily away as dissolving clouds. I wish to be very clear, however, that I am not writing about this work because I have any personal vendetta against the Catholic Church. Instead, the book remains with me because the trajectory it traces about Catholic Church politics in the twentieth century is so shocking--and seems to me a warning to our political institutions.

Williams' thesis ties the decline of the institutional church to its having sold out its core values starting in the late nineteenth century.

He then locates several theological turning points in the twentieth century church: the Vatican was penniless in 1929 and $10 million in debt to Germany when Mussolini bought papal support for $90 million. Williams connects this to the startling silence of the Church about Mussolini's antisemitism, as well as to Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Williams also pinpoints a major change in ancient Church theology in its adoption of usury in 1935, the year the Church's newly formed bank became part of Mussolini's banking consortium and started a series of lucrative money lending endeavors. This was a problem not only because the bank tightened ties between the Vatican and a fascist regime, but because it sent a symbolic message that still resonates today. Collecting interest is a "rent"--a form of unearned income (which the Church once condemned as immoral)--  that has led to increased concentrations of wealth in the hands of the very wealthy and to increased suffering for the poor. That the church supports usury helps normalizes cripplingly high interest rates, such as those that burden some poorer nations and many poor individuals. In contrast--and ironically--one of the first steps of the new Bolshevik regime after the Russian Revolution was to abolish usury and give out interest free loans, wanting to free people from the drag of rents.

Beyond the church's complicity with Mussolini, Williams documents the "rat line" the Vatican established that the Nazis used after the war to escape to South America, its hand in glove work with the CIA in the Cold War era, the destructive results of Vatican II on the Church, and the pedophile scandal.

None of what Williams says is new information: his sources are reputable books by scholars, reputable newspapers, already published interviews and available statistics. What makes the book powerful is the way Williams' relentlessly lays out the path of corruption over the course of a century. As a former religion reporter, I have been used to reading about the various problems with the Catholic Church (and we can apply this as well to the Protestants churches and many other faiths) in isolation: complicity with fascism as separate, for example, from the pedophile scandal. It is stunning to read about all of these as a continuum. I also often found myself  certain Williams must be  exaggerating or using sources with the credibility of a National Enquirer, but every one I looked at appeared to be solid. Even if only a fraction of what he writes is true, however, the magnitude of the corruption is breath-taking.

Williams writes that the decline of the Roman Catholic Church over the course of the twentieth century was made real to him when his childhood church, St. John the Baptist Church in Scranton, Pa. was closed in 1995. Its grounds are now occupied by United Penn Bank, while "the convent house, the rectory, the church hall, and the school have been demolished to create a parking lot." His investigation is an effort to put together how this happened.

As we might wonder how our own cherished places have now sometimes turned into parking lots and fast food restaurants surrounded by decayed buildings, it is instructive to read what happens when a powerful institution repeatedly trades its ethical core for money. In the United States, as Williams outlines in a stunning series of statistics that show the wholesale fleeing of clergy from the church and declines in parishes and lay attendance (only saved from a rout by Latino immigration), we can trace an institution that ate its seed corn when it sold out its values. (We can argue this has been happening for a millennia and would not be wrong, but that it is not the book's focus.)

This sell-out seems to me not dissimilar from what the major political parties have been doing in this country, yet ethical cores are vitally important to institutions. The Roman Catholic Church arguably would have done much better to have defaulted on its loan to the Germans in 1929 and embraced poverty rather than become Mussolini's puppet. The Church might have suffered in in the short term (I will mention, however, that embracing suffering for moral reasons is a Christian core concept.) I will also note that the very point of ethics is that they have meaning only if they are not abandoned the moment they become difficult to adhere to. Ethics, as George Eliot might have said, are more important that an individual's or an institution's ease or convenience.

If we run an imagined alternative history, we could envision that after a period of suffering, bankruptcy, and persecution in the 1930s, the Church might have become a creditable moral voice free to speak out, fighting fascism and the holocaust. What has the alternative done but discredit the institution as corrupt, overly wealthy, and out-of-touch? Fortunately the voices of the many dedicated Catholics on the ground fighting for liberation and justice work to keep the core message--and the Church itself-- alive.