For decades, Garry Wills has written about Catholic matters with a keen intellect and lacerating wit. While he has grown increasingly critical of the Church's hierarchy and never shied away from cataloguing its historical sins, Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition might be his most incendiary work yet.
In a brilliant exegesis, Wills artfully proposes that the Book of Hebrews, a late addition to the New Testament, was added to justify a priestly caste that exists to this day. This permanent priesthood was put in place along with other, linked, strands of Catholic tradition like apostolic succession and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; Wills maintains that all of these traditions rest on suspect biblical interpretation, often filtered through corrupt power structures interested more in maintaining the status quo of the ruling hierarchy than in advancing the faith.
The Jesuitical leaps of logic are impressive to behold and are never less than intellectually stimulating, though Wills often comes across more as an aggrieved and disappointed lover than a dispassionate professor. With its in-your-face subtitle, Why Priests? may not convert devout Catholics over to Wills's way of thinking, but underneath the incendiary rhetoric lies a man of faith. While his conclusions may be anathema to some, the clear conscience and conviction from which he writes and the intelligence displayed deserve admiration. --Donald Powell, freelance writer