From among the Ruins

Among the Ruins: the Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Church

by Paul L. Williams

Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York 2017

We seem to be “on a roll”: new books on the manifold Catholic crises appear now almost weekly. No sooner had I written about the Catholic “decline and fall” genre when a new candidate comes across the transom. Paul Williams’s  Among the Ruins takes us through the phenomena of the post-Conciliar collapse of Catholicism: the interminable financial and sexual abuse scandals, the disintegration of doctrine and liturgy,  the Vatican chaos. He writes as a reporter summarizing facts that have already been disclosed and published.  His forcefully and clearly written book has the merit of not focusing primarily on Pope Francis. Rather, Mr. Williams takes us back 50 years and more and recapitulates facts that we may have been aware of at one time but have conveniently discarded.

Having said that, I have to rate Among the Ruins as one of the least of the entrants in this field.  Like most reporters, Paul Williams concentrates on superficial if revealing factoids instead of trying to identify underlying realities. He is often uncritical in the use of sources. In his eagerness to present damning facts about the current Church he at times espouses opinions more commonly associated with the Church’s progressive wing.

He takes strong positions, typical of the more extreme right wing of Catholicism, but without sufficient development to make them convincing. Yes, Masonic infiltrators are definitely an issue – especially in Italy and certain other places in Europe. But what is their significance compared to the very public influence and manipulation of the Church by the news media, the universities, the corporations and even the secular governments? Paul Williams brings up facts that show Pope John Paul II was not at all the “rigid” defender of Orthodoxy that both critics and proponents of Pope Francis make him out to be. But to qualify successfully the last years of John Paul II’s papacy as bearing “the mark of the antichrist” requires much more background and explanation than what Mr. Williams gives the topic. Absent that, such statements only contribute to a loss of credibility.

Paul Williams brackets his book with profoundly pessimistic descriptions of services at his parish in West Scranton in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1958 and in the same area today (the author’s own parish in 1958 closed some twenty years ago). It’s no surprise that his writing grows more eloquent as he describes things he himself has seen. Mr. Williams concludes his book with this:

How had it come to this? A time when Saturday night became Sunday morning, when the sacred altar transformed into a common table, when potted plants replaced the statues of the Saints…. When the majestic Mass that inspired many of the worlds greatest thinkers, artist, and composers, transformed into a religious travesty.

The congregants walked from the church to the descending darkness. Many had come in search of some hint of transcendence, a measure of sanctity, a sense of spiritual belonging that they had experienced in the church of their childhood.  What was lost could never be recaptured. It could only be remembered.

It was time to leave.

Here, at the local level, we get to experience the true, terrible cost of the clerical aberrations of the last 50 years. Yet, also proceeding from the local level, readers of this blog will know that we cannot concur that the Catholic cause is hopeless. For, contrary to what Paul Williams implies above, the Traditional Mass continues to be celebrated. A Mass, I should add, that very often is celebrated today in a more dignified and complete manner than in 1958. And it is from that Mass, in some way we now cannot visualize, that rebirth will come.