book reviews

Coming to know Augustine

AUGUSTINE AND THE LIMITS OF POLITICS. By Jean Bethke Elshtain (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind. 46556, 1996), 143 pp. HB $21.95.

    This small, insightful book was originally a series of lectures at Loyola University in Chicago. Jean Bethke Elshtain is a Professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is a well-known and respected political philosopher. I know of no one about whom the literature is more interesting than St. Augustine. Clearly, Professor Elshtain has added a remarkably clear and wonderful book to the reflections about the extraordinary man that was Augustine of Hippo.

    Professor Elshtain’s book is both a personal and intellectual account of her coming to know Augustine. She immediately begins her study by disassociating herself with those reductionist studies that would narrow what Augustine was to the limits of their disciplines, psychological, sociological, or religious. Key to this book is Professor Elshtain’s own dialogue with one of the most surprising students of Augustine in recent times, Hannah Arendt, and with the latter’s effort to understand the nature of evil in modern political life. This dialogue is immensely fruitful, one that reminds us of the perennial value of Augustine who keeps coming back again and again in twentieth century political philosophy, from Figgis to Niebuhr, from Cochrane, Markus, Brown, and Milbank. My only disappointment with the book was that Professor Elshtain did not seem to know Charles N. R. McCoy and Ernest Fortin on Augustine, both of whom had made many of her same points.

    What has always struck me about teaching Augustine was that, however much a man’s writer he was, still it needed a woman to fill in his depths and his complexities. Very little of the literature on Augustine ever seemed to realize that he was probably best understood by someone like Monica, or his famous mistress, or any woman who is aware of the stormy process of growing up any young man, with his young friends, goes through. But in addition to such presumably ordinary events, there is the ranging mind of Augustine encountering every philosophy and religion that comes his way, either to justify himself or to test his intellect or his faith.

    What recommends this really touching and moving book is Professor Elshtain’s clear awareness of all the levels of Augustine. As a wife, mother, professor, and Christian thinker, Professor Elshtain displays precisely those varied and penetrating qualities that can read The Confessions, The City of God, De Trinitate, (and the thousands of other things that this man from North Africa wrote in his lifetime) and realize quite vividly how important and, yes, exciting Augustine remains for every age, perhaps especially to our own. This excitement must begin, as it does for Professor Elshtain, with a personal reflection on what he wrote and did.

James V. Schall, S.J.
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Nathanson repents

THE HAND OF GOD. By Bernard Nathanson, M.D. (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 422 First St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003, 1996), 206 pp. HB $24.95.

    The Hand of God, by Bernard Nathanson, M.D., is a tale of conversion, as the title implies, but the conversion, in this case, is of epic proportions. Dr. Nathanson is one of the founders of N.A.R.A.L. (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League); it may be said that no one was more prominent than he in agitating for Roe v. Wade; and he served as chief of the largest abortion clinic on the East Coast. He has personally aborted thousands of infants, including one of his own begetting. In this book, Dr. Nathanson examines his conscience, explains the reasons why he changed his mind about the moral status of abortion, explores his personal guilt for what he has done, and makes clear why he now regards Jesus Christ as God and Savior and looks forward to entering the Catholic Church.

    Born in a grimly dysfunctional family, the author begins by showing how his life and attitudes were originally dominated by his cold and unforgiving father (also a prominent gynecologist). From him he absorbed a rigorous scientific approach to his profession, and from his father’s hypocritical form of Judaism he was led to accept an outright atheism. When patients are seen as mere Skinnerian entities, it is easy to overlook their tears. Dr. Nathanson describes with steely precision the terrible clinical procedures of aborting a fetus, as well as the all too frequent circumstances in which the surgeon’s carelessness results in injury to, or the death of, the mother. In similarly objective language, he records how his feelings of charity were finally aroused by the ghoulish nature of his work, and how his soul was ultimately brought first to revulsion and then to repentance.

    Knowing how his professional acquaintances would react to his conversion, the author unflinchingly takes up the question beginning “How could you, as a scientist, bring yourself to . . . ?” Nowhere does he spare himself, or condone what he has done. It has become his belief, as an embryologist, that the fetus must be regarded as a person from a very early period in its development, and consequently must enjoy standing (in the legal sense) even before it is attached to the uterine wall. He does not take a specific position on the “constitutionality” of Roe v. Wade, but the reader may readily infer his opinion.

    This is not a book to be read at a sitting. This reviewer found it so gripping, and its subject matter so horrendous, that he was obliged to pause several times during the reading, in order to ingest fully what the author had written and to integrate it with what had gone before. This is not to suggest any deficiency in style!—like many physicians, beginning with Sir Thomas Browne and continuing to Dr. Lewis Thomas, Dr. Nathanson’s writing is facile and adept—but it is to say that the subject is both unattractive and emotionally disturbing. It is to the author’s credit that he has managed such recalcitrant material as elegantly as he has, without yielding any of the solemn intensity of his meaning.

George Martyn Finch
Memphis, Tenn.


Killed by a firing squad

WITH LIFE AND LAUGHTER, The Life of Father Pro. By Gerard F. Muller, C.S.C., (Pauline Books and Media, 50 St. Paul’s Avenue, Boston, Mass. 02130, 1996), 156 pp. PB $9.95.

    Father Miguel Pro, a young Jesuit priest, was killed by a firing squad in Mexico City in 1927 during the turbulent days of the persecution of the Church there. Like Christ, his only crime was helping the people. Despite all his difficulties as a hidden priest in Mexico he had a lively sense of humor. He was only thirty-five years old when he suffered martyrdom for his faith. He had lofty ideals and sought to attain them with generosity and joy. This book is highly recommended for teens. Let them read it and they will never think the same about their faith being dull and tiresome and irrelevant.

    Miguel was from an upper middle class family, but as a priest he had a special love for the working class. Would that we had more priests like him today; he did not debate theology, he liked to go to the homes of the tired, overworked people and bring them cheer and renewed hope in Christ. These are the same people who suffer the most in our society.

    Miguel claims that he did not find God but that God found him. He wrote, “He gave me my religious vocation and withdrew me, in spite of myself, from the corrupt world in which I lived so as to accomplish in me those beautiful words of David: ‘I lifted you out of the dunghill to place you among the princes of my people.’” This youthful Jesuit, serving the underground Church in Mexico, said of God, “In His infinite mercy, He saw in the future this image which He would make with His grace.” He concluded, “You ask me what I have done that God favors me in this manner? Nothing at all. They are proof of His pure love.”

    He was captured by the police and put in a terrible hell hole of a prison. He was taken after a few days to the place of execution. They asked if he had a final wish. He responded that he wanted to pray a little. He fell to his knees, kissed his crucifix and prayed fervently. He stood up with the crucifix in one hand, his Rosary in the other. He refused to be blindfolded. He raised his arms in the form of the cross, and the bullets tore through his heart full of love.

Fr. Rawley Myers
Colorado Springs, Colo.

John Paul the Pole

HIS HOLINESS: JOHN PAUL II AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF OUR TIME. By Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi (Doubleday, 1540 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10036, 1996), 582 pp. HB $27.50.

    Readers who enjoyed the condensed version of this book as it appeared in the October 1996 issue of Reader’s Digest and expect to be inspired in the full-length work by the towering figure of “John Paul the Great” heroically leading the Church through her crisis of faith are forewarned: caveat emptor.

    This history, for all its use of high-placed sources to chronicle the uplifting saga of Solidarity, is, in toto, a heavily partisan reportage depicting the Church being led back through the conciliar dividing line that “broke with the past” by the ethnically constricting theology of “John Paul the Pole.”

    That, in fact, is the premise of the whole book.

    “The roots of all he did and felt as pope, in terms of both Catholic dogma and geostrategic doctrine,” the authors say up front, “were to be found deep in the soil of his native Poland” (p. 13). Wherever he went, whatever he did, he “baptized everything . . . into his Christian-Polish vision” (p. 229).

    Exemplary of “the attempt to export the Polish experience to the universal Church” is the “medieval religiosity” of the “mariolatric approach” (p. 401). Thus, at Vatican II, Paul VI overrode the Theological Commission’s “explicit rejection” and “imposed a definition of Mary as the Mother of the Church” in order, according to the authors, “to appease Polish bishops” (p. 97).

    Likewise, John Paul II’s 1984 Marian Consecration is presented as a lone papal act. The devout participation of Catholics around the world in the Fatima movement for over 50 years, as well as the fact that Marian devotion has historically flourished cross-culturally, are simply written out of history.

    Even more fundamentally “Polonizing” (my term) is the retreat from the “conciliar revolution” outlined in Gaudium et Spes, viz., that the Church acts “within history” and is, the authors say, now defined by Lumen Gentium no longer as the “Mystical Body of Christ” but as the “People of God,” “on the march through, not above, history, a living community open to the world” (p. 434).

    But this “reform” could not pass the ethnic filter: “From the beginning, Wojtyla and the Polish bishops were in disagreement with such a stance,” preferring a “Counter-Reformational concept” as “the only guardian of God’s truth” (p. 104).

    For Bishop Wojtyla, in fact, Vatican II amounted to a “personal revolution” from the total unanimity of the Polish episcopacy, and he “wasn’t at home,” “wasn’t happy,” was “out of sync” (p. 93) at the Council.

    And he was “particularly worried . . . that the Church . . . should learn from the world” (p. 105). As Pope, he endeavored to “go back to recognizing the idea of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ . . . . The theology of the Cross . . . had to be placed at the center of the faith, instead of the theology of the People of God” (p. 437). Of course, none of what the Church was to “learn from the world” fit into the “Polish model” of his pontificate. To wit:

    Democracy: “The game of Church democracy was lost before it began” (p. 192). As Pope, he rejected the permanent synod of bishops, then held the 1985 Synod to face the “real enemies”: “bishops and theologians who want to democratize the Church; Catholics disposed to revising sexual morality,” etc. (p. 422).

    Intellectual freedom: “From the very beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II decided to systematically crush dissent” (p. 416). Schillebeekcx, Küng, and Curran were victims. Finally, with Veritatis Splendor—which receives not a single word of praise—he tried to “wipe out dissent by decree” (p. 504).

    Contraception: From “regular condemnation of sexual trends” (p. 399), he pushed the Church to open confrontation at the 1994 U.N. Cairo Conference, paralleled by his own personal conference with Nafis Sadik, who found him “not at all the benevolent person his image makes him out to be.” “Why is he so hard-hearted, so dogmatic, so lacking in kindness?” she cries out (p. 528).    

    Women: From Sister to student, around the world, they have confronted him openly. “‘His harsh prohibitions . . . betray a sort of unconscious hatred of women,’” one declares (p. 404).

    The effect—one might say the point—of isolating the Pope’s teachings as “cultural bias” (p. 508), is twofold. First, they become merely his “views” and “opinions”—“moral and ecclesial law as he knows it”; “his view of sexuality”; “what he saw as eternal truths of the Church’s precepts”; “his view of divine will,” etc.—by which he “surrounds the Church with barbed wire” (p. 508), i.e., the counter-conciliar, retrogressive teachings which he imposes on the faithful through increasingly authoritarian decrees. Second, those who “dissent” from them are assured that they are dissenting only from papal “opinions,” and that they, not he, are truly following the Council.

    And so John Paul II’s “views” put him at odds with bishops and laity, men and women, young and old, everywhere. His “apocalyptic view of all Western culture” is rejected by those who are “open to dialogue with the contemporary world” (p. 497); even “in the new Poland” “ultimately his words came to naught” (p. 493). He could be, in fact, “the last sovereign of a Catholic spiritual monarchy that has endured for centuries” (p. 538). Only the few “militantly pro-Wojtyla,” “papal hard-liners,” such as Cardinal O’Connor, side with him. As for those devoted faithful who also back him, in this “hidden history” they are not worthy of even a footnote.

    “Ill-feeling and resentment are piling up . . . broad-based opposition groups are emerging; “‘We Are The Church’ is their battlecry” (p. 510).

    “On the march through history,” they have apparently chosen the “theology of the People of God” over “the theology of the Cross.” This book would have us believe that God has, too.

Gregory Zabielski
Torrington, Conn.


Seeing the faith in action

SAINTS FOR YOUNG CHRISTIANS. By David Previtali (Alba House, 2187 Victory Blvd., Staten Island, N.Y. 10314, 1996) 174 pp. PB $9.95.

    The young should know about the saints. They are our heroes. David Previtali here gives us eighty-three saints, a story and drawing about each, and the date of their feast day. He takes us through the whole year from January 1 to December 28. This is a good book for grade school children, to introduce them to the saints. We are the Church of the saints and our children should know their brothers and sisters in Christ.

    We have, to name but a few, Mother Seton, St. Angela, Blessed Katherine Drexel, St. Patrick, St. Joseph, St. Bernadette of Lourdes, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Dominic Savio, St. Philip Neri, St. Benedict, and on and on.

    The saints wish to help us as they helped people daily, constantly when they were in the world. We should pray to them. This book will help youngsters know them. All the saints, we see, had one thing in common: rich and poor, old and young, tall and short, all the saints were humble. And because they were humble they prayed, and it is prayer that brings us spiritual wisdom, how to live in this life where today all kinds of bad influences seek to snare the young.

    Some feel our religion is not being taught to the young, or, if taught, not taught properly. Let the children then read the lives of the saints and see what our faith truly is. The saints did not just talk about the faith, a favorite pastime today—we tire the sun with our talk, they lived the faith. A youth can learn the catechism and know the faith, but in reading the lives of the saints he sees the faith in action, in daily living. And this confirms and fortifies his faith.

    Parents who worry about their children would do well to get this book and let the young read a saint a day. It would help them a great deal.

Fr. Rawley Myers
Colorado Springs, Colo.


Summary of the whole Gospel

THE LORD’S PRAYER. By Romano Guardini (Sophia Institute Press, Box 5284, Manchester, N.H. 03108, 1996), 124 pp. PB $11.95.

    In response to the innocent request of his disciples to teach them to pray as John taught his, Jesus entrusted to them and to the Church the fundamental Christian prayer. Tertullian described the Lord’s Prayer as “the summary of the whole gospel.” Augustine concluded his commentary on the psalms with the declaration that “I do not think that you will find anything in them that is not contained and included in the Lord’s Prayer.” The Angelic Doctor went so far as to state categorically that it “is the most perfect of prayers” since “in it we ask, not only for the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence they should be desired.”

    Yet all too often down through the ages Christians have mechanically recited this prayer with neither feeling nor conviction, much less with any real appreciation of its great theological richness and depth. To fill the breach between what Christians prayed with their lips and believed with their hearts and minds, a gap wider in modern times than perhaps in any earlier period, Monsignor Romano Guardini penned The Lord’s Prayer in 1932, when he was teaching at the University of Berlin from the chair of “philosophy of religion and Catholic Weltanschauung” which had been created for him and from which the Nazis were to shortly expel him.

    Unfortunately the name of Guardini is not as well known a name in Catholic circles today as it was a few decades ago, although his The Lord has remained in continuous print in almost every major European language since its publication sixty years ago this year. Even in Europe, where he was one of the fathers of the German Catholic Youth Movement, his light has waned. It seems almost inevitable that in a period of frantic change, no thinkers vanish faster than those of the recent past. Their ideas are shoved aside in favor of new ones which are supposed to address the present moment more directly. It seems the ideas of the recent past make those of the present uncomfortable since they remind the present of its own transiency. For those, however, who can overcome what Louis Dupré calls the “aversion to the imperfect past,” the time might be ripe to revisit the work of Guardini. The Lord’s Prayer may be the most attractive and accessible entrée to his thought.

    In his writings, Guardini, who was born in Verona, Italy, although he grew up in Germany where his father was a diplomat and where he himself consequently spent his entire adult career with the exception of the period the Nazis exiled him, combined the classicism of the South with the philosophical mind of the North to achieve a remarkable synthesis of vision. Despite his brilliance, however, Guardini did not approach the task of commenting on the Lord’s Prayer without some trepidation, noting that he felt “daunted by the great men who have gone before us.” However, he is confident that “the words of Revelation call each age to interpret them afresh.”

    Taking the petition that “Thy will be done” as his hermeneutical key, Guardini launches into a phrase-by-phrase, word-by-word explanation of the prayer, from why it is that we pray to our Father as opposed to my Father all the way to why believers exclaim Amen! at the end of their prayers all the way through the thorny questions of how God is to be named. According to Guardini, the basic prayer that the will of God be done, unites the Christian with his Father in heaven since through it he enters into an understanding of God himself. Each of the seven petitions from the version of the prayer which the Gospel of Matthew has handed down to the liturgical tradition of the Church then opens up the meaning of the whole prayer. The petitions of the first part initiate the Christian into the mystery of God’s name, his kingdom, his will, and into the significance of this will in heaven and on earth. The second part of the prayer speaks simply, but clearly about everyday life. This part, however, must be interpreted in the light of the first part and thus that simple clarity is something truly great: the simplicity of a child of God.

    The Lord’s Prayer can easily be read in an afternoon meditation. It plumbs the depths, but to embark on the spiritual itinerary it opens is the task of a lifetime.

Fr. John-Peter Pham
Champaign, Illinois

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