The Calvinist strategy for discrediting any new idea by submitting it to tortuous intellectual exercises which easily lost sight of its initial premises has increasingly characterized the Vatican's response to modern issues. Pope Paul's disastrous encyclical condemning "artificial" contraception, the Humanae Vitae, which did for his reign what the Vietnam war did for Lyndon Johnson's, is a marvel of obfuscation. Wills spends a long chapter unwinding its ponderous coils of theological reasoning and concludes that the whole elaborate structure rests on an empty shell. The subject of contraception is, by the Pope's own account, a matter of "natural law"--not a revealed mystery, not part of a special deposit of truths entrusted to the church; but a teaching "in accord with all men's natural reason." Accordingly, the Pope appointed a special commission which brought together reputable Catholics in the fields of science, gynecology, philosophy, as well as bishops and theologians to help decide the church's position on contraception.

The commission recommended a lenient stance on contraception, but the Pope, in a startling twist of logic, rejected the report because it went against what the church had previously maintained. Why did he set up a commission in the first place if it could not come up with any new findings? The Pope seemed to be subscribing to the "Galileo syndrome which demands that any error made by church authority must be sustained by a thousand subsequent and reinforcing errors, each more egregious as reality becomes ever harder to oppose.

IT IS THE WESTERN CATHOLIC CHURCH which Wills discusses, and it is that Church to which most American Catholics beong. The Western Church, built on the memories of the Roman Empire and with the permission of Constantine has always been more "this worldly" than its Eastern counterpart, built on the far less legalistic traditions of Greece. The orientation of the Western Church to the here-and-now, with its legal prescriptions as to what Catholics must do to be saved, has had its value. In many cases, it left American cardinals and bishops and priests free to deal with the powers that be on behalf of their immigrant flock. It led many clerics to direct involvement with labor unless and also resulted in a Catholic school system which allowed immigration to be socialized into the American Way with some of their traditions and pride intact.

But all this has not been without cost. Through the centuries, the church has often been so oriented to the here-and-now that it has accepted, even blessed, existing social arrangements-to the point of aligning itself against the majority of its faithful. It has been so involved with legalistic arguments over damnation that it has forgotten the mystery of salvation-the dominant theme of the Gospel. The Vatican, rather than God, has become the focus of discussions among Catholics.

"It is time to join the underground ," says Wills in the last line of the book. He suggests that Catholics go underground not only in relation to the Vatican or to the early "dominations and powers," but also in relation to ourselves. He wants us to forget all this complicated machinery of Church politics, coffee-house theologians, and all the things which play such a critical role in his analysis. It is only by "going underground" that we can achieve genuine spiritual experience which will in turn lead to a critical and prophetic attitude toward the evils of this world. For Wills, the Berrigan model of the Church is the best.

It's not much of a program as far as shoring up the Church as an institution is concerned. Still, unless the Church begins again to adopt a more critical attitude toward current arrangements and attempts to recapture its interest in the Ultimate, it threatens to become merely a forum in which interesting but ultimately unimportant political fights are carried on.