In the May 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, William Pfaff reviews Wills new book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, in which Wills come out against both the priesthood and the real presence. He calls the priesthood an illegitimate tradition that came about through a coup d’église, and claims that the Mass was originally a communal meal with no leader. The review is only available with a subscription, but here's a short excerpt:
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Wills’s argument, which he holds as Augustinian in source, is that the Mass originated in a leaderless communal meal taken by the earliest followers of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus, commemorating their own and their descendants’ and converts’ common participation in what the Catholic Church today calls the Mystical Body of Christ. (This is defined as “the members of the church bound together and to Christ, their head, into a spiritual though real body by the supernatural life of grace received in Baptism”).2 While bread and wine might have been part of this meal, consuming them was not considered a commemoration of Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples and had no sacramental quality.
As I understand him, Wills would like a restoration of a common and unstructured meal that in his view (and that of others, whom he cites) itself constitutes the sacrament, having been the original form of Christian worship. But it is not entirely clear what Wills wants. A leaderless meal taken in common by followers of Christ, but without a “sacrifice” (an idea of the Eucharistic consecration to which Wills objects), and stripped of later accretions? If this were accepted (and were feasible, which I would think not), it would remove the justification for a clerical class or special body of men to officiate at these gatherings. He says that for him to attack transubstantiation, the clergy, and the papacy is not to renounce his Catholicism but to purge it of error. He insists on his belief in the essentials of the church. He cites his friendships with priests, and his devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the meditative daily recital of the rosary.
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Wills describes his contrary view of the Eucharist as going back to Augustine, as well as citing for support a number of contemporary or near-contemporary theologians, including the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (to whose memory the present book is dedicated), who in 1944 traced the existence of a tradition concerning the nature of the Eucharist that goes back to the first Christian century. The Jesuit authorities eventually suppressed this book and Lubac was dismissed from his teaching post, but after his nomination as a peritus, or expert counselor, by John XXIII at the Second Vatican Council, he and a number of other so-called liberal theologians were vindicated. John Paul II made Lubac a cardinal.
Wills’s other attack on the priesthood raises a simple political and historical consideration concerning organizations. How does a religion survive without structure and a self-perpetuating leadership? The practice of naming bishops to lead the church in various Christian centers has existed since apostolic times. Aside from the questions of doctrinal authority and leadership in worship, there are inevitable practical problems of livelihood, shelter, and finance, propagation of the movement, relations with political authority, and so forth. Clerical organization seems to me the pragmatic and indeed inevitable solution to the problem of religious and other spontaneous communities that wish to survive the deaths of their founders or charismatic leaders.
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