I have a lot of respect for Wills. But this is a lame and tendentious effort, succeeding neither as polemic or scholarship. The case against the book has been made better by others—so many others—and, frankly, it's not worth my time to repeat or elaborate on it.

An interesting, revolutionary idea from an elderly Roman Catholic, but this is a very pedantic study of the idea of the priest in the church. I would have like a study to trace the development of priests in history rather than an analysis of the theology of the eucharist and Letter to the Hebrews. The history of an idea, but it is interesting how the Jesus movement with no traditional priestly roles did develop a priestly hierarchy. ( )

Gary Wills is a self-professed Roman Catholic who knows a great deal about the bible and church history. He is Jesuit-educated, spent five years in a Catholic seminary, and genuinely likes many priests. However, in his latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, he challenges not only the authority of the priesthood, but also its biblical historicity and legitimacy as an institution.

Wills states that the purpose of the book is to examine why the priesthood came into a religion that began without it, and indeed opposed it. Yet now, priests are considered indispensable. Without priests, there would be , inter alia, no apostolic succession, and no belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Wills points out that there is no evidence for Peter having been a bishop, an office that did not exist in first century Rome, and that the linear “apostolic succession” of the papacy is “a chain of historical fabrication.” He argues that the priesthood keeps Catholics at a remove from other Christians and at a remove from the Jesus of the Gospels, who was a bitter critic of the priests of his day.

The only reference to Christian priests in the New Testament appears in the Letter to Hebrews, originally ascribed to Paul, authorship that has since been convincingly refuted by modern scholarship. Wills questions whether it should have been included in the Canon of Scripture at all. It appears to have been added precisely to establish the importance of priests by someone in whose interest it was to validate that institution.

Wills avers that the principal power of priests in Catholicism is their claimed power to administer the sacraments, in particular to change the host into the real body and blood of Christ in the Mass. He combs the gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the epistles of Paul and finds no consecrations of bread and wine. And in fact, for a long time, not all Catholic theologians believed in the power of priests to transform the bread and wine into the Eucharist, or the “Real Presence” of Christ. St. Augustine, one of the two most eminent theologians in Catholic history, did not believe in the “real presence.” And William of Occam, one of the medieval Church’s clearest thinkers, came up with a formulation of Eucharistic doctrine that denied transubstantiation. However, it was the opinion of Thomas Aquinas, adopted by the Church at The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), that ultimately prevailed. From that date (and critically, not before then) the official Church doctrine has been that the substance of the host is transformed into the body of Christ.

Additionally, Wills seeks to demonstrate that the scriptural grounds of the rest of the Catholic Church’s seven sacraments are very shaky indeed. [These seven are baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction. As Wills notes, with the partial exception of baptism, all sacraments can be administered only by priests, thus ensuring the continuing necessity of priests throughout the life spans of parishioners.]

Wills espouses a more streamlined form of Catholicism that emphasizes the core beliefs outlined in the Apostle’s Creed and by which the faithful communicate directly with God rather than through intermediaries (priests). He would make a good Protestant, but he prefers to stay with the faith of his youth.

Evaluation: Wills is extremely learned and erudite. His knowledge of Church history is encyclopedic. He tosses off terms like “hapax logomenon,” “chiasmus,” and “paraenetic” with the ease of someone who actually knows what they mean. He is also not willing to submit to a Church hierarchy that knows less than he does and reasons less trenchantly than Occam, Abelard, and Augustine. This book is addressed primarily to Catholics, but anyone interested in Christianity (including us infidels) can benefit from its broad knowledge and incisive reasoning.

(JAB) ( )

A disappointing book. I was looking forward to a thoughtful, reasoned argument, and instead found a polemic, in the worst sense of the word. ( )

The real question is, Why this book? Wills basic argument is that Jesus did not create a priesthood...duh! I don't know of any Scripture scholar who would argue that did, and many point out that Jesus challenged the power structures of his society, including the Levitical priesthood. Wills argument seems to hinge on the messy thinking contained in the Letter to the Hebrews, but it is hard to understand what difference all that makes if one accepts, as Wills seems to indicate at one point he does, that an institution with widespread membership inevitably evolves offices, functions, call them what you will, to enable the institution to serve its many members. ( )