Angels and Demons and Skeptics

By Donna Woolfolk Cross
novelist

"Where's your skepticism?" Diane Sawyer, a brilliant interviewer who pulls no punches, asked me right after we sat down for an ABC Primetime piece on my book, "Pope Joan: A Novel."

"Where's yours?" I countered. "The record of the Catholic Church with regard to the truth, both scientific and historical, does not inspire confidence."

With "Angels and Demons" in theaters, interest in Pope Joan and other shrouded Church secrets has been rekindled. Is there, as Dan Brown's book and the movie based on it imply, a "secret Vatican Archive" with over 52 miles of shelves filled with millions of documents only a privileged few will ever see?

In a word: yes. But there is nothing surprising about this. The first imperative of any established institution, religious or secular, is self-protection. This is true in the U.S. no less than in the Vatican. Witness the 18-minute "gap" in the Nixon tapes. Or Oliver North's proud "Semper Fi" shredding of important documents relative to the Iran/Contra affair. Or the sealing of the JFK assassination records, which will not be seen in their entirety until 2017.

For faith-based institutions, this primary imperative of self-protection can lead to serious moral dilemma, for in most religions truth is considered one of the greatest virtues.

How to get around this? How to protect one's church and at the same time hide its all-too-human failings? If one cannot lie, one must fall back on the age-old stratagem of evasion. The Catholic Church even has a doctrinal name for this: "mental reservation". Mental reservation is a form of casuistry, elevated to an art form by Jesuits, which uses double meaning, euphemism, or omission to allow clergy to equivocate for the greater good of the Church.

In other words, one cannot lie; one can only mislead. I understand this kind of wordplay all too well, having once worked briefly in a Madison Avenue ad agency. In advertising, verbal misdirection is called "weaseling", so-called after a weasel's ability to suck an egg dry while preserving the shell so it still looks intact. For example:

"Brand Y toothpaste tastes better".

The implication is that Brand Y tastes better than other toothpastes. Caveat emptor: listen to what has NOT been said. The ad writer might be comparing the taste of Brand Y toothpaste to day-old bacon fat!

The principle of "mental reservation" is not dissimilar. The Catholic Encyclopedia says it "involves truths expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind, relying upon the idea that God hears what is in one's mind while human beings hear only what one speaks." It provides the following example.

"Such expressions as "He is not at home" are called equivocations, or amphibologies, and when there is good reason for using them their lawfulness is admitted. If the person inquired for was really at home, but did not wish to see the visitor, the meaning of the phrase "He is not at home" is restricted by the mind of the speaker to this sense, "He is not at home for you, or to see you."

Years ago, I was invited to a panel discussion about Pope Joan in Vienna, Austria. I read a chapter from my novel, and Peter Stanford, former editor of the Catholic Herald, spoke about the strong evidence in favor of Joan's historical existence (in which he believes). Afterwards, Peter told me what happened when he met the curator of the Vatican archives. "There's nothing here about Pope Joan," the curator told him.

But what if the curator was practicing mental reservation? "There's nothing here about Pope Joan" he could then say aloud, adding in his own mind, for God's ears alone, "...nothing that is for you, or that you can see."

Like Dan Brown's books, "Pope Joan" is not a polemic. It's a novel--above all, I hope, a rip-roaring, what-may-have-been, "good read." But there's no denying that like Brown's work, it raises the thorny issue of long-buried Church secrets--and therefore of skepticism.

Today, given all that I have learned, I would reply differently to Diane Sawyer's right-on-point interview question. I would use the words of Lily Tomlin: "No matter how skeptical I get, it's just never enough to keep up!"

Donna Woolfolk Cross is author of "Pope Joan: A Novel," a story of a ninth-century woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to become the only female ever to sit on the throne of St. Peter.

By Donna Woolfolk Cross |  July 6, 2009; 2:45 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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