Bad Faith Arguments
21st April 2025
When a book’s dust jacket describes its author as an “award-winning investigative reporter” and the author begins by describing his work as “an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church,” readers might expect that, by the end of the book, something strikingly new would have been revealed. But in this case (to borrow from Richard M. Nixon) “That would be wrong.” For Philip Shenon gives the game away two sentences later when he defines “the battle for the soul of the church” in these terms: “It pits Catholics desperate for a more tolerant church—one, that in the words of Pope John [XXIII], dispenses the medicine of mercy instead of severity—against those who see that vision as heresy.”
Right.
How Shenon came to that conclusion—the Platonic form of the New York Times’s view of the Catholic Church—is clarified in the book’s Acknowledgments where, after claiming the Catholic Church is more “secretive” than the Mossad, authorial thanks are rendered to a Who’s Who of the Catholic Left, living and dead. At the end of an extensive list of those who wrote books of papal history (12 of the 14 being firmly on the portside of things Catholic), the author gives a nod to my “deeply researched biographies of John Paul II”—after proffering a trigger warning that “I … fundamentally disagree with the views of the author George Weigel.” And while I’m mildly gratified that Philip Shenon thinks my books “important additions to [his] library,” that seems a low bar to overcome, given some of the fabulists (e.g., Malachi Martin) and progressive spin-doctors (e.g., Austen Ivereigh, the late Richard McBrien, Massimo Faggioli) whose work he evidently found far more agreeable.
The death of Pope Francis earlier today will exacerbate this division between the People Who Want Change and the People Who Don’t Want Change.