Triumph: A Book Review

Every history has an agenda. For example, in a college class our history instructor had picked a textbook all about "the worker." The book detailed the strikes and riots and printed excerpts from the workers' songs and newsheets. I thought it all very interesting--until I found out that our beloved professor was a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.

My point is that, while a book like Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church was, in a sense, MADE to be dismissed by the academic trendsetters of modernity as a pointless anachronism, it nonetheless differs in no way from any other history on the market in its adoption of an agenda. One gets the sense that, like the workers' textbook, Triumph exists not only to vindicate the Church's role in history, but also to put that role in its proper perspective--a perspective that is often buried under an avalanche of anti-Catholic prejudice.

The book is a blast of fresh air in a room stuffy with the secondhand smoke of the Protestant Reformation. For the first two-thirds, I could hardly put it down. Harry Crocker gallops through history with all the skill and virility of a Crusader going at full tilt--without missing any of his targets. The years whip by so quickly, it seems the darkness of paganism lurks just beyond the streetlights of the modern European state. The ancient barbarism of the Germanic tribes seethes beneath Hitler's triumphant Reich. Italy is a land of ancient rivalries and modern political chaos, Mafiosi-style. Spain is a noble woman who, after having been knocked down a few too many times, is ruthless in her pursuit of an idyllic Catholic state. And the enduring zealotry of the French turns to nightmare during the Revolution, when all truth seems to die.

Indeed, once the whiplash caught up with me, things had gotten so bloody that I had to put the book down and accept a dark truth. Things were not getting any better. Despite all our claims of "progress," the 20th century saw more blood shed in the name of atheism than in any of the wars over religion. Persecution of the Church hadn't gone away--it had increased. In the first few years of Stalin's reign, hundreds of thousands of Catholics simply disappeared. Four million Catholics perished alongside the six million Jews during the Holocaust. More than ever, the Pope seemed to be a lone voice crying out in the wilderness for justice, for peace, and for the dignity of man. And yet never was an institution more ruthlessly attacked.

Throughout the Church's history, with the deadening predictability of death and war, priests and religious have been martyred, exiled, marginalized and penalized in every conceivable way. Church property has been seized, smashed, and sacked in every age. Catholic lay people, women and children, have been dragged from their homes and slaughtered. Soon the truth starts to build in the back of your mind that, if the things that people say about the Church--that it's a man-made institution that simply exists because of a consolidation of power--are true, then history needs to be hidden from view, because it tells a much different story. How can it be that priests, monks, and female religious would put themselves on the front lines, set themselves apart in a highly visible and controversial fashion, in age after age, if they were simply the dupes of a power-hungry papal dynasty? As a matter of fact, no dynasty, no nation, no tribe, and no dictator has ever existed as long, and in the same essential form, as the Catholic Church.

Crocker doesn't pull any punches--all the papal pecadilloes are here. And yet, while littered with pragmatist popes and overzealous generals, the history of the Church is still the history of Western Civilization. For centuries, the papacy was the axis around which Europe turned and--after the rise of the nation-state--the lodestar to which the Western world looked as its man-made institutions began to crumble. Amid internal strife and invasion, it was the Popes who kept the peace--often with their own armies--upholding the transcendent concept that there was a Power above kings and nobles. As each new heresy threatened to split the fabric of society, consecrated men and women stepped from the shadows to preach, to admonish, and to purify the Church that they loved. And we are reminded that it is ultimately the influence of the Church that brought King John to Runnymede to sign the Magna Carta, and it is those same principles of liberty--"the traditional rights of Englishmen"--which are enshrined in our own Declaration of Independence.

The paradox of the Church is that she could be so great, and yet filled with men who appear weak, sinful, and at times--antithetical to the Church's raison d'etre. So many people look at the facts about the Church and ask, "How can this be the church of Jesus Christ?" I submit that after reading this book, one can draw only two conclusions. Either the author has been entirely disingenuous, or we may have to admit that there is no way that any institution of merely human origin has survived for so long and still remains.

This is the Church of Jesus Christ. Sometimes she looks weak, sometimes ridiculous, and always like a flame that wavers as if about to go out. Men have sought to annihilate her in every age, but the gates of Hell have never prevailed over Christ's Bride. Chock-full of sinners as a hospital is of the sick, the Church remains, with arms open wide with mercy--because She is the path, the narrow way...even the foolish-looking way.

I am reminded of the Donatists who, in the time of Augustine in the fifth century, maintained that he who had collapsed under torture and denied the Church should not be readmitted to the sacraments because they would make the Church impure. St. Augustine, who for love of his Lord strove to heal the breach, preached peace and mercy to them:

"Nothing in you do we hate, nothing detest, nothing denounce, nothing condemn, except human error. We repeat, we detest human error from regard for divine truth, but we acknowledge all of God's graces [sacraments] in you, while whatever in you has gone astray we would correct....The stray is the one I would seek out, find, admonish, approach, take by hand, and lead, correcting the deserter, not defacing his divine image" (Willis 109).