Bare Ruined Choirs by Gary Willis

I just finished reading Bare Ruined Choirs, my first completed book from this fall half-semester with extra time to read since one of my classes was only 8 weeks long.

Some thoughts:

This book is really good at portraying a mindset, primarily because it's extremely (EXTREMELY) personal. It's about one-quarter history, one-quarter original reporting, and half memoir. Nothing about the whole book is objective in the slightest. The primary topic is the transition from the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church to the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. Born in 1936, Wills makes his points from the perspective of someone who was a young adult pre-Vatican II making the post-conciliar church his primary adult experience of church. His memory of the pre-conciliar church is largely negative.

Wills portrays the church he experienced as a child as mystical, filled with awe, oppressive to priests but wonderful for the layman. For example, he cites Robert Byrne's Memories of a Non-Jewish Childhood to help the reader experience the awe a young boy felt serving as an altar server. But he also hammers home the point that everyone was deceiving everyone else pretending faith they did not feel (an, it must be noted, extremely modern concern. Faith is not necessarily an emotion.)

He describes VII as a rebellion of the priests away from Latin, doctrines they couldn't believe in, sole responsibility for the church. However, he also chronicles the trauma experienced by lay people, who had been taught their whole life that certain things were absolutely necessary. When those things (such as receiving on the tongue) were abruptly abandoned, they did not know what to believe. Ultimately, of course, many lay people abandoned the church and so did many priests. 

The final quarter of the book goes in depth through a transition from a Jesuit seminary from Woodstock, Maryland to Manhattan. That seminary has now dissolved. In the book, Wills reports that the precipitation for the closure of the seminary was a dramatic decline from 120-140 novices every year to 80 novices a year, for this one seminary that served a few dioceses. The total number now, in 2018, of novices that entered the Society of Jesus for Canada and the United States and Haiti is - 40. Forty. 

Link to the (former) seminary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_College. Link to the total number of novices in the United States, Canada, and Haiti: http://jesuitsmidwest.org/story?TN=PROJECT-20181015123858091915

One of the primary characteristics of this work is a deep ambivalence about whether anything that has happened is good or bad. He rails about the conservative catholic thinkers of the mid-20th century but goes on to attack liberal thinkers for being just as bad. He talks extensively about the liberal church movement, at first admiringly, but then derides them all for leaving the faith. Overall, I don't think Gary Wills knew what he thought about the Catholic Church at the time he was writing this book. (As far as I know, he is still living.) He might have honestly been happier had he just left the church entirely. 

I would recommend reading the book, to understand what some call the "Boomer Catholic" mindset. (Technically, as he was born in 1936, Wills is not a Baby Boomer). They would resist going back to what was before, and they don't have any sympathy for what the church lost in the transition. It's totally unreliable as a record of what the church was like before the Vatican II council, however, because it's so personal and polemical. There were real problems, as he related, but the cure may have been was worse than the sickness.