Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934)[2] is a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Wills has written nearly 40 books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books.[3] He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of History. Wills describes himself as a Roman Catholic and, with the exception of a period of doubt during his seminary years, has been a Roman Catholic all his life.[7] He continues to attend Mass at the Sheil Catholic Center in Northwestern University. He prays the rosary every day, and wrote a book about the devotion (The Rosary: Prayer Comes Around) in 2005.[8] Wills has also been a critic of many aspects of church history and church teaching since at least the early 1960s. He has been particularly critical of the doctrine of papal infallibility, the social teaching of the church regarding homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, and the Eucharist, and of the church's reaction to the sex abuse scandal. In 1961, in a phone conversation with William F. Buckley Jr., Wills coined the famous macaronic phrase Mater si, magistra no.[7] The phrase, which was a response to the papal encyclical Mater et magistra and a reference to the then-current anti-Castro slogan "Cuba sí, Castro no", signifies a devotion to the faith and tradition of the church combined with a skeptical attitude towards ecclesiastical authority.[8] Wills published a full-length analysis of the contemporary Catholic Church, Bare Ruined Choirs, in 1972, and a full-scale criticism of the historical and contemporary church, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, in 2000. He followed up the latter with a sequel, Why I Am a Catholic (2002), as well as with the books What Jesus Meant (2006), What Paul Meant (2006), and What the Gospels Meant (2008). Wills began his career as an early protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr. and was associated with conservatism. When he first became involved with National Review he did not know if he was a conservative, calling himself a "distributionist."[13] Later on, he was self-admittedly conservative, being regarded for a time as the "token conservative" for the National Catholic Reporter and even writing a book entitled Confessions of a Conservative.[8] However, during the 1960s and 1970s, driven by his coverage of both civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements, Wills became increasingly liberal. His biography of president Richard M. Nixon, Nixon Agonistes (1970) landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.[14] He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election, but declared two years later that Obama's presidency had been a "terrible disappointment". [15] In 1995, Wills wrote an article about the Second Amendment for The New York Review of Books. Originally entitled "Why We Have No Right to Bear Arms", that was not Wills contention and he neither wrote the title nor approved it prior to the article's publication.[16] Instead, Wills argued that the Second Amendment does not justify private ownership of guns but rather refers to the right to "keep and bear arms" in a military context only. The New York Times literary critic John Leonard said in 1970 that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[18] The Roman Catholic journalist, John L. Allen, Jr. considers Wills to be "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years" (as of 2008).[8] Martin Gardner in "The Strange Case of Garry Wills" states there is a "mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything Wills has written about his faith". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Wills

• published: 26 Feb 2015
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