Morris West is a (righteously) angry, deeply spiritual, and very clever man. The Sydney-born (and now Sydney-retired) writer’s twenty-six novels have sold 60 million worldwide (not to mention his screenplays, radio dramas, Broadway productions et. al.) He’s fluent in half a dozen languages, ‘adequate’ in a few others. And at eighty years of age, he’s given us a very readable chronicle of his life and faith.

After winning dux honours at his school he began to train for the priesthood, but left on the eve of his final vows. ‘In the religious life,’ he writes (p.6) ‘I met a few saints, a number of emotional cripples, some brilliant scholars, a largish number of men as ordinary as myself, and a small number of malicious folk, whom, even today, I cannot remember without a pang of resentment’. (See the ex-nun’s case-study on our home page for a similar story). ‘When I left the religious life, I was a man without a shadow. I had no past to which I could make reference, no future to which I could direct myself.’ An all-too-common experience by ex-priests.

Thus, like so many sensitive Catholics he has a love-hate relationship with his church. But he’s still there. In an On Being interview a few months back (On Being is an Australian journal – roughly similar to Sojourners) he said he wanted his writing to be ‘consequential’. In terms of insight he’s succeeded. But whether anything in the institution called the Roman Catholic Church or the Papacy has changed much (at least in the time of the present Pope) is debatable. His obituary of John XXIII and ‘memorial’ to John Paul II are very moving. The good Pope John was his hero.

Morris West has a firm faith, because, he says, it is based on a confession of ‘not knowing’. He wants us to live with ambiguity (a virtue not valued enough by the present Pope’s appointees). As an old Italian proverb has it: ‘Chi piu sa, meno crede’: ‘who knows more believes less’.

His most difficult experience was when Rome refused to nullify his first marriage. Talk about ’emotional intelligence’: West and we are more changed by our feelings than by our logic. That verdict, he writes, ‘changed my life completely’. The Vicar-General told him if he remarried ‘it would mean automatic excommunication’. However, he could choose to ‘live discreetly in concubinage’!!! (David Rice chronicles this attitude in his powerful book Shattered Vows: see the review summary in our home page).

This is a good read. And another reinforcement of sociologist Robert Merton’s dictum that ‘All institutions are inherently degenerative.’

A few things to think about:

* ‘Evil is not explainable. It is not even understandable. It is what the writers of the Dutch Catechism called ‘the great absurdity, the great irrelevancy.’ (p.78).

* ‘Men and women of absolute faith and absolute integrity are rare on our shabby planet’ (p.90).

* ‘In our society… a whole industry has been built around the art of affirmation, but the dignity of dissent is daily denigrated’ (p.95).

* ‘In today’s Church, papal teaching on birth control is regarded by the majority of the faithful as, at best, a directive that is dubious in theology, and, at worst, an arbitrary exercise of the magisterium. The question of a celibate clergy falls into the untimely category’ (p.109).

* ‘In ecclesia suprema lex salus animarum: In the community of the faithful, the supreme law is the welfare of souls’ (p.112).

* ‘Let us seek that which unites us and not that which divides’ (John XXIII, p. 126).

* ‘Modern Catholics have developed a mistrust about the nuances of power within the hierarchy. They are not rebellious; but they are suspicious… They understand instinctively the maxim of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: Fides suadenda, non imponenda: Faith must be persuaded and not imposed’ (p.139).