The Desolate City: The Catholic Church in Ruins

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

At a time when it has become commonplace to say that the Church of Rome has experienced more upheaval and conflict in the past 25 years than at any time since the Reformation, Anne Roche Muggeridge has written a book which both catalogues and critiques the changes that have taken place. A native of Newfoundland and a one-time novice nun, she is now the mother of five children and the daughter-in-law of Malcolm Muggeridge, in whose conversion to Christianity and Catholicism she was instrumental. She lives in Welland, Ontario.

The Desolate City is not a cold objective study of the Catholic Church, but a passionate and personal analysis of the events which have changed it since Vaitican II. Muggeridge displays her colours from the opening sentence, saying that “this book is an attempt to explain the complete and extraordinary rapid collapse of the Catholic world in which I grew up.” She clearly identifies her villains (“liberals” such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Hans Kung, Mary Malone, and Edward Schillebeeckx) and her saints (“orthodox Catholics” such as James Daly, John Paul II, and Joseph Ratsinger). Liberals have undermined, and thus come close to causing the total collapse of, authority in the church by taking over the growing ecclesiastical bureaucracy, by changing the Mass from a God-centred to a community-centred act, and by setting themselves up as the “true” interpreters of the decrees of Vatican II. Muggeridge exhaustively catalogues the events in each of these areas of church life which lead to her pessimistic analysis of the church.

But as there was a faithful remnant in ancient Israel, so a small group of “true Catholics” continues to exist in today’s church. To Muggeridge and her fellow conservatives a ray of hope, focused in Pope John Paul II, shines to combat the darkness of the new modernists, the radical feminists, and the liberation theologians. This hope depends not upon a repudiation of Vatican II, but a proper explication of the Council’s numerous decrees and other documents which will reflect the intent of the bishops as mediated by the papacy rather than the subversive actions of the current liberal interpreters. However, by pinning this hope upon the teaching office of the Pope and the church hierarchy, the very structure which has been derided and denigrated in the intra-church conflict, Muggeridge has chosen human authoritarianism rather than divine authority. Sooner or later she may find herself forced into the very position of Luther which she abhors, the appeal to Scripture as the final arbiter of doctrine and life. Then, at least, she may find the orthodoxy for which she strives, even if not all of the outward tradition for which she longs.