Rendered Imperfectly: A Review-Commentary of Jason Berry's "Render Unto Rome"

Rendered Imperfectly: A Review-Commentary of Jason Berry's Render Unto Rome | Reverend Brian Van Hove, S.J. | August 8, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church by Jason Berry
New York: Crown Publishers, 2011
Pp. 420, including Notes and Index
ISBN-978-0-385-53132-0; eISBN- 978-0-385-53133-7


Like the Curate's Egg, this book is good in parts. When Jason Berry is good, he is very good. And when he is bad, he is quite bad. One presumes the author's lawyers approved both good and bad. First, let us consider selections from the bad.

Berry identifies himself with the "nursing-home-flower-children" of the church with over-worn expressions such as "pray, pay and obey." (pages 9, 279, and elsewhere) One senses he would blithely repeat all the liberal follies of the Episcopal Church (PECUSA) which once made it the fastest dying religious institution in America. [1] He is definitely not an advocate of the hermeneutic of continuity, but rather that of rupture. Let Berry spare us the rhetoric of the Sixties generation, revived recently by The American Church Council. Let a younger John Paul II Generation blossom.

Render Unto Rome is the final installment of what he terms an investigative trilogy begun in 1985. (page 17)  Its title echoes the work of Archbishop Charles Chaput, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. [i] We will wait for the decision of history to prune its merits. For now, here are highlights.

Who are the heroes and who are the villains in this book? Generally, the heroes are liberal nuns, select lay people and ex-priests. [2] We are given homey vignettes of their personal lives. Who are the villains? In general, corrupt and incompetent cardinals and bishops and their clerical cohorts. This must be said at the outset. Berry wants "reform from below" in a naīve way. There is no guarantee that liberal nuns (whose assets are secret), lay people and ex-priests would do a better job in a Fallen World than Cardinal Angelo Sodano or Cardinal Franc Rodé, to name but two of those he presents as his villains. [3] The Berry model of reform is unoriginal, as unoriginal as Congregationalism or Presbyterianism, and in a book that is designed to illuminate its readers with respect to "money," such vignettes (however interesting to certain religious subcultures) seem entirely gratuitous.

Read the entire review on Ignatius Insight...