Take Back the Truth: Confronting Papal Power and the Religious Right

Manning writes in anger, but she writes well. Where Cardinal Ratzinger's office in the Vatican claimed (in Dec. 2000) that Christians cannot use practices of the early church to critique the actions of current church authorities, Manning feels it is her Christian duty to do so. Where Cardinal Camillo Ruini rejected the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights as contrary to Christian heritage, Manning feels that equality of human rights is at the heart of the Gospel. Manning's version of Christianity may strike some as hopelessly idealistic, and some as refreshingly non-hypocritical. She defends a socialistic version of the faith, as in the ideal of monastic communities, noting that in Acts (5:1-11) a couple in the first church is struck dead for the sin of holding back part of their property from the common pool. With Noam Chomsky-like documentation of recent church policies, Manning holds the present religious powers to a most unflattering comparison with Jesus. She warns of a growing coalition of reactionary Catholics, right-wing Protestants, and patriarchal Muslims, as seen in the cooperation of all these groups to oppose policies for women's equality at the 1994 Cairo U.N. Conference on Women, Population and Development. There's more -- on sexual abuse for example, and it's well documented.

Joanna Manning provides a powerful and insightful look into the Vatican and the religious right. She makes a provocative and compelling case for reform in the Catholic Church. Conservative Catholics will hate this book,and her.