The final section of ''The Vatican II Church'' and the climax of the book as a whole is a manifesto entitled ''The Pope's Loyal Opposition.'' Here Wills states and vigorously argues the 11 conditions on which ''support of the papacy is possible for the conscientious.'' Drawing on the history of the preceding chapters, he asserts: (1) The papacy is a deeply flawed institution. (2) The church itself is a deeply flawed institution. (3) There have been many papacies. (4) One is obliged to differ from the papacy. (5) The papacy, like the church, changes. (6) Change in the papacy has not been unidirectional. (7) The historical reality of papal teaching has little to do with infallibility. (8) The essence of the papacy is the Petrine charism. (9) The papacy is the sacrament of the unity of the church. (10) Heresy is a sin against this sacrament of unity. (11) The papacy, as a center of unity, has many sources of renewal.
After this catharsis, the jejune 40-page commentary on the creed that ends this otherwise candid, richly informative and perfectly timed book comes as an anticlimax and a distinct disappointment, not least for its studied indifference to contemporary American Catholic theology. Wills reads selected contemporary church historians and three or four Scripture scholars, but with one exception he finds no theologian since John Henry Newman worth a word of either praise or blame, not even Avery Dulles -- a famous American convert become a Jesuit and now, like Newman, a cardinal -- whose ''Models of the Church'' has done more than any other book to keep alive in the American Catholic Church the very ''People of God'' ecclesiology in which Wills has invested such hope.
Why this abstention from theology? The opening, autobiographical portion of the book may offer a clue. As a Jesuit novice, Wills underwent a crisis of faith in reality itself: does anything exist, or are we trapped in a dream? He survived that crisis with the help of a sensitive confessor and the chapter entitled ''The Suicide of Thought'' in G. K. Chesterton's ''Orthodoxy.'' A few years later, Wills left the Society of Jesus; but from that moment to this, Chesterton's vision of ''the mystical minimum'' -- gratitude to God for the miracle that anything at all is -- seems to have remained for him an intellectual bedrock too deep or too private for discussion.