When a book’s dust jacket describes its author as an “award-winning investigative reporter” and the author begins by describing his work as “an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church,” readers might expect that, by the end of the book, something strikingly new would have been revealed. But in this case (to borrow from Richard M. Nixon) “That would be wrong.” For Philip Shenon gives the game away two sentences later when he defines “the battle for the soul of the church” in these terms: “It pits Catholics desperate for a more tolerant church—one, that in the words of Pope John [XXIII], dispenses the medicine of mercy instead of severity—against those who see that vision as heresy.”