Wills was married for sixty years (1959–2019) to Natalie Cavallo, a collaborator and photographer for his work. They have three children: John, Garry, and Lydia.[4][6]
A trained classicist, Wills is proficient in Ancient Greek and Latin. His home in Evanston, Illinois, was "filled with books", with a converted bedroom dedicated to English literature, another containing Latin literature and books on American political thought, one hallway full of books on economics and religion, "including four shelves on St. Augustine", and another with shelves of Greek literature and philosophy.[4][7] After his wife's death in 2019 and the sale of their house, he donated most of his library to Loyola University Chicago, but retained what he termed "the core".[8]
Religion
Wills was a Catholic and, with the exception of a period of doubt during his seminary years, had been one all his life.[9] He continued to attend Mass at the Sheil Catholic Center at Northwestern University. He prayed the Rosary every day, and wrote a book about the devotion (The Rosary: Prayer Comes Around) in 2005.[10]
In a May 2024 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Wills revealed that he no longer considers himself a Catholic nor takes communion. Instead he refers to himself as an "Augustinian Christian." Wills attributes this change to the influence of his late wife, Natalie, who died in 2019 after 60 years of marriage and deeply influenced his thinking on everything from the day that he met her on an airplane two years before they married. Wills is pursuing the idea of writing a book on leaving Catholicism.[8]
Wills has also been a critic of many aspects of Church history and Church teaching since at least the early 1960s. He has been particularly critical of the doctrine of papal infallibility; the social teachings of the church regarding homosexuality, abortion, contraception, and the Eucharist; and of the church's reaction to the sex abuse scandal.[11][12][13][14]
Wills published a full-length analysis of the contemporary Catholic Church, Bare Ruined Choirs, in 1972 and a full-scale criticism of the historical and contemporary church, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, in 2000. He followed up the latter with a sequel, Why I Am a Catholic (2002), as well as with the books What Jesus Meant (2006), What Paul Meant (2006), and What the Gospels Meant (2008).
Politics
Wills began his career as an early protégé of William F. Buckley Jr. and was associated with conservatism. When he first became involved with National Review he did not know if he was a conservative, calling himself a distributist.[15] Later on, he was self-admittedly conservative, being regarded for a time as the "token conservative" for the National Catholic Reporter. In 1979, after having supported more liberal positions for 20 years, he wrote a book titled Confessions of a Conservative,[10] in which he described his break from William F. Buckley and the American conservative movement, while continuing to remain in some ways ethically and culturally conservative.
In 1995, Wills wrote an article about the Second Amendment for The New York Review of Books. It was originally titled "Why We Have No Right to Bear Arms", but that was not Wills's conclusion. He neither wrote the title nor approved it prior to the article's publication.[18] Instead, Wills argued that the Second Amendment refers to the right to keep and bear arms in a military context only, rather than justifying private ownership and use of guns. Furthermore, he said the military context did not entail the right of individuals to overthrow the government of the United States:
The Standard Model finds, squirrelled away in the Second Amendment, not only a private right to own guns for any purpose but a public right to oppose with arms the government of the United States. It grounds this claim in the right of insurrection, which clearly does exist whenever tyranny exists. Yet the right to overthrow the government is not given by government. It arises when government no longer has any authority. One cannot say one rebels by right of that nonexistent authority. Modern militias say the government itself instructs them to overthrow government—and wacky scholars endorse this view. They think the Constitution is so deranged a document that it brands as the greatest crime a war upon itself (in Article III: 'Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them . . .') and then instructs its citizens to take this up (in the Second Amendment). According to this doctrine, a well-regulated group is meant to overthrow its own regulator, and a soldier swearing to obey orders is disqualified from true militia virtue.
The New York Times literary critic John Leonard said in 1970 that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[20] The Catholic journalist John L. Allen Jr. considers Wills to be "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years" (as of 2008[update]).[10]Martin Gardner in "The Strange Case of Garry Wills" states there is a "mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything Wills has written about his faith".[21]
Inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 2006 in the area of Communication and Education.[28]
^"To Keep and Bear Arms: An Exchange". New York Review of Books. November 16, 1995. I had no knowledge of the misleading cover title "Why We Have No Right to Bear Arms" before I read with dismay the printed issue. Of course the Amendment states a right that "we" do possess—but we possess it, as the Amendment itself says, in a "well-regulated militia."
