The last 10 years have been hard on this kind of confidence.

A college of supposedly conservative cardinals elected a surprisingly liberal pope.

Moral and theological debates supposedly settled by Pope John Paul II were conspicuously reopened.

The Latin Mass, rehabilitated under Pope Benedict XVI, was partially suppressed.

Progressive theologians found themselves back in favour; formerly conservative bishops suddenly evolved.

It seemed as though liberal Catholicism had been merely hibernating, awaiting a new pope, a new spring.

But lately, in both Rome and the United States, I've had conversations with well-informed Catholics in which the old conservative confidence has made a comeback.

The idea of the Francis era as a "last gasp" for the Catholicism of the boomer era has figured prominently.

The assumption that progressive Catholicism has no real long-term viability has returned.

The fear that the next pope might be another liberaliser, younger and more ambitious than Francis, has largely receded.

This new confidence reflects a specific reading of the waning years (or what are probably the waning years) of the Francis pontificate.

First, there's a sense that the current pope's liberalising program has reached its limits: The Vatican's halfway-opening to blessings for same-sex couples was essentially rejected by many of the church's bishops, and the subsequent papal document reiterating church teaching on gender identity felt like an acknowledgment that the space for innovation had (for now) run out.

Second, there's a view that Francis' capricious governing style has alienated even many churchmen who are not especially conservative and created little appetite for a sequel or "Francis II" successor. Continue reading

• Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of "The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery."

Except that we're not talking about condemnations emanating from the pope. Instead, the condemnations found in world beacon of the liberal press are often hurled against the pope.

The latest instance was the October 12th column by Ross Douthat titled "How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II".

Published for the 60th anniversary of John XXIII's opening of Second Vatican Council (1962-65), it offered the usual post hoc, propter hocnarrative on Vatican II that is typical of those who identify Catholicism with the trajectories of post-industrial, secularized Western societies and who completely ignore the global Church.

In keeping with his personal style, Douthat also made no effort to give a fair presentation of the Council's theology to readers of one of the most important newspapers in the world.

This particular column elicited very effective responses on social media, especially a sharp rebuttal on Twitter by David Gibson.

But a column published in print and online in the New York Times evidently carries some kind of journalistic infallibility, one that's even less subject to scrutiny than papal infallibility.

And the audience reached is infinitely larger than any twitter thread or blog post.

Due deference to the pope?

I once debated Ross Douthat in public.

It was in 2018 at Fordham University, a very interesting event followed by a cordial dinner together.

Trying to talk about theology with him was frustrating because his real expertise is American politics, culture, and society. And that is the filter through which he interprets anything that happens in the Church and in the Vatican.

But he also commits a fair amount of intellectual malpractice.

His book on Pope Francis (or rather against the pope) listed sources that would not be acceptable in an undergraduate students' term paper.

One of the genuinely humourous things was to see how Douthat characterized Cardinal Walter Kasper as a dangerous liberal whom Pope Francis was using to deviate from orthodox doctrine and break apart the Church through the Synod assemblies of 2014-2015 and the post-synodal exhortation Amoris laetitia.

I suggest Douthat ask German Catholics if Kasper is a dangerous liberal, especially in light of the cardinal's repeatedly stinging criticism of their "Synodal Path".

But Germany is a bit too far out of the way from the Connecticut-New York-Washington D.C. corridor, as we all know.

One of the most memorable moments in Douthat's pronouncements on the Catholic Church was during the television interview he gave to American journalist Charlie Rose in 2009.

When Rose asked him about his relationship with the papacy, Douthat replied that Catholics must have a certain amount of deference towards the pope.

Those were the days of Benedict XVI, of course. Douthat evidently forgot all about such deference when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the papacy in 2103.

Indeed, during these last nine-and-a-half years, he has accused Francis of a number of theological heresies and canonical crimes.

In doing so, he has gone far beyond the criticism liberal Catholics levelled against John Paul II and Benedict XVI, popes that were closer to his theo-political views. But don't blame John Paul and Benedict for this.

Douthat's paeans to them should be taken no more seriously than his screeds against Francis.

Fellow travelers in the neo-traditionalist Catholic right in the USA

Here are just a few examples of titles his op-eds in the New York Times: "The Plot to Change Catholicism" (October 17, 2015), "Expect the Inquisition" (September 20, 2017), "Pope Francis Is Beloved. His Papacy Might Be a Disaster" (March 16, 2018), "What Did Pope Francis Know?" (August 28, 2018), "The Slow Road to Catholic Schism" (September 14, 2019).

Douthat's columns are not the only ones that have painted a certain image of Pope Francis and of the Catholic Church to the readers of the Times.

There are also articles by some of Ross Douthat's fellow travellers in the neo-traditionalist Catholic right in the United States.

For instance, there are Michael Brendan Dougherty and Julia Yost who have published, "The Pope Has Put Undue Political Spin on a Spiritual Message" (September 17, 2015), "Pope Francis Is Tearing the Catholic Church Apart" (August 12, 2021), and "New York's Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church" (August 9, 2022). Of course, to be published in the Times works like an ordination to the priesthood for intellectuals in the public square: it elevates the profile, confers authority, and opens other doors.

Pope Francis himself was published in the Times on November 26, 2020.

But that did not change the substance of what I believe is a disservice done to the readers — Catholic and non-Catholic, Christians and non-Christians, religious and secular — by the op-ed page articles on the Church.

Mainstream Catholic intellectuals have not been frequent guests of that opinion page in recent years and the lack of balance is evident (Garry Wills is in a category of his own, but also one more evident of the way the Times covers Catholicism).

I do not know if this is also happening to other Christian denominations and religious traditions, but it's clear that, if one does not know anything about Catholicism and happens upon these columns in the New York Times, they will find a very eccentric and idiosyncratic view of the Francis pontificate and the Church he leads as Bishop of Rome.

A change in the way mainstream media has traditionally covered religion

Now, we must distinguish between the Times' reporting on religion, which is mostly thorough and fair, and its opinion page. Indeed, most of its op-ed pieces on Catholicism illustrate some important things.

The first observation is that journalistic coverage of the Catholic Church has changed in ways that are more profound than the mere fact that the current pope gives frequent interviews to the media (most of the time, secular media).

Mainstream journalism, with its shrinking readership, is more influenced by political agendas and money in our polarized democracies. And the Church is more influenced by journalism, but it no longer has any control over it.

Also gone is the era when religion reporters and columnists in mainstream media were intellectuals with whom one could discuss — and read about in their columns — the great theologians and philosophers.

This made Catholicism intelligible beyond the very narrow parameters of politics.

In the US, one remembers the Times' Peter Steinfels and Newsweek's Kenneth Woodward, whereas in Italy there was Luigi Accattoli, who wrote for Il Corriere della Sera.

We are now in a more global Church, but one that is also more parochial and short-sighted at the same time.

The theological ignorance feeding the negative view of Vatican II

The second observation is the de-theologising of the debates concerning religion.

In the United States, especially Catholic public intellectuals and politicians, as well as the business world and philanthropic circles, are increasingly represented by neo-traditionalist Catholics with a markedly negative or derisive view of Vatican Council II.

This is usually due to minimal knowledge of what the Council was about theologically: Scripture, liturgy, ecumenism, religious liberty, inter-religious dialogue, and missionary activity.

The theological concept of "Catholic tradition" as a living tradition has become subservient to a political concept of tradition as something to take back from the party on the other side of the aisle.

Theologians (like me) are also to blame because we failed to engage these voices, being prisoners of an academic environment where diversity has often become the mission.

The paradoxes of the liberals' emphasis on diversity — a largely de-theologized and big-business-like idea of diversity — has helped skew the Times' view of Catholicism, which then echoes the preferential option for the exotic that is currently found in academia.

Thanks to this appeal to ideological "diversity", anti-Vatican II and anti-liberal Catholic voices have gained access to liberal mainstream media. Ironically, they have found in the New York Times the American liberal equivalent of L'Osservatore Romano — a platform that is denied to those who are identified as mainstream, liberal "Vatican II Catholics".

Catholics reinforcing anti-Catholic bias

The final observation is that this image of a Church in disarray, with a "liberal" pope under assault by neo-traditionalists, fits a certain established image of Catholicism the New York Times has held for a very long time.

In these last twenty years, the tragedy of the sex abuse crisis has reinforced certain stereotypes of a bigoted Church of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and of Pius XII who is portrayed as Hitler's lackey.

The ongoing opinions that are expressed in the daily bible of American liberalism by Catholics who attack the pope are perversely reassuring for a certain kind of Times reader.

They serve less as interpretations of Catholicism than as specimens.

It is like looking through a keyhole and seeing this weird world of Catholicism vie with itself, where devout believers try to take down the pope as if they were students in a graduate seminar trying to impress the professor.

There are Catholic ways for Catholics to disagree with the pope in public. But this is obviously not something they teach in Ivy League universities.

This approach to Pope Francis and Catholicism echoes what Zena Hitz wrote about a certain academic culture in her recent book Lost in Thought. She describes it as a blood sport, a battle of ideas interpreted as gladiatorial contests where celebrity is the currency of success.

It's no wonder that these kind of Catholics, my brothers and sisters in the faith, are so afraid of Francis and the currency in which the Church under his guidance is so clearly trafficking.

It's called the Gospel.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Twenty years ago, Christianity looked surprisingly resilient, and so the smart thinking changed: maybe there was an American exception to secularizing trends, or maybe a secularized Europe was the exception and the modernity-equals-secularization thesis was altogether wrong.

Now the wheel has turned again, and the new consensus is that secularization was actually just delayed, and with the swift 21st-century collapse of Christian affiliation, a more European destination for American religiosity has belatedly arrived.

"In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace" ran the headline on a new Pew Research Center survey of American religion this month, summing up a consensus shared by pessimistic religious conservatives, eager anti-clericalists and the regrettably unbelieving sort of journalist who suspects that we may miss organized religion when it's gone.

The trends that have inspired this perspective are real, but the swings in the consensus over a relatively short period should inspire caution in interpretation.

One important qualifier, appropriate to the week of Halloween, is that the decline of Christian institutions and the weakening of Christian affiliation may be clearing space for post-Christian spiritualities — pantheist, gnostic, syncretist, pagan — rather than a New Atheist sort of godlessness. (The fact that this newspaper, occasionally stereotyped as secular and liberal, is proclaiming "peak witch" while The New Yorker gives friendly treatment to millennial astrology, is suggestive of just how un-secular the American future might become.)

But the post-Christian possibilities aren't the only reason to qualify a narrative of secularization. Here are three points more specific to American Christianity that should be considered alongside the stark declinist story in the Pew data.

Lukewarm Christianity may be declining much more dramatically than intense religiosity

The Pew survey shows a definite decline in weekly churchgoing, alongside the growing disaffiliation of people who once would have been loosely attached to churches and denominations — cultural Catholics, Christmas-and-Easter Methodists, Jack Mormons and the like.

But recent Gallup numbers indicate that reported weekly and almost-weekly church attendance has only "edged down" lately, falling to 38 percent in 2017 from 42 percent in 2008 — a smaller drop than the big decline in affiliation reported by Pew.

And long-term Gallup data suggests that any recent dip in churchgoing is milder than the steep decline in the 1960s — and that today's churchgoing rate isn't that different from the rate in the 1930s and 1940s, before the postwar religious boom.

The relative stability of the Gallup data fits with analysis offered by the sociologists Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock in a 2017 paper, "The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion."

Drawing on the General Social Survey, they argued that the recent decline of institutional religion is entirely a function of the formerly weakly affiliated ceasing to identify with religious bodies entirely; for the strongly affiliated (just over a third of the American population), the trend between 1990 and the present is a flat line, their numbers neither growing nor collapsing but holding steady across an era of supposedly dramatic religious change.

That resilience should not be entirely comforting for Christian churches, since both their everyday work and their cultural influence depends on reaching beyond their core adherents, and inspiring a mix of sympathy and interest among people who aren't at worship every week.

Indeed, combining an enduring core of belief with a general falling-away could make the Christian position permanently embattled, tempting the pious to paranoia and misguided alliances while the wider culture becomes more anticlerical, more like 19th-century secular liberalism in its desire to batter down the redoubts of traditional belief.

But for now that resilience also puts some limits on how successfully anti-Christian policies can be pursued, how easily religious conservatism can be marginalized within the conservative coalition (not easily) and how completely the liberal coalition can be secularized — not completely at all, so long as its base remains heavily African-American and Hispanic. (The tragic racial polarization of American Christianity, in this sense, may have one positive effect: preventing a complete polarization of our politics between Christian and post-Christian coalitions.)

The possible resilience of piety and zeal connects to the second qualifier in the story of decline … Continue reading

Last month, columnist Ross Douthat wrote several pieces about the synod on the family in Rome.

He suggesting, among other things, that clear factions among the bishops have emerged, that Pope Francis favours a more liberal resolution of the key questions and that heretical viewpoints are afoot in Rome.

Dozens of theologians and academics responded by sending a letter to the editors of the New York Times.

They stated that Douthat was proposing a politicised reading of Church affairs and that he was, at the end of the day, unqualified to speak on such complex matters.

"Moreover, accusing other members of the Catholic Church of heresy, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, is serious business that can have serious consequences for those so accused. This is not what we expect of the New York Times," the academics wrote.

Douthat responded by agreeing that he is not a theologian.

"But neither is Catholicism supposed to be an esoteric religion, its teachings accessible only to academic adepts," he said.

Douthat said that while he has great respect for the professors' vocation, his own role is to provoke and explain.

He said that in his columns, he aims to cut through obfuscations and get to the basic truth.

He went on to explain his concerns about ideas of "development of doctrine" that appeared to reverse doctrine, and to pastoral suggestions that seem to empty doctrine in practice.

Los Angeles auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron backed Douthat being able to express his views.

"Are all of Ross Douthat's opinions on the synod debatable? Of course," Bishop Barron wrote.

"Do I subscribe to everything he has said in this regard? No. But is he playing outside the rules of legitimate public discourse in such an egregious way that he ought to be censored? Absolutely not!"

"The [academics'] letter to the Times is indicative indeed of a much wider problem in our intellectual culture, namely, the tendency to avoid real argument and to censor what makes us, for whatever reason, uncomfortable," Bishop Barron added.

Sources

• New York Times
• Daily Theology
• New York Times
• Aleteia
• Image: Veritas