No Better Time to Be a Catholic

No Better Time to Be a Catholic

(ITALY)
New York Times [New York NY]

December 22, 2023

By Ross Douthat

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When I began writing a column for this newspaper, I was by no means its first Catholic columnist, but I was probably the first representative of conservative Catholicism, a partisan of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, to write regularly for The Times’s opinion pages. This created an expectation — in my own mind, at least — that when I wrote about my own religion, it would be mostly as a defender of the faith, championing church teaching and papal authority to a readership inclined to a certain skepticism about both.

Instead, the major Catholic story of my early years as a columnist was the sex-abuse crisis, where there were ideological arguments about causes and cures, but far more to lament than to champion or defend. Then in 2013, Pope Benedict resigned, a decision that I firmly believe supernaturally jolted the entire world off its comfortable end-of-history…