Ross Douthat, a leading opinion writer known for both his political conservatism and for his Catholic faith, is leaving The New York Times. The CBS News program “60 Minutes” announced on July 28 that Mr. Douthat will be joining the show as a correspondent.

Correspondents on “60 Minutes” are traditionally full-time reporters who produce in-depth stories, so we have not seen the last of Mr. Douthat in a public role. But his departure from The Times is still a loss to American intellectual life—and American Catholic intellectual life in particular.

Mr. Douthat has spent nearly two decades as one of the most recognizable Catholics in American public life. Many Catholics have spent that time arguing with him, and they will no doubt continue to do so. But his greatest contribution has not been to conservative politics or even to Catholic debates. It has been to demonstrate, before one of the country’s most educated secular audiences, that Catholicism remains an intellectually serious way of understanding the world.

A faith seeking understanding

An enduring challenge for the faith today continues to be the association in the public mind of religion with anti-intellectualism. The fight against this Enlightenment prejudice against religion has to be refought in every age, and not every generation of Catholics has done so productively. But Mr. Douthat has shown his readers over and over again that being religious, much less being a member of a religion perceived to be particularly institutional, hierarchical and dogmatic, need not entail anti-intellectualism.

More often than not, he showed rather than told this truth. Yes, Mr. Douthat has written a great deal on Catholicism. But he has also explored a wide array of other subjects with intellectual seriousness. He could write sympathetically about neuroscience, economics, evolutionary biology, science fiction, political philosophy and mysticism without surrendering orthodox Christianity.

Against the prejudice that to be Catholic is to surrender reason and embrace inflexible dogma, Mr. Douthat’s columns displayed curiosity about an extraordinary range of subjects, intellectual humility about his own knowledge and a healthy skepticism toward claims of expert certainty.

At a time when Americans often seemed trapped between technocratic deference and populist contempt for expertise, Mr. Douthat offered a different posture. He asked serious questions, identified patterns of overconfidence and elite consensus, and explored how fear, ambition, desire for status and institutional pressures can shape even expert judgment. 

The point was never that expertise is worthless. It was that expertise earns authority through openness, correction and humility rather than through claims of infallibility. Often enough, Mr. Douthat pointed to the need for a humility that is not only epistemic but also institutional. Whether with respect to the suspected lab origins of Covid-19, the failures of meritocracy or the limits of medical expertise, Mr. Douthat has consistently argued that institutions earn authority not by claiming infallibility but by acknowledging uncertainty, correcting mistakes and inviting scrutiny.

Part of Mr. Douthat’s importance at The Times—something many America readers would affirm—was that he was not just an intellectually serious journalist who also happened to be a Catholic: Rather, he modeled the intrinsic openness of faith to reason. Mr. Douthat did more than defend Catholic ideas. He modeled a particular way of being a Catholic intellectual, one that assumes faith and reason belong together, and that Catholics need not leave either behind when they enter public life. 

That confidence in the compatibility of faith and reason also shaped Douthat’s understanding of the vocation of the Catholic laity. If faith belongs in public argument, then lay Catholic public intellectuals have both the freedom and the responsibility to participate in the church’s intellectual life.

A distinctively American Catholicism 

Mr. Douthat represents a distinctive tradition within American Catholicism. He is not a professional theologian, and theology is not primarily how he understands the world. He is a journalist whose formation is as much in history, politics, literature and sociology as in theology. For precisely that reason, he has often been told that he has wandered beyond his competence. During the debates over “Amoris Laetitia,” for example, some theologians dismissed his arguments not merely as mistaken but as evidence that journalists should not presume to adjudicate theological questions.

There is something to this criticism. The church needs theologians. Theology has its own methods, its own disciplines and its own standards of argument. Not every dispute can be settled by a clever columnist. But the opposite error is at least as dangerous: imagining that the church’s intellectual life belongs chiefly to specialists. Catholic theology has never existed in isolation. It has always been in conversation with historians, philosophers, lawyers, scientists, politicians, artists, journalists and ordinary laypeople whose questions arise not from the seminar room but from the life of the church.

One of the strengths of American Catholicism has been its resistance to intellectual gatekeeping. American Catholics have rarely been content simply to receive expert opinion. They read, organize, publish, argue and ask inconvenient questions. Sometimes those questions are misguided. Sometimes they are prophetic.

Recent history should make us wary of confusing credentials with wisdom. The clerical sexual abuse crisis was prolonged, in part, because too many people deferred to institutional authority when they should have insisted on asking harder questions. The lesson was not to distrust expertise. It was to recognize that expertise is healthiest when it welcomes scrutiny rather than treating it as impertinence.

Mr. Douthat embodies this peculiarly American instinct. He has been wrong, and he has certainly provoked his share of exasperation. But those who appreciate him, and even many who argue with him, recognize that he represents something increasingly rare in American public life: an educated lay Catholic who neither checks his faith at the newsroom door nor wears it as a partisan badge. He has treated Catholicism as an intellectual tradition capable of engaging neuroscience, economics, politics, literature and history because he believes it has something to say about all of them.

Positive example

Over 117 years, America has always argued that the Catholic faith belongs confidently in public life. Ross Douthat deserves appreciation for witnessing to that conviction for nearly two decades before one of the country’s largest secular audiences. His importance lies not simply in defending Catholicism but in representing a distinctly American ideal of the Catholic lay public intellectual: someone whose faith enlarges rather than narrows his field of vision, and who therefore feels responsible not only for the church’s theological conversations but for the wider intellectual life of the republic. 

At a moment when confidence in nearly every institution is fraying, Mr. Douthat’s example resists both anti-intellectual populism and technocratic deference. It is the older Catholic confidence that faith seeks understanding, that reason welcomes scrutiny and that educated laypeople have both the freedom and the responsibility to participate in the church’s intellectual life.