NY Times Op-Ed: There's No Better Time To Be A Catholic Than Christmas 2023

New York Times Op-Ed:  No Better Time to Be a Catholic, by Ross Douthat:

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. ... 

[I]n 2013, Pope Benedict resigned, a decision that I firmly believe supernaturally jolted the entire world off its comfortable end-of-history timeline and threw us into a more apocalyptic realm of populists, plagues and U.F.O.s. Obviously, that jolt affected Catholicism most of all: Pope Francis ascended, and over the past decade, the church has been governed by a liberalizing, destabilizing, provocateur pope.

This has created high drama in the church and ample opportunities for explanations of its controversies — but in those controversies I’ve found myself crosswise from the papacy itself, a peculiar position indeed for a Catholic columnist at a secular publication. I imagined myself making Catholic tradition and thinking attractive to secular and liberal readers. Instead, I’m often obliged to explain why, in seeming to move the church closer to the median secular liberal, Francis is actually driving Catholicism toward crisis.

The latest news from Rome provides yet another example of this pattern. Here you have a papal directive that seems to crack the door to (some ambiguous kind of) priestly blessings for same-sex couples, which unsurprisingly inspires talk of landmarks and revolutions and the church finally changing with the times.

And my appointed role is to be the conservative killjoy who points out that Francis is yet again widening liberal-conservative divisions without a plan for unity, that his strategy of trying to change Catholic practice without changing Catholic teaching is late-Soviet in its ideological acrobatics, and that (to select a few initial reactions from around the world) a church wherein priests in Austria are basically ordered to bless same-sex couples, while priests in Malawi, Zambia and Nigeria are basically told to ignore the Vatican, is not a sustainable dynamic.

But it’s Christmas, a time for killjoys to fall silent, so let me say something a little more encouraging. In one of the anguished reactions to the latest papal provocation, the British Catholic convert, Gavin Ashenden — a former Anglican priest, indeed a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II — enumerates all the ways that Francis seems to be undermining church teachings, describing the impossible dilemmas facing conservative Catholics, and ends with a cri de coeur: “Who would choose to be a Catholic at a time like this?”

To which I would submit, in perfect seriousness, that there is no better time to be a Catholic than this one. ...

If [conservative Catholics] are truly on God’s side against an erring pope, they will almost certainly be vindicated within the Catholic Church eventually. ...

When I meet people who are becoming Catholic now, “at a time like this,” the fact that those struggles are present inside the church does not seem to especially bother them. They’re used to struggle and uncertainty, they don’t expect a simple refuge, and they recognize that any space of real spiritual power — which the Catholic Church still is, I promise — will inevitably be a zone of contestation as well.

As it has been from the beginning, from failed and feckless popes all the way back to failed and even treacherous disciples. If the story that Christians hold up for the world a few days hence is really the greatest and most important ever told, then Christianity will come through this crisis as it has come through past ones. And whether you’re a liberal, a conservative or just a believer trying to stay out of the crossfire, you should feel confident that what happens inside Roman Catholic Christianity will show some of those ways through.

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