CathNews New Zealand

These days, Catholic intellectuals open the op-ed pages of the New York Times with the same dread they once had for the threatening, unsigned editorials of the official newspaper of the Vatican, L’Osservatore Romano.

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.

Additional reading

News category: Analysis and Comment.