A Conservative Catholic Begs the Pope: Lead Us Not Into Temptation

Conservatives love to take Jesus literally when he says, "What God has joined together,let no man put asunder". When Jesus tells the rich man to sell all he has and give it to the poor they seem to take a less literal view.

Douthat's attitudes (in his columns, and as reported in this review), brought to mind this passage from "Everybody Dies" by Lawrence Block (1998), and though its subject is fundamentalists, it seems to fit those religious folks of any faith who insist on the infallability of their beliefs: "If there’s one thing the fundamentalists of the world have in common it’s the conviction that God’s all-powerful, but He’s screwed unless they help Him out.”

Ultimately, this is a discussion to be had at Comicon among all the other fantasy and science fiction stories.

One wonders why Ross Douthat converted to Catholicism. Ever since he's been trying to remake the Church into the institution he wants it to be rather than the one it is. The Church doesn't need to move further to the right. Perhaps Douthat would have been happier if he had converted to Islam.

"Douthat ignores human experience." This astute observation by the author of this review also applies to the elderly celibate men who control the Catholic church. Their obsession with sex and social issues results largely from a futile attempt to enforce rigid gender stereotypes, using shame to punish those who don't conform. Their authority and their hierarchical worldview are threatened when a large percentage of actual human beings behave in ways they insist are "unnatural." The edifice from which they pontificate to Pope Francis and the rest of us is growing shakier by the day.

"The regimen of diaphragms and dental dams, masturbation and oral sex and porn, has replaced the older forces of family, religion and shame that policed the sexual landscape for generations. " Including the use of Catholic "charity" workhouses and laundries as prisons where sexual women could be sent to do forced labor, for committing a sin rather than a crime. The Church has all but ruined itself in Ireland with its legacy of harsh judgmental cruelty and the systematic abuse of Irish women. Time's up for that too.

Excellent review. The cutture-war, inside-baseball-church-politics, and, as Mr. Elie notes, high-wire act perspective of Ross Douhat totally misses what Pope Francis's on the ground and to the peripheries Gospel project is all about. In his obsession to prove an ideological take on Francis, Douhat misses all the tools for renewal that this Argentiine pontiff is offering the United States and the World.

Had Mr. Douthat been a Jewish man when Jesus showed up with his followers, whom would he have sided with? The revolutionaries or the rulers?

Superb review except for this cheap shot attibuted to dissenting Catholics: "By what right do those child-abuse-indulging clerics tell me that my marriage is adulterous?" Catholics dissent because Church teaching is counter-cultural, insistent on sacrifice and self-control, united to the suffering of Christ on the cross, and Biblical.

Not a day goes by that I don't miss Pope Benedict xi.

The irony of Douthat's position is that as a layman he is critiquing the clerical caste, i.e., the Pope while simultaneously maintaining that that caste is the source of all wisdom.

It never ceases to amaze me when I read the comments on Ross's columns (btw his column is the ONLY reason I have a NYT subscription), what a bubble these liberals live in. Basically everything they say about the 'fakenews right' is simply bigger and more pervasive on their side. I mean you guys aren't even trying!! A simple wikisearch would handle most of the comments on this post. The Catholic Church believes in papal infallibility on the very few and rare instances in which he speaks ex cathedra. Only a handful of popes have ever done this. For the rest they have been just as fallible and by turns as good and bad as regular leaders. Conservatives do not use the cudgel of infallibility to promote contemporary teachings of the church like Human vitae, instead they have used the reasoned and well supported arguments with which they were made. You guys (esp on this thread) are once again strawmaning. It has been precisely those parts of the Church that have adopted a reasoned approach to theology and faith without lazy liberalism and its nihilistic tendencies, that have experienced a resurgence of faith, joy and vocations. There are almost none in the so-called progressive orders, they are all dying away. Remember the nuns on the bus? how many of them were under 70? There are plenty of young novices in the conservative orders. The liberal side was always so predictable and boring and frankly, pointless.

What Mr. Douthat and his co-believers don't seem to grasp about Pope Francis's thought on remarriage and receiving communion is that the Pope is not changing any Catholic teaching on the permanence of marriage. What the Pope is saying is that the church should not be necessarily withholding Communion as a punishment for those whose marriages fall apart, for whatever reason. Moreover, it should be up to the persons involved, in conjunction with their local priest, to look at their situation and decide how to respond and proceed. Those are two completely separate issues. Another comprehensive review of Mr. Douthat's book was published in the National Catholic Reporter, detailing many outright mistakes of fact and sourcing. It's at https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/douthats-fran...

Conservatives like to fall in line - liberals to fall in love, a saying often quoted by Mark Shields (David Brooks' counterpart on the PBS News Hour). Seems very on-target here.

Catholicism is not alone in this struggle to "handle" culture. Many other Christian branches are sucked into this current. Rather than a desire to "liberalize" the church, many believers and leaders now recognize that even cultural change can be a critique of an unchanging doctrinal schema. When that happens, thoughtful leaders and members may find that reexamining the foundations of traditional beliefs slaps their certainty into a new humility that no longer assumes they had it "right" the first time. All doctrine, including Catholic, has evolved and yes, changed, over the centuries. Not all of it has been helpful or productive when believers look back. While tradition is very important, it is not so sacrosanct that new insights (dare we say "truths") cannot challenge it.

The discussion is so narrow, The Christian God, the only god. One thing seem true if the Roman Catholic Church can not control culture, it will be diminished. Many resent their attempting to make their culture into law.

I am amused that conservative Catholics believed in the primacy of the Pope and his teachings until a less conservative Pope was elected. Now they all seem to believe they are more Catholic than the Pope which is an oxymoron for truly devout Catholics. Either the Pope is chosen by God to guide the faithful when he is elected by the College of Cardinals or the whole thing is a sham used to disguise the rather messy politics inside the Catholic church. Which is it Mr. Douthat?

Intellectual observations aside, the best way to assay a spiritual situation is to look around for what the mystics are going on about - religion is more than belief, ... much more ... only in the vanities of un-natural science ... do folks think the progress of Faith is all about long arguments in books/reviews, or getting under the radar of Sam Harris's ... whatever it is that makes him so happy being superior. Suppose this: "Saving the Catholic (universal&Christian) Religion, from the failing institutional Roman Church - through deepening our understanding of the Third Fatima Prophecy."

I have not read Douthat's book, nor will I, given that I have read enough of his work, not only here at the Times, but before that when he wrote for The Atlantic. His writing is nothing if not predictable. That being the case, Paul Elie's astute commentary on Douthat's latest tome is more than enough to convince me that I needn't waste my hard-earned money in order to read more of the same old drivel. I thought Elie's description of Douthat's endless culture war-mongering as a "high-wire act" was especially apt. Douthat always views the world from afar, always through the lens of theory rather than actual experience. It's as though he never wants to get his hands dirty so he pontificates from his moral high horse far above the rest of us mere mortals. But real life is not like that. It is often messy, often contradictory, often paradoxical, and often requires thought processes that do not fit into neat little boxes. This is disturbing to people like Ross Douthat, so they have to do their part to try to manage life's messiness, as though anyone can do that. Ultimately, Douthat suffers from the same malady that plagues so many conservatives: he lives in a perpetual state of fear: fear that the world and the church are changing in ways he cannot manage, cannot contain, and ultimately cannot fathom, so he lashes out with his intellectual's pen. In the end it is all rather sad, since the only constant thing in life is change, something Ross Douthat clearly does not accept.

The Catholic Church has to adapt to new conditions and new beliefs. But it is a huge and complicated institutions, and must do so incrementally. Pope Francis may be doing it too quickly for serious believers, such as Ross Douthat, but his changes come after decades of stasis and retreat under Popes Paul, John Paul, and Benedict.

I imagine, left out, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Roger Williams. Left out, Papal support for the institution of slavery and co-operation with dictatorships. Left out, objections to institutional misogyny in the church.

I was a devout Catholic until I was twenty-five & began to think, finally. Mr. Douthat, what is it that needs conserving in the world & in the church? Hatreds & wars & fighting progress? Reading history, even the sanitized stuff, brings tears to my eyes. Whatever the present pope does, it won’t be enough.

The real traditionalist here is Francis, who wants to go back to Jesus' teachings about caring for the poor and suchlike. Douthat, in contrast, wants more the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, when Rome was in charge of sexual practices, interest rates, and a whole bunch of other things that Catholic "conservatives" long to regain power over.

I should know better than to reference the Gospels in the context of Ross Douthat without saving it because it will be removed from these boards. Here's another try. Perhaps the Biblical quotations are too hot to handle, and the references to the words and actions of Jesus too obvious to print? I suggest a careful study of those same Gospels, and a return to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Then there are the seven deadly sins, the first of which is pride. The Republican version of the success doctrine, excluding and criminalizing poverty, and blaming the less fortunate while taking pennies from the poor to swell the coffers of the rich and powerful is not Christian. Perhaps they should be a little less focused on other people's sex lives and a bit more focused on the beam in their own eye. There are too many whited sepulchers, moneychangers in the temple, casters of first stones in this current Republican power elite. They even cheat about forgiveness, withholding it from others while they dispense it with abandoned generosity to their own, who seem to have never heard the words: "go and sin no more".

This Pope told the Cardinals that they would be sorry they elected him. (It could have been sooner, he was runner-up to Pope Benedict eight years before.) People like Douthat who convert to Catholicism join because they love the strict rules and regulations. Someone is setting them on the "right" path. Pope Benedict definitely enhanced these teachings and engaged in pageantry that hadn't been seen for decades. Any Pope would have been more lenient than Benedict. Pope Francis, always a priest of the people, is a shock to those conservative Catholics who loved being told exactly how to practice the faith. Just as evangelicals have prostituted themselves to follow Trump. so have the Douthat type of Catholic. They are so focused on their one issue, abortion, that yesterday, the Pope stated that caring for the migrant and poor is equally important. What a shock. Life is sacred even if it isn't in the womb! This is not what those who are more Catholic than the Pope want to hear. It totally ruins their agenda. They would rather follow a trice married philanderer, liar, cheat, bully than give up on their rallying cry, life in the womb is sacred, but after that those people can starve to death. We don't care.

Christ is God’s love for all the world. If it were not free, no one could ever experience it. All our cultures and all our faiths appear (at least in our group) to proceed toward goals of love, respect, cooperation. Fear, Hardship, Isolation, Physical Needs stand against us. Theology is the attempt to rationalize our dilemmas.

I'm not sure how Douthat can defend a changeless church in good intellectual faith. The history of Catholicism has been one of continuing interpretation and evolution-- starting with the New Testament, Christianity's progression through Rome, Constantinian statements on doctrine and later responses to Protestantism. Proposing an eternalist and ossified Church seems to disinvest it of all the rich history and thought that has contributed to its formation. (For example it would seem to invalidate the continued hold that thinkers such as Augustine have had through the present day).

I will not read this book, as I am not Catholic nor am I a real fan of Douthat or his writing or his politics. But as a student of religion and a staunch liberal (which may be why I'm not Catholic), I find Douthat's conservatism about his Catholicism and his questioning of the Pope somewhat disconcerting. Not for me - but for him. My understanding of Catholic teaching is that the Pope is God's representative on Earth. That his election, however flawed it may seem to our human eyes, is guided by God and thus infallible. Perhaps times and Catholicism have changed since the days of the High Middle Ages when Popes were, for all intents and purposes, God on Earth, but surely someone so steeped in scripture and Catholic doctrine and love of the Church, as Douthat professes, must fear for his soul by questioning the Pope. The fact is that the Church (with a big "C") has changed mightily over the years. And in order for it to remain relevant on an international scale it must continue to change. This may be painful for some Catholics. To an outsider, and a student of history, Pope Francis seems a breath of fresh air to a church that has been so scandalized as to be almost marginalized by its own believers. What is wrong with focusing your efforts on helping the poor and downtrodden (often in the guise of the immigrant)? That seemed to be what Jesus - in whose image the church was created - focused on. Not who slept with who and questions of marriage.

This is a brilliant, astute critique of the talented New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and his ongoing and largely superficial critique of Pope Francis because of the pope's openness to widely consult the world's bishops to propose new solutions to the crisis of family life today. As the reviewer states, the irony of several conservative Republican leaders including the President and his past sexual escapades and multiple divorces and New Gingrich's three annulments after an affair with his secretary whom Trump recently reported as Ambassador to the Holy See is not lost on many young Catholics. They are not particularly concerned about Douthat's obsession with arcane traditional theological doctrine and practice. Pope Francis realizes they are on the periphery of the Church but represent the future of the Church. Ross has a well-trained mind and is a compelling writer. He lacks theological depth and have apparently never been steeped in the tradition.

Thank you for this thoughtful review. While Ross Douthat is, no doubt, highly intelligent, he seems to have little compunction about critiquing a field that he has, to my knowledge, few credentials to critique, other than being a practicing Catholic, which seems to be secondary to being a practicing conservative. To my knowledge, he is not seminary trained, he has not worked in the church - he is long on opinion and short on wisdom in this regard. If this were the practice of medicine, we would say he has exceeded his scope of practice. Were it a bar, we'd say he's a gadfly. There are better books on the church written by authentic scholars of ecclesiology.

The Catholic Church was in crisis long before Pope Francis entered the scene. Francis realizes that sensible accommodations must be reached with those Catholics who refuse to blindly submit to rules and regulations that really have little to do the essence of faith as required by Christ. Many of the Church's official teachings were politically and/or bureaucratically motivated due to various historical events and a secular rather than spiritual issue. One of the biggest issues causing Catholics to turn their backs on the Church for decades is its prohibition to artificial birth control; a prohibition based primarily on St. Augustine's almost psychopathic hatred of the sex act, even between married couples. He contended that the sex act was always an evil and only to be tolerated when its objective was reproduction. Pope Francis knows better than to expect educated adults to accept such irrationality.

For many of us, Pope Francis has been a return to the foundational teachings of Jesus Christ. Compassion, generosity, kindness. Many of the conservative tenants actually originated in the 1400s. Most of us have become too educated to allow a bunch of power mad clerics to dictate our behavior. Francis is leading a revitalization of the church.

A good review. Douthat, in this book, as in his NY Times columns, tries to depict religious obligation through the simplistic. clerically-created lens of the Baltimore Catechism, rather than through the complex realities of life or the more straight-forward approach of the Sermon on the Mount. The preoccupations of right-wing Christianity very little reflect the preoccupations of Christ.

There is a clique of American Catholics who share values with a large number of evangelicals in that they use their "religion" as a cover for a self righteous claim to power over and oppression of others. Pope Francis is leading the Catholic Church away from its support for the wealthy and the powerful and toward the teachings of Christ.

Since the publication of "Privileged," Douthat has not ceased to whine, and his occasionally decent writing does nothing to tarnish his image as a bemused, spectator god, whose complaining bears all the substance of a middle schooler who did not get his way. "Adroit, perceptive, gripping?" I think not. Weak, narrow-minded, and banal are more like it. He is so afraid, but of what, really? He seems worried that if we change "core" beliefs, that spells the end of Catholicism as we know it. Does that hold true when we introduce new doctrine and promulgate it as late as the mid-20th century? His vision is of a rule and compliance based religion acted out in a series of rituals and dogma that tell you who is a good Catholic and who is not. Jesus' vision could hardly be any father away.