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Ross Douthat on the Trumpian Side of Pope Francis
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Ross Douthat on the Trumpian Side of Pope Francis
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:17]
B
I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. In his new book about the Catholic Church, Douthat portrays Pope Francis as a disruptive figure, not unlike Donald Trump.
- [01:36]
C
Last week, Pope Francis issued a statement to Catholics worldwide, something that's called an apostolic exhortation. In more than 100 pages, he talks about how to live a holy life in, quote, a practical way for our time. The document covers many things, but the newspaper headline singled out this in particular and that caring for the poor and for refugees is a vital Catholic duty, just as vital in Francis eyes as opposing abortion. That shift in the church's priorities has made Pope Francis quite popular, especially here in the United States. But it's led to some hostility and real resistance to the pope from more conservative Catholics. It's a resistance that we haven't seen in generations, and one of those critics is the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthet. For Douthat, Francis is hardly the kindly reformer. Rather, he's a radical, playing fast and loose with doctrine. In a new book called To Change the Church, Douthet claims that Francis is frankly a deep danger to Catholicism. And he goes so far as to compare him to Donald Trump, which, to be clear, Ross Douthat does not mean as a compliment. So, Ross, you've written a book that's a critique of an enormously popular pope, at least in the United States. And when people ask you what have you got against Pope Francis, what's your immediate response?
- [02:57]
B
Embarrassment. Cringing embarrassment. Sort of, you know, a desperate desire to escape the conversation. But then I say to myself, well, I wrote a book about this, so I guess I have to actually answer the question. No, I mean, I, you know, Pope Francis has a well earned, I think, reputation as the great liberal pope, which manifests itself in sort of his emphases, the fact that he talks more about migration and poverty and those kind of issues than about the sort of what we think of as culture war issues in the west, abortion and same sex marriage and euthanasia and so on. And I'm some kind of a conservative Catholic, I suppose. So there's at least a mild tension between sort of his general vision for the church and my general politics and so on.
- [03:45]
C
If he's talking about poverty.
- [03:47]
B
Right.
- [03:48]
C
Do you have a problem with that?
- [03:49]
B
No.
- [03:50]
C
So then let's get to the core of the core.
- [03:51]
B
Well, the core of it is that part of this liberalization. So the hope initially, I think, was that Francis would basically maintain this kind of synthesis that I think is one of the Church's strengths, between a vision of sort of social solidarity that tends to lean to the left in certain ways on economic questions, and a vision of. Of sort of what you might call moral solidarity that emphasizes the centrality of the family, the protection of unborn human life and so on. And ultimately, what Francis has decided to do instead, I think is basically seek a kind of truce with post sexual revolution culture. And he's done this sort of, on this specific point that has involved bishops and theologians in complicated shouting matches in Rome over whether remarried, divorced and remarried Catholics can take communion without getting their first marriage annulled.
- [04:47]
C
And you have a deep problem with, say, divorced Catholics taking communion?
- [04:51]
B
Not divorced Catholics. Divorced Catholics can take communion. But I think that if the Church makes this shift, it basically means that the Church's claim to teach the indissolubility of marriage is sort of empty.
- [05:06]
C
Before we get to these arguments, let's talk a little bit about you. You were not born to conservative Catholicism or Catholic in general, right?
- [05:13]
B
No, I Was raised in a lot of different, strange places religiously. We started out as Episcopalians and then we ended up on a kind of wild tour, yeah, of American evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, all kinds of charismatic Christianity. And then we ended up becoming Catholic when I was about 16. So I'm this little known third category, neither adult convert nor cradle Catholic. But when I came in, John Paul II was pope and he sort of seemed to be offering a kind of synthesis which basically said, look, the church changed in various ways in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council, changed its attitude towards liberal democracy, changed its relationship with Judaism. But for the sake of the church's own continuity, it also has sort of maintained its resistance to a lot of the trends that came in after Vatican ii. The divorce culture, sexual revolution, generally.
- [06:10]
C
What does that mean, the divorce culture? In this way, why would a church want to get rid of, rather than bring into its fold people whose marriages, for one reason or another, have collapsed?
- [06:24]
B
I mean, I think the idea is not that the church wants to get rid of anybody. The idea is that the church is trying to be faithful to a particular moral vision in which marriage is actually something that you are supposed to do and can really only do once if it's a real marriage. And that vision, I mean, I think there's a theological case for it, but there's also a sociological argument here, which is that the idea of a welcoming church, it can have an effective cruelty toward the people who are victims of the kind of individualistic sexual culture that you have now. So if you say, you know, well, for the sake of mercy, we're going to essentially act as if second marriages are the same as first marriages, that says something to the children of the first marriage who are now told that actually the church, which was sort of the last entity, saying that your parents first marriage was a real marriage and it was the real marriage and you know that this, this is something that should have been held together, that's gone.
- [07:27]
C
Jesus was living in time when life expectancies were rather shorter than they are now, somewhat.
- [07:36]
B
Although if you survived childhood, they weren't.
- [07:38]
C
Actually, they were a hell of a lot shorter. And you're pretty young, relatively. How old are you?
- [07:45]
B
I'm 38. I'm getting up there pretty damn young.
- [07:49]
C
If, God forbid, in 10 years, for some reason your marriage went off the rails and you were to remarry, what would be the effect on you as a Catholic of not taking communion?
- [08:01]
B
I mean, I. My.
- [08:03]
C
Well, wouldn't you feel a great sense of loss?
- [08:06]
B
I think Ideally, I wouldn't remarry. Right. That I, you know. And of course, life is long and God knows what would happen. But I think I would have to have some larger intellectual change in my relationship to the faith in order to convince myself that it was right to remarry in the first place. Which is, again, yeah, it's an extreme.
- [08:29]
C
So you would disavow sex for the rest of your life?
- [08:34]
B
I mean, that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's companionship more than sex. That would be the challenging part.
- [08:39]
C
Well, they both would be challenging.
- [08:40]
B
They both would be challenging. But again, this is where, you know, in what Catholicism has traditionally taught. Right. Is that, in fact, celibacy is the highest form of the Christian life and that marriage is there for people who, you know, aren't up for celibacy, which is most of us. But I don't. Again, I don't think the idea that God could ask you to be celibate for the last 30 years of your life is an impossible ask, given the asks that are made of Christians in all kinds of complicated situations that don't have anything to do with sex and relationships and so on. And, yeah, I think a Catholicism that can't ask people to be celibate is a Catholicism that in the end isn't going to have much of a compelling claim on people at all. For the Catholic message to make sense, you have to be able to make a case that celibacy is possible for people who aren't married.
- [09:37]
C
So it's no secret to you that your views on women's rights are frequently criticized. You've argued that access to contraception and abortion gives women a degree of choice in the matter of becoming a parent. That's kind of unfair to men. I think I'm getting this right. And in the end, that's fundamentally detrimental to society.
- [09:56]
B
Oh, I don't know that I've said that. Precisely. Unfair to men, I think. I mean, if anything, what's your beef with contraception?
- [10:05]
C
Let's start with that.
- [10:05]
B
I don't have an incredibly strong beef with contraception. I mean, I think that there's a kind of contraceptive mentality that alienates people from family. I think abortion should be restricted because abortion is a form of murder. But that's different. I mean, if anything, I think in many cases the sort of post sexual revolution culture is beneficial for a certain kind of man in striking ways. Part of the sexual revolution is Gloria Steinem, but part of the sexual revolution is Hugh Hefner or Harvey Weinstein. I think There are ways in which men can be the losers from this culture insofar as it sort of deprives them of sort of clear roles. But I don't think it's anything as simple as like, men have lost from the sexual revolution and women have gained.
- [10:52]
C
You wrote in a column that people who are in support of current abortion laws are themselves extremists.
- [11:00]
B
Yes.
- [11:02]
C
Why am I an extremist?
- [11:05]
B
American abortion laws are themselves rather extreme by the standards of much of the Western world generally. Since Roe v. Wade, America has had one of the more permissive abortion regimes where second and third trimester abortions are concerned relative to France or Italy or Germany or other sort of peer countries. So in that sense, the sort of default pro choice position is more extreme in its willingness to accept killing unborn life. That's sort of the easiest.
- [11:36]
C
Is a woman who gets an abortion a murderer?
- [11:41]
B
She's a particular kind of murderer. Yes, in a sense.
- [11:44]
C
What kind?
- [11:46]
B
A kind who has committed a. She's committed an act of killing that, you know, I mean, is intentional and ends a human life.
- [11:59]
C
What should be the penalty?
- [12:00]
B
I don't think there should be any penalty for a woman who gets an abortion. I think the law should restrict and penalize doctors and others, abortionists who perform abortions. But I think the balance.
- [12:13]
C
What should the restriction be?
- [12:14]
B
The restriction should be. It should be against the law to perform abortion and there should be some jail time for abortionists.
- [12:22]
C
Now you know damn well what's coming next. And then we return to the back alley and clothes hanger.
- [12:31]
B
Do we. I mean, this is where I think there's sort of an insufficient level of actual study. And I think there's no question that if you look at countries in the developing world that have restrictions on abortion, you end up with lots of, yeah, back alley abortions and a general climate that can be terrible for women. I think if you look at countries though, in the western world that have abortion restrictions, Ireland is a country that has had a ban on abortion since its inception as a republic. And Ireland has very strong statistics when it comes to gender equity, maternal mortality and so on. The pro life movement is sort of stuck in certain ways because it's ended up united to the Republican party, which takes a sort of hostile view of social spending, obviously.
- [13:15]
C
Right. The argument is that the very same people who are the most ferocious. I'm not talking about you, but just in general most ferocious on anti abortion are also the least likely to be pro spending on all kinds of social.
- [13:28]
B
Which isn't always the case and especially again, within Catholicism. I mean, historically, prior to Roe v. Wade, many people who are now pro life Catholic Republicans were pro life Catholic Democrats. And there's a fairly strong tradition in Catholicism that's not the Republican Party. No, I agree. That's not the Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party can drift in that direction. Compassionate conservatism was sort of an attempt to move in that direction.
- [13:53]
C
At one point in the book, you compare Pope Francis, of all people, to Donald Trump and you write this. The Pope has turned out to be far more Trumpian than most of the cardinals who elected him ever anticipated. Francis opponents like Trump's feel that they're resisting an abnormal leader, a man who does not respect the rules that are supposed to bind his office. Meanwhile, to his supporters, all these discontents are vindication, evidence that he's bringing about the change required by. To make Catholicism great again.
- [14:24]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's a deliberate provocation to some extent, but obviously there's no moral comparison between the two men. You know, whatever my criticisms of Pope Francis, but in their relationship to their institutions, there are real similarities.
- [14:42]
C
Ras, this is one point of yours that I'm not getting at all. Pope Francis as opposed to his predecessor Benedict, and as opposed to John Paul and the rest, there are shades of difference, but you're portraying Francis as radically, radically different, as different as Trump is to his predecessor. Somehow I don't see that in Catholicism.
- [15:04]
B
You don't get Francis has put himself in a position where conservatives and traditionalists can at the very least raise questions and say, you're flirting with heresy. And that's a very unusual thing for a very unusual situation for a pope to find himself in. Maybe it's not as unusual as electing a billionaire populist.
- [15:33]
C
Libertine.
- [15:34]
B
Libertine as President of the United States. But on the other hand, we've only had 40 odd presidents and we've had 2,000 years of popes, and there are really very few cases where popes got into the kind of situation that Francis has gotten in, the kind of controversy.
- [15:49]
C
Now, one thing, one area where I would assume, Ross, you differ from your more liberal Catholic brethren is on questions of, say, Islam and immigration. You've been very conservative, it seems to me, on immigration, and you've been very tough on Islam. Because it seems to me, it seems to me that somebody like Pope Francis, for example, on immigration is, you know, sees it as a focus for the need for compassion, that you have enormous, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee and they're refugees I.
- [16:25]
B
Mean, I've argued that it's very risky for Europe to have any kind of open door to refugees right now.
- [16:33]
C
Yeah, your compassion seems not nearly as generous as the Pope. And how do you answer that?
- [16:39]
B
I think the Pope might. It's totally possible that the Pope is closer to the heart of the Christian message on immigration than I am. I mean, anytime you set out to be critical of the Pope as a Catholic, you can be.
- [16:51]
C
Is that a failing of yours or the Pope's?
- [16:53]
B
Oh, it would be if it's true. It's a failing of mine. It's a sign that I am sort of privileging pragmatic concerns and doubts about Europe's stability over a kind of more radical vision of love. And I could be, yeah, it could be a case where my sort of conservative temperament has led me away from the Gospels. At the same time, I think it's a mistake for liberalism, sort of abstracting from the sort of more radical question of what Christian love requires. It's a mistake for liberalism to sort of assume that the job of the statesman is to just assume that nativists can be crushed. And you don't have to deal with the reality of nativism. The good statesman has to deal with the reality that large scale population change in a swift time produces backlash, and you want to be, therefore, be careful and prudent. There's a sense in which I can see that the Pope might be right and I might be wrong. On the other hand, it's tricky to say that a Christian statesman would be one who would make choices that might end up Balkanizing his own country and sort of destroying its internal stability.
- [18:02]
C
Conservatism has had a long history in the United States, and you have written pretty forcefully about the pervasive influence of right wing talk radio and its influence on contemporary conservatism, which is far harsher, far, far more filled with all the things that we associate with Rush Limbaugh and now Fox. The harsher aspects of Fox, which are plenty. How do you go about getting rid of that? If that stuff makes you sick.
- [18:35]
B
How.
- [18:35]
C
Is the culture of conservatism going to right itself?
- [18:38]
B
I mean, this may sound like a sort of ridiculous answer, but I actually think the way the culture of conservatism, it probably only can be fixed to some extent from the top down. Well, put it this way, I think the people who supported Trump were wrong, but I think their theory that, you know, that you needed a strong president who could redefine conservatism was actually correct.
- [19:02]
C
What messiah are you waiting for? There is no in the earthly sense.
- [19:05]
B
Well, you asked me about, you know, what I think about conservatism. I have no optimism. You're just asking me how it. The only way it fixes itself, I think, is from the top. Somebody gets elected, governs well, and the party sort of conforms itself to their leadership.
- [19:20]
C
That's what I'm asking you for.
- [19:22]
B
But I don't have a candidate.
- [19:24]
C
There's no one on the horizon in the Republican Party.
- [19:26]
B
No, at the moment, I don't see. I think you could sort of take pieces of Marco Rubio, pieces of Tom Cotton, pieces of Nikki Haley, fuse them together into some ideal candidate. But that's just make believe. The figures we have right now, none of them have shown the capacity to be the leader that conservatism needs to be a good force for the common good in our society right now.
- [19:49]
C
Ross, thank you so much.
- [19:50]
B
Sure. You're very welcome. That was Ross Douthup talking to David Remnick.
- [20:09]
C
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts from prx.