I’ve spent most of my life defending and advancing the claims of the Catholic Church. In fact, I’ve written nine books doing just that. And my commitment goes back much further. In high school, I risked expulsion by defying, then publicly exposing, the modernist heresies of my libertine, quasi-Marxist religion teachers. I skipped our high school prom to go on retreat with the pious old gents of our Holy Name Society.
At Yale, I became a social leper by defending the Church’s moral teaching about sexuality at the hot beating heart of the burgeoning LGBT movement — telling anyone who would listen that it wasn’t Yuri Andropov’s Soviet Union that really threatened the West so much as these young conformist preppies wearing pink triangle buttons. (Sadly, my prophecy came true.) I published op-eds opposing the Sexual Revolution and defending the unborn.
In grad school I started an alternative to our heretical campus ministry, and through our talks and Bible studies we produced multiple converts and religious vocations. My dissertation was on Catholic author Walker Percy, and back in New York City I helped organize revived celebrations of the traditional Latin Mass.
So it’s with the heaviest of hearts, after years of black agonizing that often nudged me close to depression, that I say now … I simply don’t know what to say. I’m speechless. I don’t have any answers. I don’t even have a theory.
I haven’t come to doubt any tenets of the Catholic faith. I love my parish and pastor. But the character, behavior, and public statements of Pope Francis, and the allies he pushed into power, are more than a scandal or stumbling block. They’re a Berlin Wall, complete with snipers, who stop my thought dead in its tracks.
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