Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…But more people would become priests if they could marry. See, I’m not completely sure. I think you would see a temporary bump in the number of people becoming priests, but in general, there’s a problem of talent recruitment for mainline Protestant denominations, too. And also — this is the more Catholic argument — there’s a dynamic relationship in a healthy Christianity between a church having strong models of celibate life and strong models of married life. When that goes away, in fact, married life gets harder, too, because there’s this sense that everyone is supposed to get married. If you’re not married, you’re defective, and marriage is the highest form of life. So, if your marriage isn’t particularly happy, then you should get out of it and find a better marriage. In fact, I think having a commitment to celibacy at the heart of your religion is better for the diversity of human types and experiences than just making marriage the summit of all things. And it’s also — this is more of the argument of my last book than this one, but they relate to one another, I suppose — part of what I find attractive and persuasive about Catholicism is that, not always and everywhere, but in particular ways, it has preserved commitments to the radical side of the New Testament, the nonbourgeois side. I think that’s true in the Church’s resistance to divorce, which has crumbled a bit under this pontificate, but it’s true in issues of celibacy as well. If you read the New Testament, and especially if you read the Gospels, but Paul’s letters too, you would not come away convinced that this is a religion that’s all about Ross Douthat and his wife and four kids as the model Christian, right? The model Christian is somebody doing something much more radical. And if you drop that or downgrade it from its position in the church, then a piece of New Testament radicalism goes away. And you know that New Testament radicalism is literally what I think God has given us in his most direct and intimate revelation. So it would be a bad idea to jettison it. Here’s a reader question: “I believe 95 percent of Catholic universities are Catholic in name only. Does he agree? In what direction does he hope for the future of Catholic universities? Should the Church withdraw its sanction?”…

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