What Catholics and Print Media Lose When Ross Douthat Leaves The New York Times

For nearly two decades, he demonstrated that serious Catholic thought belongs in the nation's most influential newsrooms. His absence there will be deeply felt.

Legacy print media just lost one of its few unapologetically Catholic voices. Columnist Ross Douthat announced that he’s leaving the New York Times for a new gig at Bari Weiss’s revamped CBS News’ 60 Minutes. What’s lost is not just a celebrated columnist, but an entire way of thinking. Douthat’s departure leaves a huge hole—no, a chasm—of conservative Catholics represented in legacy print media. (Bill McGurn of The Wall Street Journal, you simply can never retire.)

For Catholics who think, Vatican-wise, that “as Rome goes, so goes the world,” they’ve lost the voice of a practicing, fairly conservative Catholic who consistently highlighted Church news—from the picayune to the significant, the mundane to the momentous.

For Douthat, at the end of the day the Church, capital C, matters. For liberal Catholic Times readers, especially those “credentialed” academics, the great thorn in their side is gone; Douthat’s support of Church teaching was so...not cool. They may see his exit as some kind of a win. And for Times readers who consider the comments section of a Douthat piece therapy for anti-Catholic screeds, well it’s a mixed bag; they’ve lost their love-to-hate-on white, patriarchal whipping boy. Wherever will they go?

Douthat Wrote about the Catholic Church Frequently

A quick search shows just how central Catholic themes and prelates—lots of prelates—were for Douthat in his 17 years at the Times. Pope Francis claims the top spot (not just in columns, but in a book, too), followed by Pope Benedict XVI. He frequently wrote pieces peppered with cardinals—Burke, Kasper, Müller, and Dolan—as if they actually mattered. (They do.) Douthat also brought to the pages of the Grey Lady a whole lexicon of terms—“dubia,” “Traditionis Custodes,” Regensburg, and, let’s not forget Synod and Synodality—that I fear will now show up far less frequently, and with far less nuance.

Last fall, I attended a debate between Douthat and secularist Phil Zuckerman on “Should Everyone Be Religious?” Afterward, it was notable that Douthat had an eager group of students around him, intent on continuing the discussion. He seemed overwhelmed, yet delighted, to have such earnest questions while people shoved their books at him for signing. For that crowd, Douthat’s cool factor was certainly visible.

He was genuinely convivial with Zuckerman, and on his podcast, Interesting Times, he features guests with whom he might be at odds doctrinally (Fr. James Martin, SJ, for example) and culturally (Chase Strangio, for example). But there was always an olive branch amid the edginess he provoked; Douthat genuinely wanted to know how his interlocutor thought. You don’t find a replacement for that kind of skill and temperament in the phone book.

The loss of a highly visible Catholic writer in a deeply secular global publication goes far beyond Catholic discussions. Journalists, writing in both established publications and fledgling ones, have taken many of these conversations to paid-subscription digital rooms and newsletters, far away from the clacking typewriters of a more diverse newsroom like I once inhabited at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Echo Chambers of News Do Not Serve Us Well

There, you might not like someone’s politics, but you still could end up across the street at the Heidelberg restaurant and bar and have a beer together after putting the paper to bed. Now, posting a story remotely—or, as your own publisher, pushing “send” in a coffee shop—doesn’t nurture camaraderie at the water cooler with colleagues who have different political or cultural or religious views.

Our echo chambers, our bubbles, are not serving us well. The problem today? How many e-newsletter emails from Substack—and the legacy media—can you handle in a day? It would be far more efficient, if legacy media would allow it, to have diverse opinions under one “roof.” Today you pay for the people you like. Your subscription does not offer oppositional op-eds that infuriate you.

I routinely watched my mother’s blood boil after reading the Times, dutifully marching to her IBM Selectric, lighting up a Kent and letting a letter to the editor rip. They never published one, but she did appear in a handful of conservative Catholic publications. Still, it was good for her to be reminded on a daily basis that, for most people, especially Times readers, “as Rome goes…” is not a sentiment widely shared.

And it is also good for people, especially Times readers, to be reminded that Catholicism continues to have an outsized influence in our culture. No religious figurehead garners the interest across the globe like Pope Leo XIV does. His every move is chronicled, even in the Church-antagonistic Times.

Catholic News Sells

Catholic subjects sell papers, movies, and tickets. Conclave was a box-office hit; ecclesial garb inspired the Met’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit, and athletes’ Catholic faith repeatedly cropped up in World Cup stories. This past week’s Catholic viral “thing” is the Birkenstock-clad nuns, but there are always baseball nuns—and endless SNL skits. SSPX split? The world watches Catholics fight…and fight. Catholics hold a majority on the Supreme Court, and how about sexual politics? Every election, Catholics are often on opposing sides of hot-button issues, and the media loves divisive soundbites from both camps.

That Douthat knows how to write intelligently and honestly about these Catholic issues is a big deal. That’s no small thing when you consider the consistent and persistent errors, untruths, and misrepresentations about Catholicism that Baylor University professor Rodney Stark, a Baptist, has catalogued in an entire book, Bearing False Witness.

Douthat confidently wove Catholicism into his writing—he could not not do this—which brought him under fire regularly. He has been walking a fine line as a public Catholic for years.

Douthat Publicly Professed His Faith

Joan Frawley Desmond interviewed him in 2012 about that tension. When she asked how he dealt with the “powerful forces of partisanship” at play in politics and journalism, Douthat replied, “What did St. Paul say: ‘I work out my career in fear and trembling?’ I don’t want to hold myself up as an example. To the extent that I aspire to anything in the marriage of faith and career, it is to be engaged in major political debates, while also remembering that my first loyalty is to my faith and not to partisanship.”

While one hopes Douthat will take his catechism with him to CBS, it won’t be the same to see him on television as it was in print. His column percolated with ideas that often brimmed with a Catholic sensibility hard to find in progressive-leaning publications. Like all of us, he was shaken and devastated by the sexual abuse crisis, but he was—is—at the end of the day, a son, and friend, of the Catholic Church. For an essay in The Lamp Magazine, he referred to himself, a convert at age 17, as an “accidental pilgrim,” confessing, “I found in Catholicism coherent answers that seemed sensible, balanced, intuitively plausible.”

Speculation about his replacement has begun in earnest. Given the 2,000-year history of the Church—the late Vatican journalist John Allen called the papacy “the most important soft power on the face of the earth”—Catholics, and all readers, deserve an authentic Catholic voice and witness in the so-called paper of record. All I can hope and pray for as Ross Douthat begins his new role at CBS is that the Times will replace him with a Catholic who, like Douthat, can say: “My first loyalty is to my faith and not to partisanship.”

Betsy Fentress is a Fellow at The Catholic Association and editor of the TCA Substack.