Op-Ed | Staying Catholic at Christmas: A Gospel reading for the scandal in the church

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ross Douthat

A visitor prays in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the nation's largest Catholic church, in Washington, D.C. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

At Mass this Christmas Eve, many Catholics who have spent a year reading headlines about abusive priests, indifferent bishops, predatory cardinals and Vatican corruption will sit and hear the long roll of Jesus’s ancestors with which the Gospel of Matthew begins. The more you know about Genesis or Chronicles or Kings, the more remarkable it is that Matthew announced the birth of the son of God by linking him to a pack of egregious sinners. Then he offers examples of just how squalid things got among those long-dead Israelites. If you find it strangely compelling, then you’re close to the case for remaining Catholic at a time when the corruption of the church is driving a number of very public defections from the faith. It is the season’s promise, and in the long run its testable hypothesis, that those who stay and pray and fight will see it improbably reborn. [More]