To understand the Francis papacy—its promise, its perils, and the profound divisions it has caused—it helps to look at a recent exchange between the Pope and a young boy named Emanuele on the outskirts of Rome.

The encounter in question occurred two weeks after Easter, during a papal visit to St. Paul of the Cross Parish. After touring a ramshackle public housing complex and ministering to the parish’s poor and elderly, Francis fielded questions from parishioners—a common-enough feature of such visits. But when young Emanuele stepped to the microphone and broke down in sobs, unable to articulate his question, there followed the kind of unscripted, inclusive moral gesture that has been a hallmark of this papacy.

“Come, come to me, Emanuele,” the Pope beckoned the boy. “Come and whisper it in my ear.” After hearing the boy’s plea in private, Francis relayed the essence to the crowd: Emanuele was crying for his deceased father, a non-believer but a “good man” whose four children had all been baptized. “Is dad in heaven?” he wanted to know.

The Pope responded with a message of mercy and compassion, albeit tinged with ambiguity. Praising the boy’s “beautiful witness” and courage, Francis demurred on his own ability to make such pronouncements: “God is the one who says who goes to heaven.” Yet his subsequent call-and-response with the crowd left no doubt about Francis’s leanings: “What do you think? . . . God has a dad’s heart. And with a dad who was not a believer, but who baptized his children . . . do you think God would be able to leave him far from himself? […] Does God abandon his children?” No, the crowd shouted back. “There, Emanuele, that is the answer. God surely was proud of your father,” the pontiff responded, before encouraging Emanuele to pray for his father’s soul.

In many ways, this story is the Francis papacy in miniature. For the Pope’s many supporters, both within and outside the Church, it distills the essence of his appeal: his visible, Christ-like demonstrations of mercy and comfort; his pastoral focus on ministering to the complex human needs of those he encounters; his elevation of “discernment” over rigidly applied doctrine; and his evangelizing impulse in traveling to the peripheries of society to spread the good news. For many admirers of Francis, such gestures hold the long-term promise of a healthier and more inclusive Church: more open, less insular, less judgmental, more attuned to the complexities of modern life.

To Francis’s traditionalist critics, on the other hand, the episode might look less benign. In this view, Francis’s appeals to mercy mask a dangerous flirtation with heresy: the suggestion, however tentative, that salvation can be attained without belief in Christ. True, Francis may not have officially contradicted Church teaching; the “no salvation outside the Church” principle has been qualified and re-interpreted over the years to reject strictly literalist interpretations. Yet Francis’s reassuring answer to Emanuele, with its strategic hedging and use of rhetorical questions, nonetheless illustrates a tendency often viewed with alarm by Francis’s critics: a propensity for doctrinal confusion, and a preference for easy comfort over hard truths.

In the United States, there has perhaps been no critic more prominent than Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist. In a series of dispatches over the five years of Francis’s papacy—and now in his new book, To Change the Church—Douthat has been a lonely voice of dissent against a pope treated by much of the press as a heroic figure. At the core of Douthat’s critique are the Pope’s controversial efforts to re-shape Church doctrine on the family, and specifically to open communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. In this seemingly abstruse sacramental debate Douthat sees a larger story, and a greater threat: that Pope Francis will bend Church teaching to its breaking point, ultimately producing a schism.

The stakes, Douthat tells us, could not be higher: not just for Catholics, whose leader he claims risks breaking faith with the Gospel, but for Christians and theological conservatives more broadly, who should care about what kind of precedent the Catholic Church sets in its engagement with the modern world. Douthat depicts the current moment as a crucial turning point for the Church, set against a broader political crisis of liberalism in the West. And the course of action he advises is one familiar to our political moment as well: resistance.

From the outset, Douthat claims that his subject “cannot be written about neutrally,” beginning a personal preface that explains his own strange path to faith. In his telling, he is the “little-known third category” of Catholic: neither a cradle Catholic, baptized at birth and born into the Church’s traditions, nor an adult convert who took the plunge entirely on his own. A child of divorce exposed to various Protestant churches early on, Douthat converted as a teenager, but did so in large part at his mother’s urging, making his a “half-chosen and half-inherited faith.”

Douthat writes eloquently about how this upbringing informs his present faith. He describes himself as “the good bad Catholic or the bad good one”: the kind who takes his religion seriously, aspires to adhere to it, and attends mass every Sunday, but who also questions whether he would have joined the Church of his own accord, who second-guesses his belief, who internally debates Pascal’s Wager ad nauseam even as he drags himself to the nearest mass that suits his schedule. In truth, this angst is hardly unique to Douthat: Speaking for myself, the youngest in a practicing Irish Catholic family and the product of Catholic education from kindergarten through college, it was familiar enough to register as a self-portrait.

For Douthat, the upshot is that he wants a Church that imposes strict doctrine, that demands he uphold a more rigorous form of the faith than he can sometimes muster, rather than one that changes the rules to make his practice easier. This perspective informs the critical view of Francis that runs through the book. Yet Douthat’s confessional disclosure is also an effective credibility-building exercise for readers of the opposite persuasion.

In that spirit of that disclosure, I should confess that I am one such reader. Unlike Douthat, my political sympathies tend more left than right; my theological sympathies, more toward Francis’s vivid displays of mercy than Benedict XVI’s pious disquisitions on doctrine. Yet I found myself disarmed by his admirably frank opening, complete with its mea culpas. Douthat establishes himself early on as both even-handed and intellectually honest. He is a reluctant critic of Francis, not a reflexive one; he is firm in his convictions but not possessed of unyielding certitude; above all, he is more interested in persuading than scolding. His book is ultimately a polemic, but it’s one that gives a fair hearing to opposing views.

His early chapter on Vatican II, which Douthat rightly identifies as the source of the Church’s present divides, is a case in point. Douthat offers “three stories” about its uncertain legacy: one, the “master narrative” of liberal Catholics, who believe that the council’s reformist, modernizing spirit was betrayed by the reactionary doctrinal backlash of John Paul II and Benedict XVI; another, the master narrative of conservative Catholics, who believe the council’s limited reforms were willfully hijacked by those pushing ever-greater concessions to modernity, before John Paul II and Benedict righted the ship. He then attempts a synthesis, tilted toward the conservative view but crediting arguments on both sides, to argue that Vatican II resulted above all in an “uneasy truce,” promising renewal but in practice prolonging the Church’s divisions.

According to Douthat, the Francis papacy began with a genuine opportunity to transcend these divides: “Indeed,” he writes, “it promised to highlight, usefully, the ways in which those divides aren’t necessarily as binary as the language of ‘left’ and ‘right’ suggests.” Unlike many conservative Catholics, Douthat seems essentially untroubled by the pope’s critiques of unfettered capitalism, or his prioritization of climate change as developed in the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. He suggests that Francis’s embrace of figures like Archbishop Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day—much beloved on the Catholic Left—could facilitate a newfound appreciation of their contributions to Catholic social teaching on the Right, leading to a healthy depolarization in the Church. And in probing Bergoglio’s biography, he eschews the caricature of Francis the radical leftist, explaining how he fought against extreme versions of Marxist liberation theology as Jesuit provincial in Argentina.

In short, Douthat concedes that Francis had the makings of a moderate pope—or at least, one who could have productively challenged the limitations of both factions. Had Francis rigorously upheld doctrinal orthodoxy while still maintaining his focus on social justice and his countercultural critiques of modernity, he might have fulfilled “the promise of a new Catholic center.”

Instead, Douthat argues, Francis’s leadership has left the Church dangerously uncentered, and uncertain of its own teaching. The heart of his critique concerns the Pope’s two synods on the family, convened in 2014 and 2015, which considered whether the Church might allow, under certain circumstances, Catholics who had divorced and remarried to receive Communion without obtaining an annulment.¹ Douthat deftly sketches the stakes of the theological debate, tracing the Church’s teaching on marriage back to the Marcan passage where Jesus challenges the Pharisees’ understanding of marriage to uphold a more rigorous rule: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” For Douthat this teaching is central, not incidental, to Catholic theology, and an instance where the Church has rightly adhered to the plain meaning of the Gospel even as more lax denominations have found reason to soften it. Inviting divorced and remarried Catholics back to Communion because the former teaching was too hard, Douthat argues, would mean contradicting Jesus’ own clear moral instructions. And if such a fundamental moral teaching can be changed, then in theory any Church teaching can.

Douthat’s slippery-slope argument has been challenged by more credentialed, Francis-friendly theologians, but his reasoning is sound enough. The problem is that his theological convictions inevitably seep into, and prejudice, his accounts of the worldly debate. Douthat’s treatment of the marriage controversy doubles as a story of hardball Vatican politics: a battle of wills between Cardinal Walter Kasper, the liberal German newly ascendant under Francis, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American traditionalist who has led the resistance against his family agenda. As secondhand palace intrigue, this section is compelling enough.

But it’s also where Douthat’s prejudices show up most plainly, where he seems most susceptible to confirmation bias, and where his depiction of Francis becomes less than charitable. He relies heavily on cherry-picked quotations and sweeping summaries of the synod proceedings to depict the traditionalists as a besieged minority, blindsided by the machinations of a shadowy liberal cabal seeking to rig the synod in its favor.² Douthat acknowledges that the synod did not ultimately change Church teaching, but gestures at vague “rumors” and “talk” that it could have been much worse, that “the pope’s collaborators” had planned to pre-write the synod’s documents to fit their own conclusions, and would have, were it not for the vocal resistance they met.

Tellingly, Douthat’s previous acknowledgments of Francis’ virtues seem to go out the window in this section, in favor of an isolated, angry, and manipulative figure, a man “boiling with anger” and railing Lear-like against the traditionalists who resist his edicts or do not flatter his beliefs. This is a feature, not a bug, of his narrative: In some sense Douthat needs this sinister image of Francis to sustain his portrait of the Pope as a doctrinal revolutionary, and to justify his own reaction against him.

It is not a portrait constructed entirely out of whole cloth, admittedly: Pope Francis has been known to inveigh against traditionalists in harsh terms, likening them to latter-day Pharisees, and he has made full use of his papal prerogatives to sideline rivals. But Douthat fails to consider how the Pope has not pushed his authority as far as he might. “His Holiness Declines to Comment” is the title of one chapter, its implication being that Francis prefers to stay deliberately silent on controversial matters of doctrine, allowing wiggle room for liberal bishops to interpret his true agenda in the most progressive way possible. It’s a plausible reading, to be sure—that the pope might settle for a studied ambiguity on such matters for now, tacitly giving a permission slip to the Church’s liberals until, after enough time, the weight of Catholic practice allows for a fuller doctrinal revolution down the line.

Left unexplored by Douthat, though, is the extent to which Francis’s silence is also a refusal to explicitly change Catholic doctrine, even if his most liberal acolytes might prefer that he do so. In other words, the Pope may care more about continuity than Douthat gives him credit for. And in harping on the Communion issue specifically, Douthat neglects the many other areas where Francis has unambiguously upheld orthodox teachings, to the disappointment of the Church’s liberalizers. His denunciation of the teaching of transgender ideas in school (which he has called “ideological colonization”) is one example; so too is his firm stance against euthanasia, which he has denounced as “always wrong.”³

The book’s doctrinal critique culminates with a discussion of Amoris Laetitia, the lengthy papal exhortation that came out of the family debates. Amoris did not explicitly alter Church teaching; among other things, it unambiguously affirmed Church teaching on homosexuality, stating that same-sex unions were not “even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.” But on the Communion question, Douthat sees it as a muddled statement, altering the spirit of the law if not the letter, while engaging in a confused dialectic with John Paul II’s teaching on the family in order to do an end run around it. (One discursive footnote in Amoris arguably refutes his teaching that remarried Catholics should live “as brother and sister” if they are to receive Communion; another vaguely hints at opening up Communion to couples in non-marital relationships). The practical consequences are that different dioceses have interpreted Amoris in different ways, with some liberal Europeans rushing to give Communion to the remarried, while traditionalists fight a rearguard action to resist those interpretations and clarify that the practice remains prohibited. It is in these internecine splits that Douthat sees the seeds of schism.

Perhaps—and yet for all his concern over that prospect, Douthat ultimately hedges about where the Francis papacy is heading. Late in the book, he offers two historical parallels from church history that could clarify the present moment. First, there is the comparison to Arianism: a fourth-century heresy, accommodated for a time but ultimately rejected, which denied Jesus’ full divinity. This is Douthat’s scenario for how traditionalists could still “win” in the long term: by resisting Francis’s changes, even at the risk of exile or censure, just as past Church fathers like Athanasius resisted the Arian heresy before the rest of the Church came around. But then, Douthat says the current controversy may be more like the Jansenist-Jesuit debates of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. This suggests how the traditionalists could lose, just as the Jansenists—an ascetic semi-Calvinist sect that taught predestination and justification by faith alone—were ultimately kicked out of the Church, their arguments discredited.

Here, Douthat’s penchant for equivocation gets the better of him, and his admirable tendency to hear all sides only papers over the uncertainties in his own conclusions. In the second scenario, Douthat initially expresses some admiration for the Jansenists’ moral rigor, writing that the Jesuits did not “necessarily have the more theologically decisive argument” over them. But he then casts them as “theological rebels,” noting that the analogy to today’s traditionalists is an imperfect one. He then further muddies his meaning, saying that, actually, today’s progressives share similar premises as the heretical Jansenists, in their understanding that God’s law is impossible to live up to in the modern world. In sum, the chapter reads less as a thorough elaboration of the parallel than as a hesitant, overqualified testing out of various contradictory theses.

Douthat saves his most provocative comparison for last. In a final chapter placing the Francis era in the context of the West’s populist moment, he likens Pope Francis to Donald Trump.⁴ This is a fraught analogy, he acknowledges, given all their ideological differences, and it has already provoked much outrage among the pope’s admirers. But perhaps it is worth taking seriously. Both men have a penchant for shocking, off-the-cuff statements, which their advisers have to qualify or walk back. Both are beset by rival factions trying to get their ear, scheming and leaking to shape their narrative. Both are populists, after a fashion: focused on the masses while scornful of hierarchies and traditional norms about how to carry out the duties of their office. “Francis’s opponents, like Trump’s,” writes Douthat, “feel that they’re resisting an abnormal leader, a man who does not respect the rules that are supposed to bind his office.”

Yet if the Trump comparison is worth pondering, so too are the ways in which Douthat at times resembles Trump’s most hysterical critics. For one there is his tendency to rely on thinly sourced hearsay that’s just too good to pass up. Second, there is his celebration of those who stand in Francis’s way, a tendency to turn the papacy into a simplistic heroes-and-villains story with those who resist the pope (the Deep Church?) firmly in the former camp. Like Trump’s critics, he depicts his subject in somewhat inconsistent terms, given the needs of the moment: At times he is a careless bumbler, unintentionally sowing confusion; at times he is a master manipulator, implementing a devious agenda. Like them, too, he occasionally indulges in fanciful scenarios about a successor who can roll back all of the populist’s changes and restore the status quo ante.⁵

And like Trump’s critics, he is sometimes prone to over-reaction, oblivious to the risks of endorsing the breaking of norms in an effort to correct a perceived norm-breaker in high office. Douthat seems to tacitly approve the bold moves of Cardinal Raymond Burke, the Francis foil and radical traditionalist who has all but accused the Pope of heresy, and publicly challenged the orthodoxy of his teachings in Amoris Laetitia. If the Francis resistance has a natural leader, it is Cardinal Burke—and Douthat says, only half joking, that he could one day be canonized and remembered as a “lion of orthodoxy” for his trouble.

But there is, I might suggest, a more prudent course than the outright resistance embodied by Burke. Indeed, it is one suggested by Benedict XVI himself. Late in the book, Douthat quotes the words of the Pope Emeritus, spoken last year at the eulogy for the traditionalist Cardinal Joachim Meisner:

What particularly impressed me from my last conversations with the now passed Cardinal was the relaxed cheerfulness, the inner joy and the confidence at which he had arrived. We know that this passionate shepherd and pastor found it difficult to leave his post, especially at a time in which the Church stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age and who live and think the faith with determination. However, what moved me all the more was that, in this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even if the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.

This passage has been widely, and plausibly, interpreted as an attack on Francis’s doctrinal agenda by the former Pope. Yet as Douthat also notes, it did not “call for rebellion or resistance” or suggest that Benedict regretted his resignation. “If it implied a message to Francis’s open critics,” he goes on, “it was one of patience, trust and prayer. If the conservatives were ultimately right about the controversies of the Francis era, then by their own premises their vindication was already somehow prepared—in God’s time, not man’s.”

Perhaps this message, and the example set by Francis’s predecessor, is one that Douthat himself might heed. Instead of mounting the barricades and rallying the troops to rebuke the Pope, he might take a cue from Benedict: to uphold Church teaching faithfully and live it “with determination,” yes—but also to walk humbly, to trust that “the Lord does not abandon his Church.” He might also take comfort that Benedict has taken pains to emphasize continuity in the Church, recently praising Francis’s “profound philosophical and theological education” and noting the “interior continuity between the two pontificates, notwithstanding all the differences in style and temperament.”

This is not to say that Douthat’s critique is without merit, or his concerns invalid. He is right to say that the Church cannot be “a ship of Theseus in which every single part can be changed,” and he is right to reject a Hegelian notion of a Church evolving into ever-more enlightened positions over time. Yet he is also right to note that the Church has made many accommodations to modernity already: “We are almost all adaptationists…in contemporary Catholic debates,” he concedes at one point. This granted, the question then becomes where to draw the line, and whether a provisional, discretionary opening of Communion to some remarried Catholics really is the orthodoxy-shattering, Church-rupturing event that Douthat claims it is.

I remain unconvinced. And for all his dire, hour-is-late warnings, Douthat himself is honest enough to admit that he could be wrong about it all. That’s a sign of his admirable intellectual humility, which combined with his erudition and eloquence, makes To Change the Church a book worth reading and wrestling with. But it’s also an expression of doubt that makes his unflinching opposition all the more dubious—a risky gamble that could precipitate exactly the outcome he wants to avoid. This is a danger to which Douthat and his fellow Francis critics ultimately remain blind: that in pressing for resistance where it is not warranted, they could heighten the Church’s divisions and make a schism more likely, not less.

Listen to Ross Douthat discuss the book on The American Interest Podcast.