wages for the wealthy are continually increasing. i will now be going into the job market where there are not a lot of jobs. many that congress doesn't seem to care about. librarian here at salt lake community college library. an important issue for the state of utah is overpopulation. population isera the root cause of our societal problems. i do feel like that is possibly the most important issue facing our state as well as our city on a global scale. all of that. >> voices from the states, part of c-span's 50 capitals tour.

and our stop in salt lake city utah. >> this week on cue and day, new ross.imes columnist he discusses his book to change the church, pope francis and the future of catholicism. ♪ brian: ross douthat, when you were here nine years ago, here is what you said about the republican party. [video clip] ross: i think the republican party is roughly where the democratic party was around the time that ronald reagan was elected president, which is to say it is coming off a long period of logical dominance and it has lost its dominance temporarily.

the question is how long will it take for the party to come back politically and intellectually as well. [end veo cli brian:that was 2009. what do you say today? ross: i would say did not take that long for them to come back politically. whether they have come back intellectual he is an open question. we often have this nice idea that a party loses power because it does not have any ideas anymore and goes into the wilderness and find new ideas and is rewarded for those new ideas and is ushered into power. history does not work that neatly.

probably we should have all been aware of that to begin with. the republican party has regained and maintained power primarily through a kind of anti-liberalism that has been pretty successful because liberalism has been culturally successful in various ways and the republicans have been able to ride a political backlash against that. devoted toprise creative policy, thinking the republican party is still in the way it was with donald trump being this fascinating figure, because in many ways he was kind of a policy innovator in his crude way during the primary campaign. he ran against conservatism. up on the debate stage and marco rubio would say you're not a conservative and he uld say who cares?

was the closest thing to innovation the republicans have had. trump being trump, he never had a plan to operationalize much of that on economics. the party has fallen back into the same kind of -- i used the term zombie-reaganism. same idea the parties have put forward before. then you cut taxes and you call it a day. >> how has your thinking changed? you were here nine yard -- nine years ago. you are just writing a digital column in the newspaper at this point. how has your thinking changed if at all? corrects it is a funny thing.

certain ways the trumpet era has partially vindicated some of the things i thought of as a young man with more hair and less experience. victorytrumps rise in shows that the republican party is an empty vessel and the populism. me where the republican party would go, i would say things that resembled what trump has done. in a lesse them substantive way and morally darker way. i think i would have envisioned, as an optimal scenario, a kind of pan ethnic populism. he started his presidential as a birth certificate

conspiracy theorist. something i imagine would have been partially fulfilled but not at all in a way i have expected. i think the whole trump experience should make everybody think either a little more pessimistically or creatively. maybe those two things go together with the kind of for ourwe nd to make political parties and our system of government to work again. i think trumps election is a sign of increment that incrementalist divisions and change on the right and left may not be equal in occasion. time between last and now, i have spent championing and working with a bunch of writers and over form conservatives.

we had incremental policies that moved the republican policy to the center. if you had me three years ago i would have said slowly but surely we are pulling the republican party in the right direction. i think trump came along and blue that all up and left those of us that write about policy and try to imagine the new conservative policy thinking, i think we should feel our efforts were insufficient and we miss read where the country was and the seriousness of a lot of our problems here in bc. time thatd us last you started among other places with atlantic. james bennett had an editorial page, editor of the new york times, do you work for him? >> i do. i'm not based in new york right now. i don't see him in the office every day.

he's my boss. i like him, in case he's watching right now. >> whawould he say your columns are about? >> i think that he would say that part of my job that hopefully i have been doing issonably well, everyone aware that the new york times is a fairly liberal leadership. think one of the dangers that liberals as well as conservatives that i was talking about, fall into, sort of an inside the bubble thinking. i think he would say the job of a good conservative columnist is in part to expose readers to ideas outside the bubble that interests them without infuriating them or alienating

them or make them dismiss conservatism as simple bigotry or simple racism. so to the extent that he thinks i'm doing a good job, i think it's trying toay do things thoslines, helping to make the page a place that reveals all the world in all its complexity. need some people writing from a conservative perspective to do that. >> do you write your own headlines? >> not only -- not always, but i have say. says pope francis is beloved, his papacy may be a disaster. >> i was partially responsible. >> let me read the first paragraph and i will ask you about your book, the conversation has become predictable. a frilly acquaintance, a neighbor, a fellow parent, a

real estate agent asks about my work. a book have been writing about the pope, and the acquaintance smiles and ds and says, "isn't he so wonderful." or "he must be an inspiring thing." or i have a friend who would love to read it. eventually i for myself saying uncomfortably, they should know it's not entirely favorable. it's not entirely favorable, a book about pope francis. >> it's a book that tries to take in his whole papacy. frances is probably the most fascinating religious figure. he is certainly a figure the people in my profession and the media have been most interested in. as john paul ii was in a different way before him, he's a celebrity pope. he's a pope who successfully harnessed the popes position as a focal point for media coverage cases church to, in many

remarkable effect. he thithe chureeds to ways, in various particularly, i think, around issues related to the sectoral revolution. said these basically are changes the church can't make. they have been these fraught places in his pontificate where he has clashed with cardinals canbishops over how far he push the church to change, how far the church can change without undercutting its own traditions. part of the book is trying to which is just, independent of how fondly you feel about the pope. it is just an interesting religious story that has implications for every other

religious tradition engaged in a similar wrestling match with modern society. ultimately the book has judgments. is on a lot of these issues. the pope has been making a mistake. journalist, i'm not a theologian or bishop. my authority is necessarily limited. i'm speaking for a lot of people who are no -- who are more theologically experienced in various ways than i am. this job translates high-level debates for many institutions into a store that people left plugged into it can understand. there is obviously something presumptuo for any catholic writer criticizing the pope. offer the criticism with an appropriate dose of humility.

in offering it on speaking for an important part of the church and explaining an important side in what is the most important religious argument going on in the western world and arguably the whole world today. >> one more recent thing that is there isy eye anlow named -- i have article from the catholic herald of great britain. this is from an interview that he had with him. i will show you some video in a second. the souls of those who did not repent and could not be forgiven -- not be forgiven disappeared. what exists is the disappearance of sinful souls. when we all read that a few nowhs ago before easter --

we don't haveab tt g toell, o solers disappears. video, he'syou some 93 and has a newspaper called republic of in rome and italy. withe conversation started some jokes, because that's his way. he says some of my advisors want me to be careful talking to you because you are a clever man and he will try to convert me. me, converting the pope. >> the pope had invited him for a chat. --would be a wide-ranging wide-ranging discussion that attracted worldwide attention. what came to the church hierarchy, francis was on -- uncompromising. of the church have often

been saying as narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their court hearings. the court is the leprosy of the paper see that of the papacy. and i will do everything to change it. is the great voice of will lyman and the frontline of pbs p at he probably pronounces his name correctly, i didn't. >> essentially the popes a kind ofombines absolute power with absolu limits on his power. he is the monarch of the catholic church. -- says goes,o except that is pope he should not be of change anything. the entire doctor of people in fallibility, he is in fact this limit imposed on the pope. the pope is supposed to be protected by the holy spirit from saying anything that contradicts what passed popes have taught or said.

pope is very aware of this , these pressure constraintonth can do. , who is n iws his early 90's, but as you can see from the video, he is healthy in various ways. he doesn't take notes in the interviews. an atheist journalist in italy who doesn't take notes and reconstructs the conversations from memory. what having conversations with this journalist does for francis, i think, is it enables him to basically float theological speculations that a in ais not able to float deniable, you can't he said it that way. so he is probably getting part of what francis says wrong. i think that's a reasonable assumption. at the same time the holy father

has conducted five separate conversations with him, in which the health case is an extreme example. he floats theological speculations that skirts the boundary of catholic orthodox. is ank what you see there pope trying to find ways, in some cases, to explicitly change the church. i would think he would say and openness for conversation and debate around official teachings. catholics use the word magisterial to describe an informal papal teaching. it supposedly with the popes have always taught and said. of --red that he sort he's sort of stepping outside that role. he obviously has an awareness that if he talks to scout far he

about hell, what he says will around the world. so there is a kind of intentionality about this that is the pope's way of dealing with these powerful constraints on the office. brian: what do you think of this idea of talking with scalfari, who is an atheist and doesn't take notes? ross: my reaction is, oh, lord, help us. not again. i don't think it is helpful to the catholic faith to have a pope sort of doing this. i think if the pope wants to introduce different theological ideas about hell, he should be sort of open enough to do it publicly and risk the backlash.

the controversy, and so on. and francis, to his credit, has done that on divorce and marriage and whether catholics remarried without annulment can take communion. that is a central controversy of his pontificate. there, francis did push for a certain change. he let bishops argue it out in these two senates in rome. the reaction from the bishops put limits on what he could do. but his response to those limits was similarly a kind of ambiguity, where he issued a long document on marriage that included a small footnote that seemed to open the door to communion for the remarried and basically became a permission slip for some countries and some dioceses and some bishops to go one direction while others went another. the ultimate effect is a kind of

shift for the catholic church toward a slightly more anglican model. the anglican church had ideas about communion, substantiation, different ideas about hierarchy, different liturgical forms, all of these things, without central doctrinal teaching that has been the selling point of the catholic church. you know where the catholic church stands. the anglican model hasn't been working well for the anglicans. they have had schisms and almost-schisms. taking the catholic church in that direction is a betrayal of what the pope is supposed to do. the pope is supposed to provide unity and continuity rather than opening a perpetual conversation about what catholicism is.

brian: let me be very simple. why would god care at the end of someone's life whether they fussed all over this liturgical stuff, divorce, not divorce, if you have basically been a good person all your life? are you going to be -- i guess there is a hell. he rejected that, basically, saying he did not say that. ross: the church is still teaches that there is the possibility of hell. it does not have a view on exactly how many people are there. brian: why all of this handwringing whether you are a protestant or a catholic or a jew? in the end, isn't it about how you lived your life and whether you have been a decent human being? ross: to some extent, yes. but these issues are from the caliphate point of view and also the point of view of most religions, markers of that question.

the state of a person's soul, what comes across in a secular frame as are you a good person or not is really a question of the state of your soul after 30 or 40 or 60 or 70 years of life. what kind of condition is your soul in? from the catholic perspective, the condition of your soul is shaped by the moral choices that you make, whether you confessed sins and repent them or whether you maintain that is part of your being and the sacramental life of the church, the mixture of the rights of marriage, the sacrament of confession, taking communion and so on is itself supposed to be a source of grace, a place where grace is entering your life and making

you closer to the kind of ultimately if not good at least better person. in the case of communion, when you are living in a second marriage in the church's eyes is effectively an adulterous marriage, what you are doing when you take communion and that situation, if you are doing it with the requisite amount of knowledge and so on it is a kind of sacrilege. and sacrilege is bad for your soul. instead of communion making you a better person by infusing you with divine grace, it turns your sins back on themselves and hardens you in the place of sinfulness you are in to begin with. so the church is effectively, the idea of withholding communion, while it it is perceived as a punishment and ultimately self-punishment, i think it is very easy to see the very understandable, psychological reaction people have to these rules but they are fr yo protection. so participating in the life of the church when you are in a state of mortal sin is not good for you. it's not how you get to heaven from the catholic perspective. does that make sense as an answer?

not for you to say, i guess. brian: let me show you something you talked about in your book. i think it irritated you about. this is a stamp published by the vatican. it is a stamp with martin luther on the right-hand side, at the base of that crucifix. why did that irritate you? ross: it only mildly irritated me. brian: why would the catholic church want martin luther on a stamp anyway? ross: there are a lot of people in the vatican making choices. but the view is the conflict between lutheranism and catholicism is something that needs to be effectively transcended, which is ideally something i agree with, too, but the best way to transcend it is to have these kind of ecumenical

partnerships where everyone gets together. this was for the 500th anniversary of the reformation. and says wasn't this a regrettable thing and we can all agree the 16th century popes had good ideas and luther had good ideas and it was a shame they could not figure things out. again, i think the impulse behind some of this is that it is admirable and there are ways in which questions where catholics and lutherans have come to common ground about abstract theological ideas about grace and sin and justification that were central to the reformation. at the same time, in other areas, the gap between official catholic teaching, where a lot of protestant churches are, has gotten wider, like religion and sex and sexuality since the 1960's. so it is not the case that there is this obvious convergence

between catholics and protestant churches. and for catholic teaching to make sense, for catholicism to be taken seriously, i think it should be taken seriously in its claims to be the church founded by jesus christ and all the rest of it. the issues that split the church in the reformation were important issues. it was not just all a big misunderstanding. maybe it started as a misunderstanding, but within years and decades, lutheranism dissolved all kinds of catholic institions. it changed the teaching on the nature of the eucharist, on transubstantiation to this lutheran compromise. there are all kinds of ways in which the church should be able

to say we committed sins during the reformation. the popes of that era were corrupt. we should have done things differently without in effect elevating luther as the equivalent of a catholic saint. brian: in your book, you point out that there are 200 cardinals, they cannot all vote. if you are over 80-years-old, you cannot vote. there are 150 bishops, 400 priests. give or take. a number of things, why is it if somebody is over 80-years-old they cannot go for the pope? ross: i think that is a decision that john paul ii made. retirement from an active life as a cardinal, life as running an archdiocese or a department of the vatican and so on, corresponds to a sort of stepping away from responsibility. of course, there's issues of senility and so on that enter in. you get distant from whatever

the competencies are that you want in choosing the next pope. like any age rule, it is an arbitrary choice that could be changed right a different pope. brian: and cardinals have to retire at 75. ross: they have to offer their retirement at 75. brian: there are 200-plus cardinals in the world. why are 40 of them from italy? why does italy have the most responsible people in the world in catholicism to have a kind of dominance? ross: if you want to go back far enough, st. peter was martyred in rome.

the church sort of recognized rome as its capital. that was true then, and it has been true ever since. so it is natural in certain ways to have -- if the center of your church is in rome, just as the politics of virginia and maryland loom larger in washington, d.c., there will always be italian influence. that being said, 40 cardinals in italy in a religion of over a billion people seems ridiculously disproportionate. one of the things i think pope francis has done correctly it is sort of widen the spread of cardinals. benedict and john paul before him did that, too. italian influence has diminished somewhat over the last few

generations. but clearly, francis has made an effort to appoint cardinals who are not just from outside italy, but for more peripheral countries. so instead of making the archbishop of the biggest city here and there and everywhere a cardinal, he has chosen more minor figures from small caribbean islands and places like that. the general intention is to address exactly that sort of disproportionate thing. it is a hard thing to change. you had that quote from francis where he is sort of criticizing [indiscernible] -- the fascinating thing about his pontificate is that it is consumed more by these issues i am writing about in the book, these moral and theological controversies, than by the clinic every organization of the church's governance, which is the reason why he was elected.

francis was elected by mostly non-italian cardinals who looked at how the church was run under benedict at 16th and how rome was run and decided we can do better. he had a reputation as austere. he wasn't seen as a charismatic figure, but someone who rode the subway and had a personal humility and was not corrupt. he was brought in as a kind of fix it man for the internal culture. he preferred to condemn the internal culture in vivid and often totally reasonable ways, but spend much more of his time on this attempt to shift the catholicism center of gravity to something more liberal. the vatican itself has languished unreformed in various ways under this pope. brian: let me ask you some basics. why is it that the catholic church thinks that it has to have men in the leadership only?

and they have to be celibate, cannot be married, unless they were married and then became a priest? ross: it is a multilayered thing. i don't think there is any reason in catholic teaching why the entire leadership of the church has to be male. i think, in fact, another thing that francis has done that i agree with is try and find more appointments within the governance structure of the church for women. and i think you could go further. what the church says is that, in effect, the priesthood is for men only. brian: why? ross: for two reasons. first because the priesthood is understood as having been instituted by jesus through the 12 disciples, all of whom were male.

and generally, jesus was extremely -- he was a gender egalitarian in almost all things, in ways that were radical by the standards of his time. the fact that he can find this choice of the first priests as men is a strong indicator. and it is confirmed by the catholic view that the main role of the priest is to stand in persona christi, to perform the part of christ in the sacrifice of the mass, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into christ's body and blood. that's the reason for the priesthood. and jesus was male. and the church is supposed to be sort of the bride of christ in effect. the church thinks there's some sort of sex and gender intention in god's choices. in jesus's choice for the 12

disciples and god's choice to be incarnate as a man, that basically limit the priesthood itself. brian: but it sounds a lot like what happened in this country with women and african-americans when it all kicked off 200 some years ago. the white males said we are in charge and they don't get to vote. they don't have property and all that. isn't this just politics, men saying to themselves they are the only ones who know how to operate this thing? ross: i think there is unquestionably, in any male-led institution, there is going to be a certain amount of sexism. i don't think anyone who has experienced the catholic hierarchy would say that there isn't sexism there. but in certain ways, historically, catholicism has been an institution that has this reputation now in the wake of the sexual revolution and second and third wave feminism

as this obdurate foe of gender equality and female progress. historically, the catholic church, compared to other religious bodies, including protestant churches in the 16th and 17th century, provided many more leadership opportunities for women than just about any other comparab i compared to the institutions of pagan rome that the church came in conflict with and transformed and so on. the church simultaneously had an all-male priesthood, but was more genr alitarian. the litany of catholic saints is filled with often aggressive and influential women. so, the church has been put in an unusual position by the cultural changes of the last 50 years where it has gone from being seen, often by protestants, as this feminized form of christianity, with the role of mary is elevated above the human race, to being seen the way you just described, an example of men running everything. i think the challenge for the church is to, in effect, prove that its view of the priesthood

is theological, as opposed to just the sexist view, and i think the way to do that is to, in effect -- in some cases, this would be a restoration of the roles that women played in the medieval period. in other ways, you need to be innovative in church governance. my preference would be to have a lot more nuns running -- we haven't even gotten into the celibacy question. i think that -- i can imagine a version of the roman curia that has a very different gender balance. and has a lot of very impressive nuns running congregations and so on. i think that is both compatible with church teaching and, if it happened, would be proof that the church's vision of why why it should be a man on the altar performing the sacrifice of the mass is compatible with a basic

view of male and female equality. brian: another thing i would like to ask you about is annulments. i have known enough people in my life who have gotten annulments and i have also known that they have been very close to the hierarchy of the church. and when you have to hire a lawyer to go through all this thing, why does that make any sense? somebody has got married, had children, and some people can get annulments and others can't? ross: that part of it does not make sense. that is just corrupt. to the extent that the annulment process is available to the well-connected and not available to the less well-connected is a failed process. i think the church in this

country, and this is not true elsewhere, but the church in this country has worked pretty hard in the last 30 years to correct the problem. , the annulment process can be burdensome in various ways. the fees are waived. it's not a financial burden on people, although it can be obviously a practical and emotional burden. and if you go through the process, at this point, again, in the u.s., many more annulments are granted than not at the end of the process. it is an something where 10% of annulments are granted and it is only people who know kennedy or something. of course, the opposite is true, too. there is the famous case of sheila kennedy, who famously appealed the annulment granted to her husband all the way to rome and won. he did not get that annulment.

that is where the influence worked for him only until it did not. brian: wasn't that possibly a case of embarrassment to the church if they had granted it and she was able to take it to the hierarchy and go to rome and most people cannot afford to do that? ross: i'm just saying she was able to leverage her own celebrity against his in various ways. the theory of the annulment process is that is what is supposed to happen all the time. the annulment process is supposed to be distinct in various ways, but distinct from a divorce process, that in effect the church is judging by -- on behalf of the marriage, that is not something that can be unilaterally pursued by one spouse or the other. if one spouse says, no, he abandoned me and this was a real marriage and so on, that perspective is heard.

i think that, basically the way it ended up here in the u.s., different from around the world, is as a compromise with the culture we live in. it is a way to try and maintain the church teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. i have very mixed feelings about it. but it's different from -- pope francis has pushed things one step beyond that to a point where, it seems to me, that the idea of indissolubility is fully emptied out. if you say the annulment process is not necessary and people can effectively decide for themselves, then it is hard for me to see what is different from that catholic teaching and from what the culture as a whole says. brian: let me put on the screen a list of the popes that go back to the late 1930's and early 1940's and ask you to give us a brief.

we go back to pope pius xii. he was there for 19 years. pope john was only there for about four years plus. pope paul vi was there for about 15 years. pope john paul i was 33 days. then you have john paul ii was there 26 years. pope benedt, seven years. pope francis has been there for five years. when you look back on that list, what is the difference between pope francis and the ones that came before him? ross: that's -- brian: besides the fact that you point out that he is a jesuit. ross: there are a lot of -- the jesuits -- him being a jesuit is one interesting way of looking at

it. the jesuit order has a fascinating reputation in church history, where, at certain moments in time, it is seen as the most conservative order, fiercely loyal to the pope. the shock troops of the counterreformation doing battle with protestants. at other moments, it is seen as the most liberalizing order. that has been true since the 1960's. it swung toward the liberalizing end. people think of jesuits as the liberal intellectuals of the church. but what both of those modes of being a jesuit have in common is that jesuits are extreme. they are willing to push the envelope in different ways in order to do what they think needs to be done to evangelize. so, the mentality of the jesuit order in the western world since the 1960's is, look, you are in a culture that is falling away from catholic christianity for all kinds of totally

understandable reasons. you need to make the church as flexible and adaptable as possible. and if that means having a lot of great areas around hard teachings, so be it. francis is distinct from that, in certain ways. there are differences from latin america to north america and europe, but he clearly partakes of that attitude as well. he sees too much of a focus on rules and doctrine at this moment in history as a b obstacle to preaching the gospel. the challenging thing is there has never been a jesuit pope. the papacy has a different job in the church from the jesuits. so, putting someone who belongs to an order that sees itself as the envelope pushers at the center of the church creates a fascinating dynamic. i think francis's defenders say that he is exactly what the church needs, to push the envelope effectively from the center.

but the danger of that is that the center itself doesn't hold. that is the danger of having a pope who is always complaining about rigidity and literalism and all of these things. a certain rigidity is actually the pope's b, as sort of frustrating as that may be for the pope himself. as frustrating as that may be for the pope himself. this globetrotting media presence and very different from john paul in many ways. papacy is john the 23rd is -- allowed or encouraged the liberalization and john paul and benefit who in the contextls

of the 1960's, said things have gotten too far and we need to re-and -- reinforced catholic or -- there is a pendulum in the church that swings from one pope to another. what grade would you give the the crisis.dling >> there are two defenses you can give the church tread one is since the revelations, the for the public scandal was worse has done a reasonably good job of instituting protections.

start in 2005n't caret the way the church handled it, it was a horrible mix of the worst of conservatism and the worst of liberalism. tore was this we have protect the church and protect the priests even if they suspend ne. children -- some of the worst iuses were associated with don't to say roman pilanski, but it is the 1960's, 1970's.

leadingliberal bishops coverups, conservative bishops. it was awful. i think we have more of a sense now than we did 15 years ago it was pervasive outside the church. best, all that it shows is other places were just as corrupt here it it is supposed to be better and inns bed it was at best just as bad and that is worse. >> is the fact that the church gave to the church and paid off people. if i went to a church on sunday and drop some money, the money eventually was paid back to the parishioners?

>> ordinary catholics pay for everything in the church, so they certainly pay for that. it would've had to anyway because boston is not as catholic as it once was and so on, but were there parishes on the margins that closed because the archdiocese had to pay these things out? of course. the extent to which the ripple effect of that scandal was felt, not just among the people directly affected, but in just about every aspect of catholic life. brian: what has happened with the catholic population? has it gone down? ross: in the u.s. or worldwide?

worldwide, it has gone up. brian: in the south? ross: in the global south, especially in africa. a lot of that -- a lot of that is conversions. a lot of that is the fact that africa is the only part of the world where the population growth is still rapid generally. in the u.s., the catholic population as a share of the country has been pretty stable, but a lot of that is because of hispanic immigration. if you look at mass attendance, you have a big collapse in the 1960's and 1970's, and then it sort of stabilizes, those slightly down across john paul to benedict. in the last five or eight years, including under francis, sort of contrary to some people's expectations, the decline has

actually gotten sharper. in a lot of european countries, the decline was steeper in the 1960's and 1970's. it hit a lower point and has plateaued. latin america, the church is losing large numbers of people to not just secularism, but pentecostalism and evangelicalism. the church presents an interesting picture. it's the largest christian community in the world. it has grown in various areas, particularly in the global south. there are 1.2 billion catholics. it's much larger than it was 50 years ago, but also institutionally much weaker. brian: let me, though, go to you, in our time remaining, what do you believe? ross: in catholic christianity? brian: yeah. ross: i think that the story recounted in the new testament is very convincing and sort of the most plausible instance in

human history where a direct divine intervention into the drama of history. so, i am a christian because i believe that. i am a catholic christian because i think the catholic church has the most plausible claim to continuity with relates -- the early church. that relates to these questions about divorce and every thing else. one of the things that catholic church has done well for all its sins and compromises -- jesus says a lot of strange things in the new testament. he says that you can't get remarried if you get divorced. he says that you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood if you want to be saved. he places this incredibly high priority on a kind of radical poverty. the church, often in compromised ways, has been impressively true to that, true to the teaching on marriage, true to the view that it really is the body and blood

in communion, true through the franciscans to take francis' own namesake and many other orders down through history to radical experiments in poverty and service. so, in all of those ways, i think that -- i believe that jesus christ was the son of god and i think of all the churches in christendom, the catholic church has the best claim to be the one that he actually founded. brian: back in 2010, you probably remember the "mother jones" article. ross: yeah. brian: let me read this and have you fill in the blanks. as part of her quest for relief, patricia snow, until then an

episcopalian, attended a sermon by pentecostal faith healer grace james. i had an amazing encounter with christ, snow told me over lunch. from then on, the family allowed -- followed james around new england from high school cafeterias to elks lodges to church basements. the family later began sampling church after church in what ross calls a tour of american christianity. ross: that was my childhood. brian: were you going from church to church? were you following grace james around? ross: yeah. my mother, who was a first class of woman, women at yale, sort of upper-middle-class southern connecticut person, had this

very intense spiritual experience. in these faith healing services. i probably was six years old at the time. brian: do you remember? ross: yes. i mean, i had a childhood where i like to say, during the week, i went to a nice, liberal, secular public school. on the weekends, i went and watched my parents speak in tongues. i had an unusual religious experience, if you will, in that i was along for someone else's religious pilgrimage. i am not my mother, who now writes about -- we all became catholic when i was a teenager. she is now a writer as well. writes about some of these issues in a different way, sometimes a more intense way than i do. but she is a more mystical personality than i am. part of the baseline for my approach to all matters religious is that i hate -- think religious experience is real. i can't claim these dramatic mystical experiences, but i watched them happen to people i was close to. whatever they are, they are not a fraud. they are not just an illusion. they are sort of a central part of the human experience. below the level of is the new

testament true, is the catholic church the one true church, my foundation is the idea that religion is more important and more important to figuring out the truth about the world than a lot of secular people tend to think. brian: in the same article, your mother recalls how her introverted son would read voraciously in his room or pace their backyard for hours, throwing a baseball against the backstop while talking to himself and making up stories. the one thing he resented about his upbringing, he says, was "an evangelical phase when someone would put us into a prayer group and you are holding hands and it was like, oh, do i have to make

up a prayer?" ross: yeah. brian: you are obviously not introverted anymore. ross: i was not a totally introverted child. it was more than i like to get comfortable in us -- a given situation before i started acting like a next her. which is why being a columnist is useful, because you always have an excuse to be extrovert, the nature of punditry. i would say, jokingly, but not completely jokingly, that one of the things i liked about the catholic church is what protestants find unpleasant about it. you have prayers that you memorize. there is room for spontaneity, but the mass itself is not a spontaneous experience. you can slip into the back of a catholic mass in any parish and there won't come a point in the middle of the service where the priest says, all right, let's

have everybody stand up and testify to how jesus changed your life. there's incredible religious energy in pentecoslism and evangelicalism and so on, but my 16-year-old self was very happy not to be asked how jesus changed his life. brian: we only have two minutes. what's the best thing that has been said about your book since it has been publhed and the worst? ross: there have been a few reviews th he said i'm just making things up and the conflicts i'm describing are not real. that is the harshest critique and it is wrong. i know it's wrong because i am not a real reporter so i just relied on much better reporters than myself and the best reporting bears out the story that i am trying to tell. the best -- i don't know about the best thing. i think there have been a lot of sort of critical reviews that have taken the form, of course, he is wrong about this, but he

is a smart guy and a serious catholic and he makes an eloquent case. and since i'm in the weird position of criticizing a pope and on terms that the secular world finds bizarre and incomprehensible, sometimes, i have to take that kind of review as maybe the best that i can hope for. brian: last question, the name douthat, where does it come from? ross: northern england. it was dowthaite at some time. my ancestors went to ireland, probably scott irish, probably my protestant ancestors persecuted my catholic ancestors and we ended up in america and we put a u in the name and no one has been able to pronounce it since. brian: married? children? ross: married, three children. brian: the name of the book is "to change the church: pope francis and the future of catholicism." our guest has been ross douthat. thank you very much. ross: thank you. ♪ >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this

program, visit us at qanda.org. programs are also available as c-span podcasts. >> on the next q&a, the film makers discuss the documentary about the actions of other catholic activist to protest the vietnam war. the u.s. senate is back today to work on the defense authorization bill a short time ago. be --le majority will that succeeds, lawmakers will work on an image throughout the week. the house will be back tomorrow

starting at noon eastern including cracking down on importation of synthetic opioids . tonight on the communicators, tom wheeler talks about the end of net neutrality. he is interviewed by a technology reporter for ask the us. >> do you think it is possible to legislate this issue? thet is fascinating republican issue is this is something that congress decided and now they have an opportunity to decide, the congressional

pending in the republicans -- if the chairman ofhe his convics that what he has done is right for america and it will send up ryan andll speaker say schedule us for vote in the house and let's see what the representatives and the american people say. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. c-span was created by public service by america's cable television companind tod unfiltered to bring

coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brough you by your cable or satellite provider. >> our newsmakers guest this week is ohio congressman jim jordan. throughout his six terms in the house of representatives has been a leader of conservative members and we have lots to talk about with him this week. let me introduce the two reports who will be asking questions, christina peterson returns to newsmakers, crongsal reporter for "the wall street journal" and scott long who covers for the hill. congressman, we're all interested in what the going forward is from where we're talking on immigration. what do you see happening the next couple days? >> what the american people elected us to do and we promised them we'd do which is build the bord w