In Struck Down Not Destroyed, the Vatican reporter explores how covering the church has shaped her faith.
The book combines your reflections as a journalist and as a Catholic; how did you bridge the gap between the two?
I have some journalist friends who have equally conflicted relationships with the church and will often say, “Oh, I try to separate my reporting brain from my Catholic brain.” I just don’t feel I can do that; I’m also lucky to work at a magazine where I can do a lot of analysis, so there’s room to bring myself into it in a way that wouldn’t be the case otherwise. At this point, I don’t feel that there’s another way to do my work. I see a lot of this as a question of integrity—integrity meaning entire, my whole self. In my work and spiritual life, I’m really hungry to find out what’s true. So that means checking things, getting verifications from multiple sources—and it also means grappling with what’s speaking to me on a spiritual level.
You write about the split between traditional and progressive wings of the church. How are you thinking about that in context of the new pope?
I’m hopeful because I think Leo sees himself as a bridge builder. He combines these pro-worker, pro-union Catholic social teachings with traditional aesthetics—he got up and chanted the Regina Caeli in Latin the Sunday [after being named pope]—so maybe that can help to finally break this divide in U.S. Catholicism where your worship style tends to mean that you are in a certain political camp. I am also confident he’s going to continue a lot of the Francis reforms, even if he’s doing it in a different style—he’s quieter than Francis, more reserved. He’s talked a lot about continuing efforts towards synodality, which is an attempt to involve more lay people, women, etc., in church leadership, and have bishops collaborate more with those folks in continuing the church’s mission.
Is there a message you’d like readers to take away from the book?
I think it’s common for books on feeling conflicted about the church to land in a really nice place and say, oh you know, but the faith is more important, and I think that my book avoids that—avoids delivering easy answers. I want to make people who are conflicted feel a little less alone and as though there’s somebody else who’s also wrestling with the faith. One key takeaway is that there’s value in the wrestling—it’s a kind of demand of this institution in this time in history. In an era where every kind of authority is questioned, having your faith be part of that questioning is not a problem—it can help you sort through why this thing is important to you, if it is, and what role you want to play in it.
