The New Yorker Radio Hour - Pope Francis the Disruptor

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

As a conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat fills the post once held by no less a figure than William Kristol.  A devout Catholic, Douthat opposes the progressive direction in which Pope Francis is leading the Church—to prioritize caring for poor people and migrants over opposing abortion and the culture of sexual revolution—even though he acknowledges to David Remnick that this puts him at odds with the Church’s emphasis on mercy.  In his new book, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis of the Future of Catholicism,” Douthat provocatively compares Francis to Donald Trump, painting him as a disruptive figure who is determined to bring change fast and damn the consequences. Plus: a lawyer and former baseball player explains why a new federal law targets the wages of minor league players. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a road trade to the ballot. The observatory is straight of the block for West Boulevard and make that right. They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. They're actually, you're going to self-consciously mocked that lineage. So that's happening. It seems like an incredible story here on many fronts. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last week, Pope Francis issued a statement to Catholics worldwide, something that's called an apostolic exhortation. In more than 100 pages, he talks about how to live a holy life in, quote, a practical way for our time. The document covers many things, but the newspaper headlines singled out this in particular that caring for the poor and for refugees is a vital Catholic duty, just as vital in

Francis's eyes as opposing abortion. That shift in the church's priorities has made Pope Francis quite popular, especially here in the United States, but it's led to some hostility and real resistance to the Pope from more conservative Catholics. It's a resistance that we haven't seen in generations. And one of those critics is the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. For Douthit, Francis is hardly the kindly reformer. Rather, he's a radical, playing fast and loose with doctrine. In a new book called To Change the Church, Doubth claims that Francis is frankly a deep danger to Catholicism,

and he goes so far as to compare him to Donald Trump, which, to be clear, Ross Doubt that does not mean as a compliment. So, Ross, you've written a book that's a critique of an enormously popular pope, at least in the United States. And when people ask you, what have you got against Pope Francis, what's your immediate response? embarrassment, cringing embarrassment, sort of, you know, a desperate desire to escape the conversation. But then I say to myself, well, I wrote a book about this, so I guess I have to actually answer the question. No, I mean, I, you know, Pope Francis has a well-earned, I think, reputation as the great liberal Pope, which manifests itself in sort of his emphases, the fact that he talks, you know, more about migration and poverty and those kind of issues than about the sort of what we think of as culture war issues in the West, abortion and same-sex marriage and euthanasia and so on. And I'm some kind of a conservative Catholic, I suppose. So there's at least a mild tension between sort of his general vision for the church and my general politics and so on. If he's talking about poverty, do you have a problem with that?

No. So then let's get to the core of your difficult. Well, the core of it is that part of this liberalization, so the hope initially, I think, was that Francis would basically maintain this kind of synthesis that I think is one of the church's strengths between a vision of sort of social solidarity that tends to lean to the left in certain ways on economic questions and a vision of sort of what you might call moral solidarity that emphasizes the centrality of the family that you know the protection of unborn human life and so on and ultimately what Francis has decided to do instead I think is basically seek a kind of truce with post-sexual revolution culture. And he's done this sort of on this specific point that has involved bishops and theologians in complicated shouting matches in Rome over whether divorced and remarried Catholics can take communion without getting their first marriage annulled.

And you have a deep problem with, say, divorced Catholics taking communion? Not divorced Catholics. Divorce Catholics can take communion. But I think that if the church makes this shift, it basically means that the church's claim to teach the indissolubility of marriage is sort of empty. Before we get to these arguments, let's talk a little bit about you. You were not born to conservative Catholicism or Catholicism in general, right? No, I was raised in a lot of different strange places religiously. We started out as Episcopalians, and then we ended up on a kind of wild...

Pentecostal. Yeah, of American evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, all kinds of charismatic Christianity. And then we ended up becoming Catholic when I was about 16. So I'm this little-known third category, neither adult convert nor cradle Catholic. But when I came in, John Paul II was Pope, and he sort of seemed to be offering a kind of synthesis, which basically said, look, the church changed in various ways in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council, changed its attitude towards liberal democracy, changed its relationship with Judaism. But for the sake of the church's own continuity, it also has sort of maintained its resistance

to a lot of the trends that came in after Vatican II, the divorce culture, sexual revolution generally. What does that mean the divorce culture? Why would a church want to get rid of rather than bring into its fold? people whose marriage is for one reason or another have collapsed. I mean, I think the idea is not that the church wants to get rid of anybody. The idea is that the church is trying to be faithful to a particular moral vision in which marriage is actually something that you are supposed to do and can really only do once if it's a real marriage.

And that vision, I mean, I think it's, you know, there's a theological case for it. But there's also a sociological argument here, which is that the idea of a welcoming church, it can have an effective cruelty toward the people who are victims of the kind of individualistic sexual culture that you have now. So if you say, you know, well, for the sake of mercy, we're going to essentially act as if second marriages are the same as first marriages, that says something to the children of the first marriage, who are now told that actually the church, which was sort of the last entity saying that your parents' first marriage was a real marriage, and it was the real marriage, and, you know, that this is something that should have been held together. That's gone. Jesus was living in a time when life expectancies were rather shorter than they are now. Somewhat. Although if you survived childhood, they weren't actually. They were a hell of a lot shorter. And you're pretty young.

Relatively. How old are? I'm 38. I'm getting up there. Pretty damn young. If, God forbid, in 10 years, for some reason, your marriage went off the rails and you would remarry, what would be the effect on you as a Catholic of not taking communion? I mean, my, well...

Wouldn't you feel a great sense of loss? I think ideally I wouldn't remarry, right? That I, you know, and of course, life is long and God knows what would happen. But I think I would have to have some larger intellectual change in my relationship to the faith in order to convince myself that it was right to remarry in the first place. place, which is, again, yeah, it's an extreme sounding. So you would disavow sex for the rest of your life? I mean, that, yeah. I mean, I think it's companionship more than sex that would be the challenging part. Well, they both would be challenging. They both would be challenging.

But again, this is where, you know, in what Catholicism has traditionally taught, right, is that, in fact, celibacy is the highest form of the Christian life and that marriage is there for people who, you know, aren't up for celibacy, which is most of us. But again, I don't think the idea that God could ask you to be celibate for the last 30 years of your life is an impossible ask given the asks that are made of Christians in all kinds of complicated situations that don't have anything to do with sex and relationships and so on. And yeah, I think a Catholicism that can't ask people to be celibate is a Catholicism that in the end isn't going to have much of a competitive. selling claim on people at all. For the Catholic message to make sense, you have to be able to make a case that celibacy is possible for people who aren't married. So it's no secret to you that your views on women's rights are frequently criticized. You've argued that access to contraception and abortion gives women a degree of choice in the matter of becoming a parent that's kind of unfair to men. I think I'm getting this right. And in the end, that's fundamentally detrimental to society. Oh, I don't know that I've said that precisely. Unfair to men. I think, I mean, if anything, I think you can... What's your beef with contraception? Start with that. I don't have an incredibly strong beef with contraception. I mean, I think that there's a kind of contraceptive mentality that alienates people from family. I think abortion should be restricted because abortion is a form of murder, but that's different. I mean, if anything, I think in many cases, the sort of post-sexual revolution culture is,

beneficial for a certain kind of man in striking ways. Part of the sexual revolution is Gloria Steinem, but part of the sexual revolution is Hugh Hefner or Harvey Weinstein. I think there are ways in which men can be the losers from this culture insofar as it sort of deprives them of sort of clear roles. But I don't think it's anything as simple as like men have lost from the sexual revolution and women have gained. You wrote in a column that people who are in support of current abortion laws are themselves extremists? Yes. Why am I an extremist?

American abortion laws are themselves rather extreme by the standards of much of the Western world. Generally, since Roe v. Wade, America has had one of the more permissive abortion regimes where second and third trimester abortions are concerned relative to France or Italy or Germany or, you know, other sort of peer countries. So in that sense, the sort of default pro-choice position is more extreme in its willingness to accept killing unborn life. That's sort of the easy answer. Is a woman who gets an abortion a murderer?

She's a particular kind of murderer, yes, in a sense. What kind? A kind who has committed an act of killing that, you know, I mean, is, you know, is, intentional and ends a human life. What should be the penalty? I don't think there should be any penalty for a woman who gets an abortion. I think the law should restrict and penalize doctors and others who abortionists who perform abortions. But I think the balance...

What should the restriction be? The restriction should be it should be against the law to perform abortion, and there should be some jail time for abortionists. Now, you know damn well what's coming next, and then we return. to the back alley and the close hanger. Do we? I mean, this is where I think there's sort of an insufficient level of actual study. And I think there's no question that if you look at countries in the developing world that have restrictions on abortion, you end up with lots of back alley abortions and a general climate that can be terrible for women.

I think if you look at countries, though, in the Western world that have abortion restrictions, Ireland is a country that has had a ban on abortion since its inception as a republic. And Ireland has very strong statistics when it comes to gender equity, maternal mortality, and so on. The pro-life movement is sort of stuck in certain ways because it's ended up united to the Republican Party, which takes a sort of hostile view of social spending, obviously. Right. The argument is that the very same people who are the most ferocious, I'm not talking about you, but just in general, most ferocious and anti-abortion are also the least likely to be pro-spending on all kinds of social programs. Which isn't always the case. And especially, again, within Catholicism, I mean, historically prior to Roe v. Wade, many people who are now pro-life Catholic Republicans were pro-life Catholic Democrats.

And there's a fairly strong tradition in Catholicism. That's not the Republican Party. I see. No, I agree. That's not the Republican Party right now. The Republican Party can drift in that direction, completely. compassionate conservatism was sort of an attempt to move in that direction. At one point in the book, you compare Pope Francis, of all people, to Donald Trump. And you write this. The Pope has turned out to be far more Trumpian than most of the cardinals who elected him ever anticipated. Francis's opponents, like Trump's, feel that they're resisting an abnormal leader, a man who does not respect the rules that are supposed to bind his office. Meanwhile, to his supporters, all these discontents are vindication, evidence that he's bringing a bit of.

the change required to make Catholicism great again. Yeah, I mean, that's a deliberate provocation to some extent, but obviously there's no moral comparison between the two men, you know, whatever my criticisms of Pope Francis. But in their relationship to their institutions, there are real similarities. This is one point of yours that I'm not getting at all. Pope Francis, as opposed to his predecessor, a ben, Benedict and as opposed to John Paul and the rest, there are shades of difference. But you're portraying Francis as radically, radically different, as different as Trump is to his

predecessors somehow. I don't see that. In Catholicism, you don't get, you know, Francis has put himself in a position where conservatives and traditionalists can, at the very least, raise questions and say, you know, you're flirting with heresy. And that's a very unusual thing for a very unusual situation for a Pope to find himself in. Maybe it's not as unusual as electing, you know, a billionaire populist, you know, libertine as president of the United States. But on the other hand, we've only had 40-odd presidents and we've had 2,000 years of popes. And there are really very few cases where popes got into the kind of situation that Francis has gotten in.

the kind of controversy. Now, one thing, one area where I would assume, Ross, you differ from your more liberal Catholic brethren is on questions of, say, Islam and immigration. You've been very conservative, it seems to me, on immigration, and you've been very tough on Islam. Yeah, I don't know if I've been tough. It seems to me that somebody like Pope Francis, for example, on immigration, is, you know, sees it as a focus for the need for compassion.

that you have enormous hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee and their refugees. I mean, I've argued that it's very risky for Europe to have any kind of open door to refugees right now, yeah. Your compassion seems not nearly as generous as the Pope, and how do you answer that? I think it's totally possible that the Pope is closer to the heart of the Christian message on immigration than I am. I mean, you know, any time you set out to be critical of the Pope as a Catholic, you need to be open. Is that a failing of yours or the popes? Oh, it would be, if it's true, it's a failing of mine. It's a sign that I am sort of privileging pragmatic concerns and doubts about Europe's stability over a kind of, you know, more radical vision of love.

And I could be, yeah, it could be a case where my sort of conservative temperament has led me away from the Gospels. At the same time, I think it's a mistake for liberalism, sort of abstracting from the sort of more radical question of what Christian love requires, it's a mistake for liberalism to sort of assume that, you know, the job of the statesman is to just assume that, you know, nativists can be crushed and you don't have to deal with the reality of nativism. The good statesman has to deal with the reality that large-scale population change in a swift time produces backlash. and you want to be, therefore, be careful and prudent. There's a sense in which I can see that the Pope might be right and I might be wrong. On the other hand, it's tricky to say that, you know, a Christian statesman would be one who would, who would, you know, make choices that might end up balkanizing his own country and sort of destroying its internal stability.

Conservatism has had a long history in the United States, and you have written pretty forcefully about the pervasive influence. of right-wing talk radio and its influence on contemporary conservatism which is far harsher far more filled with all the things

that we associate with Rush Limbaugh and now Fox so the harsher aspects of Fox which are plenty how do you go about getting rid of that if that stuff makes you sick I mean how is the culture of conservatism

going to write itself I mean this this may sound like a sort of ridiculous answer, but I actually think the way the culture of conservatism, it probably only can be fixed to some extent from the top down. Well, put it this way. I think the people who supported Trump were wrong, but I think their theory that, you know, that you needed a strong president who could redefine conservatism was actually correct. What Messiah are you waiting for?

There is no. No, no. Well, you asked me about, you know, what I think about conservatism. I have no optimism. You're just asking me how it, the only way it fixes itself, I think, is from the top. Somebody gets elected, governs well, and the party sort of conforms itself to their leadership. That's what I'm asking you for. But I don't have a candidate.

There's no one on the horizon in the Republican Party. No, at the moment, I don't see, you know, I think you could sort of take pieces of Marco Rubio, pieces of Tom Cotton, pieces of Nikki Haley, fuse them together into some ideal candidate, but that's just make-believe. The figures we have right now, none of them have shown the capacity to be the leader that conservatism needs to be a good force for the common good in our society right now. Ross, thank you so much. Sure, you're very welcome. Ross Douthit is a columnist for the New York Times and his new book is called to Change the Church, Pope Francis in the future of Catholicism. Baseball season is, thank goodness, and after long months of cold, in full swing.

For minor league players, far from the big stadiums and the TV screens, the famously bad pay and working conditions just got a little harder, thanks to the federal government. Tucked away in the spending bill, the giant 2,000-plus page omnibus bill, is something called the Save America's Pastime Act. We can probably assume that many of the people who voted on the tax cuts never even read the Save America's Pastime Act. but it seems to specifically exempt the league from paying minor league ball players according to the federal minimum wage. Mary Palin is a sports writer who's been trying to figure it all out, and one of the people she spoke with is a lawyer named Garrett Brush House. Brush House practices litigation in St. Louis, and he's representing minor league players in a suit for better pay.

He himself spent 60 years playing in the minor leagues before going into law. Here's Mary Palin. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is about six hours away from the nearest pro baseball team, the Mariners. So minor league baseball, I went all the time to see the Eugene Emerald's play. And it was a huge part of not just my childhood, but kind of how I accessed sports. And it was affordable for the family to go. There were, you know, for not that much money, you could sit pretty close. The players spent a lot of time, you know, signing autographs for kids and stuff.

So I spent a lot of time watching minor league baseball. Garrett, did you watch minor league baseball growing up, too? So I grew up in an area that was so country that we didn't even have a minor league baseball team close to us. So I did not grow up going to minor league baseball games. I grew up in southeast Missouri. But, you know, you'd mentioned Eugene Oregon. That was one of the first places that I played in my minor league career. So you were drafted by the San Francisco Giants.

right out of college. Did you know you were going to spend time in the minors after you were drafted? Without a doubt. Everybody goes through the minors at least for a little bit, and most guys spend several years in the minor leagues. So it's a prerequisite where you have to play in the minors, really, before you go to the major leagues. Can you quickly explain the relationship between the minor leagues and major league baseball, which is the professional baseball organization? I think most people are more familiar with? Major League Baseball has long had this farm system in place. And the reason it's called a farm system is it's the leagues where they cultivate the young players. And they turn them into, you know, the major league players eventually. And, you know, the important thing is that

the major league teams are the ones that pay the players and they also hire the minor league coaches. And so it's Major League Baseball and its teams that always control, you know, where they the players play and how much they're paid. And then the minor league teams, the minor league owners, are really just in charge of selling tickets. Can you give us a basic description of how a minor league player is paid, whether that's salaried or by the hour, kind of how that works? So to start with, the salaries are only paid during the season. Spring training just wrapped up for minor league players. They weren't paid at all during that spring training time. So it was a full month of work where, you know, they were required to work 60, 70 hours per week and weren't paid at all for that.

Then once the season actually begins, that's when when their salaries began. The starting salary for first year players is $1,100 per month right now. Each level that you go up, and there are several different levels in the minor leagues, there's rookie ball, which is the lowest level, and then it goes on up to single A and then double A and triple A. And each level your salary increases a little bit, but there are still, you know, several players in AAA baseball that we're only making around $2,200 per month. So on a given night, if you go to a double A baseball game, whether it's, you know, in Hartford, Connecticut, or in Frisco, Texas, you know, there might be 7,000, 8,000 fans on a given night seeing that player. but they make so little per hour that, you know, when I was playing, it wasn't uncommon for the bat boy to be making more than the guy playing first base. How do you make ends meet with all of that? Well, it's very difficult. I had a Venezuelan teammate that I, that was my catch partner. And, you know, we did our running together. We did our throwing together.

And I was talking to him. And he had a pregnant fiancé. back home. And he was just trying to save up 20 bucks a month to send back to her, and he was having a hard time doing that. One of my teammates, we'd be on the long bus rides, and all of a sudden, he's getting a call from the debt collector that's trying to come after him. So, you know, some guys are lucky enough to be drafted in very early rounds, and they get a signing bonus. That helps them out. They live on that throughout their minor league career. You know, my fiancé and then wife often and paid our first month's deposit on our apartment each year. She helped me through spring training for sure. Early on in your career, you have so much euphoria that you know, you'd run

through a brick wall for that organization. And so you don't think about the financial strife at all. But then the bills don't go away. And after a few years, you know, a lot of guys do start realizing that I can't make ends meet doing this. So now one of your cases is representing minor league players in this lawsuit against Major League Baseball. Talk to us about why minor league players are suing baseball and how this all came together. So all we're doing is we're just trying to apply this country's just basic minimum wage laws to minor league baseball players. If Major League Baseball expects these players to work 60 hours per week during spring training, then they should be paid for that work. But for some reason, Major League Baseball, for years now, has decided they

don't want to pay salaries during spring training. And then even during the season, we're saying that if you're going to require them to work 60 hours per week, then you need to comply with our country's basic wage laws and provide them a livable wage. They tried defending it by arguing that they were basically like apprentices or like interns. They're temporary employees that are there just to learn. That's a very offensive defense for a minor league player. A minor league player assigned to a seven-year contract. And so that gives the major league team the exclusive rights to the players for that seven-year period. And so to say that they aren't even employees covered by your basic minimum wage laws, you know, it's quite offensive.

to minor league players. If Walmart and McDonald's can figure out a way to comply with our basic wage laws, then surely Major League Baseball can do it as well. So tucked into the spending bill on page 1,967, I believe, was the Save America's Pastime Act, which dealt with this very issue. Talk to us a little bit about what exactly this provision of the spending bill would do, or I guess now does, and how did you catch wind of it? What it does is it basically provides a new exemption where if Major League Baseball just pays the minimum wage based on a 40-hour work week, then they gain an exemption from the minimum wage laws. Our country is just our federal basic minimum wage law. And, you know, when you do the math, 725 times 40, it's a little less than $1,200 per month then.

whenever you average it out over a month. And so the way I'm sure Major League Baseball will interpret this is they will interpret this as allowing them to continue to not pay minor league players anything during spring training and during the offseason. As far how it came about, there was no hearing, there was no committee vote, there was no debate at all. Instead, what happened is the very top of leadership, you know, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan. They have been lobbied hard by MLB's lobbyist. MLB paid over $1.3 million each of the past two years to lobbyists and paid a lot more to campaign contributions. And this was a powerful lobbying group that was close to leadership. And they succeeded in getting this secretly tucked in to a spending bill.

even though it has nothing to do with spending at all. Yeah, in my reporting, it was still unclear to me how exactly this provision ended up in the spending bill. I called various offices of various representatives of Congress, the majority, the minority leaders all around, and I still couldn't quite figure out how exactly this made it into the spending bill, particularly when it doesn't directly deal with government spending. Why is the federal government weighing in on paying minor league baseball players at all in a, a spending bill? That beats me. You know, if there's ever been anything misnamed in this world, this would be it. It has nothing to do with saving America's pastime at all. It is making more money than it ever has before. It's seen exponential revenue growth. And, you know, the profit margins are

huge, both in Major League Baseball and in Minor League Baseball. Wow. So how does it change your case? Is the case dead? unclear, where does that put the lawsuit? Well, the case certainly isn't dead. One of the things about the wage and hour laws is, you know, states are allowed to enact higher minimum wages, and they're also free to say that they aren't going to have all the exemptions that the federal law has. There will be some state laws we can continue to rely on, and we'll continue to pursue that, and we'll continue to push forward. And, you know, hopefully at the end of the day, fairness will win out, and hopefully at the end of the day, Major League Baseball will decide to do the right thing,

and instead of spending money on lobbyists, hopefully they'll increase salaries. But I also wonder, you know, how will the league survive if people aren't being paid a living wage? And if Minor League Baseball fell apart or crumbled in some way, what would that mean for Major League Baseball? Well, Major League Baseball wouldn't exist without the minor leagues. You know, the way Major League Baseball set up,

They often draft players as young as 16 out of the Dominican Republic and out of Venezuela. And even out of the United States, they draft 18-year-old high school players. Well, if you're 16, if you're 18, you certainly aren't ready for Major League Baseball. And so those are the guys that we're fighting for. That was attorney Garrett Brushhouse, a former minor league ball player, and he was talking with contributor, Mary Palin. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for this week. Thanks for joining me, and I hope you'll join us next week for a conversation with the former FBI director, James Comey. See you next week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced with help from Corey Shreple, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina. Endowment Fund.