Welcome listeners to the First Things podcast from the editor's desk.

This is Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Ross Doutt,

columnist at the New York Times,

Catholic commentator on many matters,

and author of a forthcoming book, The Deep Places,

and we're just delighted to have you to discuss your article in the October,

excuse me, the August-September issue on Catholic political life. And so, welcome.

Thanks for having me, Rusty. I hope you're doing well.

I'm struggling along in our times, but reasonably well.

Well, you know, I just found it. It was a great piece.

A lot of my friends said it became a kind of parlor game to talk about, am I a Catholic populist,

Interreglist, Benedictine, or Tradnista?

That's, I mean, that's the dream of any author, is to force people to wedge all of their

complexity into an incredibly narrow schematic that you yourself have devised.

So I'm glad that it worked out.

Well, the premise of the piece is that the stable center-right, center-left framework for Catholic engagement in public life is really eroded.

And why? Why do you think it has eroded?

I would say that there are two interrelated reasons.

On the one hand, so the argument in the piece, which I think is sort of reasonably persuasive, right, is that after the 1960s, after the Second Vatican Council, you had this general sense that American Catholicism, Roman Catholicism writ large, should have a pretty easy relationship

with liberal democracy, should not be as skeptical of it as the church was in the 19th century.

And so the divisions, the political divisions among American Catholics were between what you might call

sort of liberal Catholics in the kind of, you know, Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo sense of the term,

...