Fact-Checking the New Yorker

Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American journals, writers were driven to distraction by the fanatical fact-checking characteristic of the magazine’s gimlet-eyed editors. But the old New Yorker ain’t what she used to be. Evidence is readily at hand in Paul Elie’s recent, sprawling article, “The Making of the First American Pope,” which included this sentence about the last years of Pope Francis’s pontificate:

The commentator George Weigel wrote a short book outlining the qualities conservatives wanted in the next Pope, and, in 2020, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, arranged for copies to be sent to all the cardinals who were expected to vote in the next conclave.

With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: How do I correct thee? Let me count the ways:

1) How does a book calling for the pope to recognize the New Evangelization as the Church’s “grand strategy” for the twenty-first century qualify as “conservative” Catholicism, rather than mainstream, living Catholicism?

2) By the same token, how does the trigger warning about Catholic “conservatives” and their alleged longings adequately reflect the content of a book that calls on the papacy to promote Christian humanism, deepen the Church’s appropriation of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, broaden the consultations through which bishops are selected, intensify seminary reform, empower lay men and women to be missionary disciples, undertake a root-and-branch reform of the Roman Curia, and deepen the theology of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue?

3) How is it “conservative” to urge the bishop of Rome to keep 1.4 billion men and women focused on the person of Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God and the answer to the question that is every human life?

4) As to specific fact-checking: If Paul Elie or his editors had bothered to contact me, Cardinal Dolan, or Mark Brumley, the president of Ignatius Press, he would have learned that my book, The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission, was sent to the members of the College of Cardinals by Ignatius Press; that Cardinal Dolan did not initiate that; and that the cardinal merely provided a cover note suggesting the book was worth reading. But no, one can only assume that the misrepresentations about this initiative concocted by Elie’s progressive Catholic contacts, which have been corrected more than once, were left unexamined. Why bother fact-checking when the facts, if ascertained, might get in the way of a good trigger warning or a slap at a leading American churchman?

There were numerous other problems with Elie’s article, including the usual, tiresome dismissals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as rigorists and authoritarians; the author also seems quite ignorant of the Vatican’s febrile atmosphere during the latter years of Pope Francis. I can’t quarrel much with Elie’s conclusion, though: that Pope Leo’s “mission” might be to be “an American in a position of great power who is decent and humble—a no-drama Pope whose very ordinariness is his message.”

Except to offer two more corrections.

First, Pope Leo has made it clear from the night he stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica that his “message” is Jesus Christ, not himself. Elie’s description of Leo’s pre-papal career contains some interesting information (as well as some unfortunate distortions about Catholic movements and personalities in Latin America), but it tends to elide over something crucial: that the pope is a man of God, a man of prayer, and an evangelist who wants the world to know the Lord he loves and serves.

Second, it was clear to those of us in Rome during the 2025 papal interregnum that Cardinal Robert Prevost was not thought of primarily as “an American,” for if he had been, his election would have been quite unlikely. The Latin American cardinal-electors thought him one of their own, given his many years in Peru; others considered him a prominent figure in the universal Church, with broad international experience. No one was focused on the fact that he was a White Sox fan from the south suburbs of the Windy City.

Various scribblers and talking heads (and, of course, churchmen) have been spinning Pope Leo from the day of his election, the direction of the spin being dictated by the spinner’s position in Catholicism’s ongoing debates over identity and mission. Enough is enough. The Holy Father has a very tough job, and no one trying to capture him for any particular party or agenda is doing him, or the Church, any good service.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.