Now, the most stringent sort of conservative Protestant will naturally disagree with my assessment of the Roman church’s importance and see in Rome’s crisis simple vindication for Calvin or Luther or their contemporary heirs. And people who are personally wounded or devastated by some particular aspect of the Catholic crisis, who face not just a general spiritual challenge but some specific form of mistreatment, will not be comforted by an argument that stresses Catholicism’s general providential significance. If you are drawn or tied to the Roman church but feel that in the present chaos you cannot be a faithful Christian except in Eastern Orthodoxy or Anglicanism or some other safer-seeming harbor, I don’t expect to win you over by saying, “Stick with us, we’re too big to fail!”
But I do think that even the quest for a safer harbor will not fully separate you from whatever destiny awaits Roman Catholicism. And if your doubts and issues aren’t personal but general and institutional, I don’t think there is a safe harbor anywhere: What the Francis era has proved above all is that no institution can simply be a fortress against the struggles of the age.
When I meet people who are becoming Catholic now, “at a time like this,” the fact that those struggles are present inside the church does not seem to especially bother them. They’re used to struggle and uncertainty, they don’t expect a simple refuge, and they recognize that any space of real spiritual power — which the Catholic Church still is, I promise — will inevitably be a zone of contestation as well.