EDITORIAL: Accompaniment reflects our conviction in the God-given dignity of all human persons, even those with whom we disagree.
This past Sunday marked the end of an era: Catholic journalist Ross Douthat wrote his final column as a staffer for The New York Times, as he departs for a new role with CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Douthat had been a regular for the Times since 2009, when at age 29 he was hired as the newspaper’s youngest regular opinion columnist. As Jesuit Father Bill McCormick has rightly noted, Douthat’s nearly two-decade-long tenure at “The Gray Lady” was spent demonstrating “that Catholicism remains an intellectually serious way of understanding the world.”
But even more than that, as a religious conservative writing and podcasting for a largely secular progressive audience, Douthat’s tenure at the Times modeled a journalistic version of a papally approved mode of evangelistic outreach: the art of accompaniment.
The approach had been an emphasis of Pope Francis’s — making Douthat’s embodiment of it somewhat ironic, given his frequent criticism’s of the Argentine Pope. Laid out in Evangelii Gaudium, the art of accompaniment emphasizes meeting others where they are at, treating their experiences seriously, and gently guiding them toward deeper
