Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter

Journalist Dulle, who covers the Vatican for America magazine, debuts with a potent insider’s look at some of “the most distressing stories” roiling the Catholic church. Among other issues, she unpacks women’s exclusion from key leadership roles in the Vatican, a practice that Pope Francis had begun to reform before his death, and the laborious process of canonizing saints, which can eat up decades and millions of dollars. (There’s “a strange tension,” Dulle points out, “that exists in the church between holiness, which Jesus made clear is easier for the poor to achieve,” and the great sums needed to officially recognize sainthood.) Elsewhere, she reflects on the emotional gauntlet of covering the church’s sexual abuse scandals, describing how she vacillates between numbness and anger and has come to the uneasy conclusion that “wrestling with the church’s problems [is] a key condition of my being Catholic.” Dulle buttresses her account with intriguing up-close details (including the ways in which the male-dominated Vatican culture is showing some preliminary signs of change), and delves deeply into the challenges that arise as the Vatican’s intricate traditions and labyrinthine bureaucratic processes come under the microscope of a global media, raising questions about the costs of upholding tradition and the cultural changes needed to reform calcified systems. The result is a revealing and often troubling portrait of a church in flux. (Aug.)