In An Alternate Timeline, Our Supreme Court Wins Would Have Been Bigger, by Peter Wolfgang

By Peter Wolfgang, Catholic Culture, Jun 28, 2025

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

I’m predisposed against theories claiming that alternate universes exist because they often come from scientists who want to avoid the evidence that God exists. Positing the possibility of alternate universes is how they get around the fact that our universe seems perfectly calibrated for humanity’s existence. It wasn’t because we have a loving Creator, you see, it’s just that we happened to luck out by being in the one-in-a-gazillion universes where the conditions are right for us to exist. Never mind that there is far less evidence for this theory than there is for the existence of God.

But if you like science fiction or fantasy, and you don’t take it too seriously, this kind of speculation can be fun. I felt some sympathy for Ross Douthat when, in an interview with CatholicVote’s Erika Ahern, he joked that Pope Benedict’s 2013 resignation was the moment we jumped to an alternate timeline. Think of all the crazy unprecedented things we have lived through, in the Church and in civil society, ever since that announcement. Who knows? Maybe it was the moment on that day when the lightning hit St. Peter’s Basilica. …

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