Pay No Attention to the Conclave, by Austin Ruse

By Austin Ruse, Crisis Magazine, April 25, 2025

Austin Ruse is a contributing editor to Crisis Magazine. He is president of the Center for Family and Human Rights in New York and Washington DC. He is the author of several books including, Under Siege: No Finer Time to be a Faithful Catholic (Crisis Publications). He can be reached at austinruse@c-fam.org.

We are not called to be Church watchers. We are not called to fuss at the rectory, the chancery, or the Vatican. Our proper “stance” is to face the world with the Church at our back.

The way God set up the Church is one Pope, a lot more Bishops, and exponentially more laymen. This should tell us something about our role in the Church. Clearly, the “institutional” Church is not our role, either to be in it or be overly concerned with it.

A few years ago, I wrote a column about three men who became overly concerned about the institutional Church and how their unremitting concern led them right out of the faith. In the case of my friends Rod Dreher and Joseph Sciambra, it led them out of the Catholic Church, and in the case of Steve Skojec, it led him right out of faith altogether. Each, in their own way, remains haunted by that which they left behind. Skojec just Substacked a searing cry of the heart about his journey of anger and brokenness to faithlessness. …