What I found bitterly frustrating was that the instructor was very correctly scribbling all over my papers with comments about vagueness or pomposity or whatever, but the golden-boy writers for the campus daily were doing the same thing and getting away with it (almost certainly they'd been exempted from freshman comp themselves). And they all wound up at CNN or the New York Times, and of course they all got Pulitzers. It wasn't a bug, it was a feature. It took me some decades to recognize how deliberate this is. I don't think Douthat has quite figured it out yet. Like his colleague David Brooks, he self-consciously wrings his hands over how he's a soi-disant member of the elite.
That said, and recognizing he practices approved elite-sanctioned bad writing, he does make some worthwhile observations in To Change the Church. Evaluating the outcome of the "new evangelization" promoted by John Paul and echoed by Benedict, he concludes,
No matter how it reached its positions, the church lost argument after argument about marriage, family, sexuality, euthanasia -- and eventually found itself in a rearguard battle to protect its own liberties from secular encroachment. Politically, sociologically, and theologically, the faith remained as much on the defensive after decades of conservative reassertion as it had during the years of liberal experimentation[.] (p 32)I can't argue with that. Douthat, without mentioning either by name, cites Summorum Pontificum and Anglicanorum coetibus as Benedict's main achievements, but he makes it plain that they're both overshadowed by his abdication. However queasy I may feel about Douthat as an authority, I can't disagree with his conclusions. Not long ago I had my previous surmise confirmed when I mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus to a diocesan priest and got just a quizzical expression.
Let's also not forget that Anglicanorum coetibus built on the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision, an early John Paul II initiative that, at least as far as creating whole parishes of former Anglicans went, had fallen into desuetude within a decade. As a practical matter, the "new evangelization" never took root, and the mission of Anglicanorum coetibus, after the briefest period of optimism, crept fairly quickly from welcoming and absorbing full Anglican parishes, or even significant rumps, to trying to justify tiny cliques of disgruntled cradle Catholics, angry ex-Anglicans, and riders on the denominational carousel as reasons to ordain poorly vetted Protestant clergy who'd failed to build careers in their former denominations.
As a result, I'm inclining more and more to the view that the OCSP is effectively a remnant of what Douthat calls the "restorationist" faction of the Church, the view that some sort of return to pre-Conciliar aspects of liturgy or other practice would re-evangelize the world at large and reinvigorate the Church from within. It doesn't help, of course, that Anglicanorum coetibus relies on a fantasy of Anglo-Catholicism as a pillar of faith from this period, when it's much more accurately seen as dilettantish romanticism that bears little relation to the Church's central intellectual appeal.
I would not rely on the OCSP remaining in its current form for any significant time. As a practical matter, with the CDF taking all the remaining Anglican Use parishes off the bishops' hands and bishops lukewarm at best over seeing new OCSP groups in their dioceses, I think the organism is already in the process of rejecting the foreign body.
