Randy Boyagoda is a writer and professor of English at the University of Toronto. His new novel, Lords of Serendipity, will be published next September.

“You’re lucky you’re Catholic.”

This is a phrase I never expected to hear in my adult life, never mind at a recent Toronto dinner party where there were more degrees around the table than dishes and bottles on top of it. Under normal circumstances, I would wait for the punchline, probably something about abortion or sexual abuse, but in this case, none was forthcoming.

Instead, the person making this unprecedented observation about my lifelong faith went on to explain himself with disarming candour. As a Christian but not a Catholic, he felt a greater pressure to justify his decision to live as if God exists and to do so as part of a particular community and set of practices, compared to how Catholics experience this burden. He’s not wrong, whether in historical terms, or these days especially.

Opinion: I seek to resolve my conflict between Catholicism and my culture

There’s long been an immense variety within this global faith, which makes it possible for anyone who self-identifies as Catholic to discern a place for themselves in relation to the Church, whether positively, ambivalently, or negatively, and whether you’re living in historically Catholic-majority countries like France and Italy; or in regions where adherents are increasing in number, as in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South; or as part of any number of immigration waves from the Catholic old countries to North America. Across these contexts, each of which reliably offers family background as a ready explanation for one’s continuing Catholicism, there’s also an immense variety of responses available within the faith itself to the permanent questions of how to integrate belief with action, theological propositions with political positions, individual inclinations with group behaviour.

To be sure, this has been the case for centuries if not millennia. What feels different right now, in the lead-up to Christmas, is that Catholicism, whether in high-profile politics and culture or just ordinary demographics, seems to be enjoying a certain kind of cachet.

Earlier this year, when Mark Carney’s rapid elevation to Liberal Leader and in turn Prime Minister became apparent, like many other Canadians I began reading his book Value(s). I’m not alone, I suspect, in failing to finish his 500-page study of the tension of market and human values, but I certainly read enough to appreciate Mr. Carney’s learned, wonky seriousness, and also his openness to higher kinds of guidance. Early on, he describes a lunch with Pope Francis that he attended with others in politics, policy and charitable work, where the late pontiff told a typically earthy parable about the difference between wine and grappa to propose that people with influence over financial markets were called to bring a fuller sense of the human to bear upon their workings.

Four years after reflecting positively on Pope Francis’s challenge in the pages of Value(s), the now Prime Minister was in Washington this past October for talks with President Donald Trump and members of his administration. While there, he had dinner with Vice-President JD Vance, and several media sources pointed to their shared Catholicism: Mr. Carney’s a cradle Catholic, while Mr. Vance converted in 2019. Attesting in part to the faith’s inherent capaciousness, no one would point to Mr. Carney and Mr. Vance as readily simpatico in politics or personal bearing, but each is avowedly, openly Catholic. Did Mr. Carney retell his wine-and-grappa papal anecdote to Mr. Vance? Did Mr. Vance reflect on being the last world leader to have met Francis, the day before he died this past April?

God only knows, of course, but suffice to say there’s something at work right now in the public life of Catholicism that’s encouraging this kind of attentiveness. Put differently, it’s hard to imagine media coverage of, say, a Justin Trudeau-Joe Biden meeting that made anything of their also both being Catholic, the latter famously always carrying his rosary around with him, never mind journalists accentuating the Catholicism of nine other Canadian prime ministers dating back to Sir John Thompson.

One ready explanation for........

© The Globe and Mail