VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
America [New York NY]
May 8, 2026
By Jeannine M. Pitas
It’s a question I’ve fielded my whole adult life. “How can you remain part of a religion when you disagree with so much of it?” my secular friends ask. “How can you stay in an institution that doesn’t let women participate fully? A church that has covered for child abusers?”
I usually come back to the same answer: I love Jesus and want to follow him, and the best way for me to do so is to remain in the church that raised me, flawed as it is. In Struck Down, Not Destroyed, America’s Vatican correspondent Colleen Dulle offers a powerful testament to her own commitment to the church—a commitment where scrutiny and critique go hand in hand with reverence.
“It’s impossible to be a Catholic these days without experiencing some cognitive dissonance,” Dulle states. Recalling the Genesis story of Jacob wrestling with God, she goes on: “We wrestle with the teachings and the institutional problems, think them through and rethink them, and pray for some grace to see God working somewhere in all this. Those of us who take up that wrestling willingly are aspiring to what I call a mature faith.”
In this incisive, passionate account of her work as a fulltime Vatican reporter, Dulle reflects on the most harrowing issues that she has covered thus far: the widespread phenomenon of sexual abuse within the church and its concealment; the position of women in leadership; the political divide in the U.S.-based church; the scandal of honored Catholic heroes who have fallen from grace; and the corruption within the process of canonizing saints.
While she expresses much grief and anger for the church’s failures in these areas, she finds hope for redemption in her coverage of the Synod on Synodality from 2021 to 2024, called by Pope Francis, which helped her and those around her to make the transition “from isolation and loneliness…to encounter, transformation, and community.”
Dulle begins by sharing her own vocational journey. A cradle Catholic, she describes mystical experiences in her adolescence that eventually gave way to a more rational, intellectual approach to her faith. After studying at Loyola University in New Orleans, she began her career with a Joseph A. O’Hare Media Fellowship at America Media. After being hired full-time, she eventually transitioned into her current position as a Vatican correspondent. “My search for God and for the truth were always one and the same,” she affirms, describing her faith as “hard-won” after many experiences of seeing the church at its worst.
Dulle began her career amid the 2018 “summer of shame,” when the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report documented 70 years of sexual abuse and cover-ups in the church. She also witnessed the fall from grace of Theodore McCarrick, once a beloved U.S. cardinal, who was laicized in 2019 for abusing adults and children. This horror was followed by new divisions in the church, with Carlos Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States, accusing Pope Francis of covering for McCarrick and others.
The barrage of horrible news led Dulle to feel no emotion whatsoever the first time she traveled to Rome and saw St. Peter’s Square. But she did not give up on her commitment to discovering the truth; remaining grounded in prayer was a key source of strength. “The horrifying truths about clerical sexual abuse were going to keep coming out, and it was important that they do,” she states. “It was important that I not shy away from them, but keep reporting on them, keep trying to reveal the truth.”
Perhaps this baptism by fire at the start of Dulle’s career is what gave her the fortitude to face other difficult issues in the church, such as the roles of women in leadership. In addition to the debates about ordination of women to the priesthood and diaconate, Dulle’s narrative highlights the vulnerability of nuns working in Vatican City—particularly nuns from the Global South— who have faced labor injustice.
Dulle notes that since church officials tend to extol humility and look suspiciously on anyone seeking power, women advocating for greater leadership roles are often dismissed. But she urges the church to look to the example of Mary Magdalene, first witness to the Resurrection, who was commanded by Jesus to preach the Gospel and then not believed by his apostles. While Dulle does not take a firm stand on questions of women’s ordination, she exhorts us all to urge the church to do right by the many women who see themselves in Mary Magdalene’s story.
In a chapter on the cultural-political divide in the U.S. Catholic Church, Dulle relates the internal conflict between her love of the traditional Latin Mass and the politically and religiously conservative politics she encountered among many of its adherents. In a vulnerable narrative, she relates her close friend’s death by suicide, which led her to gravitate more toward progressive Catholicism. However, she says she has never abandoned her love for the beauty of the Latin Mass.
Returning to a traditionalist parish after a long hiatus, she notes that the Communion she received “was the same one they were receiving at my hippie Mass in New Orleans…and in the Catholic Worker soup kitchen, where they used the meal prep table as an altar. There we all were, the body of Christ, even when some parts of the body thought other parts would be better off amputated.”
A particularly poignant moment in the book comes when she recounts the fall from grace of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, a worldwide network of supportive communities where people with disabilities and people without disabilities live together. Dulle describes a deep admiration for Vanier that was destroyed when his sexual abuse of spiritual directees was made known. This crushing revelation made Dulle wary of placing anyone on a pedestal. At the same time, the fact that Vanier’s misdeeds did not destroy the L’Arche movement made her realize that “ordinary, sinful hands can do good.”
Among Dulle’s final chapters is one criticizing the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. This chapter shed light on something I have always wondered about: why so few canonized saints are laypeople, and even fewer come from the Global South. Dulle explains why most of the saints’ causes that have advanced in recent times have required large sums of money to do so. Servant of God Dorothy Day’s case, if it succeeds, is projected to cost a million dollars. Dulle’s analysis of corruption in the process forces readers to remember that sainthood is something we are all called to, whether or not it is granted by a Vatican office.
Dulle concludes her narrative with a reflection on her coverage of Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality, which she sees as a first step for the church to heal from the abuse crisis and regain trust and credibility at a global level. She cites the synod’s efforts to listen to people on the margins as a move from “I” to “we.” After discussing the many harrowing situations in the church, this discussion of the synod allows her to land in a place of hope. She calls for clergy to work alongside laypeople, inviting them into active leadership and responsibility.
As a young Catholic journalist, Dulle offers a truly promising vision for the future of the church. I admire her efforts to bridge divides, particularly between so-called traditionalist and progressive Catholics, to heal from wounds and to keep God at the center. She offers a vision of the church behind the institution—the one that St. Lawrence presented to the Roman authorities when, commanded to bring out the treasure of the church, he brought forward the poor and vulnerable. Scrutinizing the center of Catholicism’s earthly power, Dulle urges us all to remember that as Christians we follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who defied worldly authority and always stood up for those on the margins.
As a professor at a small Benedictine college, I encounter many of the issues that Dulle discusses in her narrative. My college was affected by the abuse crisis; we experience the political divide among our own faculty and students; we have struggled with our own fallen idols. I look at my students—both Catholic and not—and witness their weariness and at times sheer exhaustion, as they grow up in a world fraught with conflict and violence.
I would thoroughly recommend Dulle’s book to my students and indeed to any Catholics, young and old, who are seeking their place in the church and the world. She mentions that it is rare for reporters to share so much of their own personal journey, but her story is one that Catholics of many ages and backgrounds will relate to. She has given us a true gift in sharing her journey, and she proves to be a powerful example of someone wrestling with God to reach a faith that is steadfast precisely because it is hard-won.