Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter

by Colleen Dulle, James Martin SJ Narrated by Colleen Dulle, James Martin SJ

Overview

A bold, inspiring call not to lose spiritual hope from a Vatican reporter who has seen the Catholic Church's darkness-and has learned that it cannot overpower the light

For too many Catholics, the darkness of creeping doubt, of drifting out into the spiritual cold of God's absence, is felt not outside the church but within it. With each of the church's moral failures-the sexual abuse, systematic mistreatment of women, shady financial management, its cozy relationships with corrupt political power-people lose faith or they wonder if they can, in good conscience, remain part of the church at all. For Catholic journalists who report on the church's failures in detail, the struggle to keep the faith can feel like an intolerable cognitive dissonance.

In Struck Down, Not Destroyed, Vatican reporter for America magazine Colleen Dulle takes readers for the first time into her own experience of reporting: how the church has put her own faith into crisis, and how she has managed to stay Catholic by meeting again and again the spiritual reality at the heart of the church-God and the saints. With each chapter, Dulle revisits her reporting on a church crisis, revealing to readers that in every instance of anger, betrayal, and hurt, she was ultimately renewed in hope, courage, and resolve.

Recounting efforts to pray honestly and finding herself yelling at God, attending Mass at churches where she was treated like the “wrong” kind of Catholic, or learning that one of her spiritual heroes was a sexual abuser, Dulle offers readers the gift of solidarity: they are not alone and there is hope. At the times when the church seemed merely human, just an institution for power and politicking, Dulle found herself spiritually upheld by difficult prayer, other faithful Catholics, fellow reporters, faithful priests, and, ultimately, the Holy Spirit. Dulle holds out this same promise for readers. She provides no easy solutions, nor does she pretend to resolve the feelings of dissonance; instead, she passes on the courage she received with a vivid reminder that the church's faith is still worth believing in and fighting for.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

In Struck Down, Not Destroyed, Colleen Dulle takes a unique spiritual pilgrimage, one that confronts candidly the institutional mistakes and failures of the Catholic Church, while holding on to faith. It’s a book that will resonate with many Catholics, young and old, who are trying to understand the scandals of recent years and move beyond them.”—John Thavis, New York Times bestselling author of The Vatican Diaries

“The Catholic Church, in her earthly, human dimension, will always be battling sin, always in need of purgation. A necessary part of that rectifying work is the truth teller—the man or woman willing to look hard at the dark fallen side of the church in order to bring hidden betrayals into the light for the sake of justice and healing. What we don’t often think about are the personal costs of that truth telling. In Struck Down, Not Destroyed, Colleen Dulle honestly reveals that underside of the story: the profound spiritual challenges of reporting on scandal and corruption in the institutional church as a believing, practicing Catholic. Resisting cynicism and simplistic tribalism, Dulle writes frankly about recent scandals in the church and movingly about how she’s managed to keep her faith. Like Jacob wrestling with God in the dead of night, she holds on—and in the midst of the struggle, somehow a blessing comes. This is a compelling, fortifying read for anyone who is grappling with the fallen side of the church.”—Abigail Favale, author of The Genesis of Gender

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193442868
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Human Cries and Divine Silence

The first time I saw St. Peter’s Basilica, I felt nothing. It wasn’t the reaction I’d thought I would have. I was a lifelong Catholic who’d once seriously considered becoming a nun, and who now reported on the Vatican for a Jesuit magazine. But just a few days before, on a silent retreat, I had been red-faced, tears burning down my cheeks, as I hurled all my anger at God for standing by, apparently unmoved, as tens of thousands of children were sexually abused by Catholic priests over decades.

It was winter 2019. The last six months on the religion beat had been wall-to-wall sex abuse coverage, first with the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, which recounted in harrowing detail seventy years of abuse and cover-up. Then the once-beloved Cardinal Theodore McCarrick fell from grace after his serial abuse of minors and seminarians was exposed by a few brave survivors and journalists. And finally, there was Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s attempted coup, in which he hijacked the church’s legitimate reckoning with abuse and the systems that enabled it, twisting it into an eleven-page manifesto regurgitating previously debunked claims that a “lavender mafia” of gay priests was to blame for the abuse crisis and claiming that Pope Francis himself had covered for McCarrick.

Reporters quickly shot holes through Viganò’s argument, pointing out that his own calendar contradicted his timeline of events, not to mention that it was well known that Viganò was angry with Francis for refusing to make him a cardinal. This was the same bishop who, as papal ambassador to the United States, had staged a meeting between the pope and Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who had become a conservative hero for denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. After Davis’s lawyers tried to spin the meeting as a papal endorsement, the Vatican came out with an official statement saying it was only a “brief greeting” and “should not be considered a form of support of her position.” The political motivations driving this latest “manifesto” on McCarrick were similarly transparent: the document was published simultaneously by several far-right Catholic publications and its release was timed to the second and final day of Pope Francis’s already sensitive visit to Ireland, a country where the church’s long-held influence was disappearing after its own reckoning with clerical sexual abuse and other scandals.

It was these nauseating facts that I couldn’t escape while on retreat, and that I carried with me to Rome.

Covering this news day in and day out, hearing and working to confirm, as much as possible, the harrowing details of how children were abused, along with discerning the intentions of people, like Viganò, who wanted to use victims’ trauma to further their own agendas, was, honestly, excruciating. Those of us journalists who were younger had a particularly hard time; we had mostly been shielded from the abuse crisis during the first wave of revelations in 2002, having been too young to understand. Now, we were having to confront the evil within the church as employees and representatives of the institution. We all believed that for the church to move forward in any credible way, it first had to confront the whole truth. That was a sort of mantra repeated by Catholics throughout what we were already calling the “summer of shame”: the church needs to face the truth in order to heal.

But that noble aspiration only carried us so far. I, for one, was compensating for the days of reading through the Grand Jury report and fact-checking Viganò’s claims by drinking even more than I already did. (Here, the stereotypes of both hard-drinking Irish Catholics and journalists were true.) In fact, I first read the Viganò letter in the bathroom of some bar in Brooklyn I could never locate again.

I can see now that I was drinking so much more because the way I had usually processed difficult things had been ripped out from under me: whereas I used to find comfort slipping into the Adoration chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral a block away from work at the end of the day, or relaxing into a pew in the church next door to my apartment to just talk through it all with God, now the place I’d gone for consolation had become the focus of my anger. I remember only feeling comforted at Mass one time during that “summer of shame”—it was one Sunday when the first reading was “Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the Lord. . . . You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but I will take care to punish your evil deeds” (Jeremiah 23:1–2). Indeed, I thought. This is exactly what our church leaders have done, and they deserve divine punishment. And then, immediately afterward came the responsorial psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.” While the shepherds of the church continued to anger and disappoint me, the true shepherd, God, was there. I clung desperately to that sliver of hope.

I wasn’t the only one struggling. The Washington Post op-ed section released a video of its many Catholic editors talking about how the abuse revelations had shaken their faith. In my own circle of friends, several people stopped going to church, and some have not come back. One of my colleagues told me that even his parents couldn’t bear to go to church anymore, and so as a family they decided to stay home. When I went home in the evenings, I would hang out with my cousin, a Fordham theology student who lived across the hall, and his friends. Like my colleagues, they were questioning whether they’d made the right call by devoting their lives to an institution that had done such reprehensible things. Everywhere I turned, the feeling was the same—to quote Yeats, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Although the epicenter of the “summer of shame” was the United States, the Viganò letter, dropped during the pope’s trip to Ireland and demanding a response from Rome, ensured that its shock waves were felt everywhere. And Rome, despite remaining silent for two full years before responding to Viganò’s claims, felt the need to take action. Pope Francis announced that he was gathering the heads of all the bishops’ conferences throughout the world—national and regional organizations of bishops—along with the heads of the world’s orders of nuns, priests, and brothers to come to the Vatican for a euphemistically named summit on “the protection of minors.” I and other Vatican reporters called it what it was: the summit on sexual abuse.

The conceit was interesting: Pope Francis would bring the world’s bishops into one room and force them to sit and listen to personal testimonies from abuse survivors from six continents, in an effort to debunk finally what some bishops persisted in believing since 2002: that sexual abuse was only an “Anglophone” problem. Every bishop needed to learn that abuse was a global problem and that ignoring it in their dioceses would only do more damage.

Most reporters were skeptical: there was no talk before the summit of using the meeting to impose new rules on the bishops for how to handle abuse, to say nothing of consequences for failing to report it or specific penalties for bishops and priests who abused minors or vulnerable adults or covered up abuse. The expectation across the board was that nothing would change. Nevertheless, the summit was going to be a huge media event; several hundred journalists, myself included, had requested temporary accreditation from the Holy See to cover it.

It just so happened that my trip to Rome for the summit perfectly bridged two other trips I already had scheduled: I would be going from a silent retreat in Montréal directly to Rome for the summit, and then to Israel and Palestine to work as a staff member on one of my magazine’s guided Holy Land pilgrimages. My faith was wobbly at best and a source of pain most of the time, and I would be facing it head-on in the retreat (Could I even pray anymore?), then marching directly into the center of all the failures—the source of that pain—and, fresh off the disappointment of nothing changing, I’d have to put on a nice and pious face for the pilgrims who had paid an arm and a leg to visit the holiest sites in Christianity.

I sensed I would emerge from this trip either an atheist or, miraculously, someone with new resolve. If God was going to intervene, now would be a good time.