Alas, poor Douthat! Ross Douthat, I mean, who bravely assumes the task of explaining why he will celebrate another Christmas as a Catholic, despite the, um, unending revelations of unending horrors of sexual abuse and hierarchical coverup that have plagued the Church for the last, I don’t know, twenty or thirty years.
To explain his tolerance for these horrors, Ross hit upon what he clearly thought was a bright idea: yeah, we’re bad, but so was Jesus! Well, he was, says Ross, if you believe the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which gives Jesus’ ancestry, stretching back to Abraham himself, and including 38 more biblical worthies, both famous, like David, and obscure, like Jechoniah and his son Shealtiel,1 Ross’s point being that almost all of these folks (all of them Jews, of course) were adulterers or murderers or blasphemers, or something, so that even Jesus’s family tree is a bit of a freak show, so we Catholics shouldn’t feel so bad.
Of course, this isn't Jesus' lineage. His father, of course, was God, and Mary, of course, according to Catholic doctrine, was uniquely the product of an immaculate conception, keeping her free from the original sin that, thanks to Adam, and, especially, Eve, affects and infects the rest of us, nor did I ever understand how she could have been considered even nominally as a descendant of David and Solomon, though perhaps that’s just me.
Furthermore, as I previously pointed out, Ross takes all this from the beginning of the Gospel of St. Matthew, the most anti-Semitic of the four, which includes the infamous "Let his blood be on our heads" line. As a lapsed Episcopalian, I believe there's a time for letting things go.
1. Jechoniah and Shealtiel both were both kings of Judah. Jechoniah got cursed by Jeremiah for his pains, and his sins, the curse being that none of his descendants would sit on the throne of Judah, which suggests that even prophets can get it wrong (Jeremiah 22:30),
