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.