Ross Douthat, the conservative Catholic writer announced among the new slate of 60 Minutes correspondents and contributors, claimed he shared an intense religious experience during a late-night bar talk with JD Vance.
Douthat, an opinion writer at The New York Times with no experience in television news production or reporting, is among a string of hires at 60 Minutes as CBS News’ MAGA-curious boss, Bari Weiss, tries to overhaul the flagship news magazine.
As well as writing columns, Douthat also hosts the New York Times podcast Interesting Times and had Vance as a guest in June. During the lengthy interview with the vice president, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 at age 35, Douthat brought up an April 2020 essay Vance wrote for the Catholic magazine The Lamp.
Vance described how there was not a single “aha!” moment that made him realize he wanted to become a Catholic, but there were some “weird coincidences that hastened my decision.”
Vance then described an apparent divine intervention that occurred around 2019 when he questioned an unnamed “conservative Catholic writer” in a bar about his criticism of then-Pope Francis.
“My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims,” Vance wrote.
“While he admitted that some Catholics went too far, he defended his more measured approach, when suddenly a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us.”
Vance added that the pair then both “stared at each other in silence for a bit, a little startled by what we’d just seen,” abruptly ending the conversation.
During the June episode of Interesting Times, Douthat confirmed to the audience: “I was that conservative Catholic writer.”
“Did I report this accurately?” Vance asked.
“You did report it accurately. There was a mysterious leap of a glass,” Douthat replied.
Douthat then asked Vance why, given that “God warned us both against it,” the vice president attacked Pope Leo XIV for speaking out against the war in Iran and suggested the head of the Catholic Church should be “careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
After trying to deny that he was “fighting” with Pope Leo, Vance continued: “In public life you say things, and sometimes you make bone-headed comments, and sometimes you say things that are taken totally out of context.”
On Tuesday, 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton announced that fellow television news virgin Douthat will join the prestigious show alongside Sebastian Junger, Gianna Toboni, and Trevor Phillips as correspondents and contributors.
The new arrivals were needed after high-profile 60 Minutes figures, including correspondents Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega, were fired by Weiss and Bilton.
Its biggest star, Anderson Cooper, decided to leave the show after becoming disillusioned with the MAGA-friendly editorial shift under Weiss, who also had no television news experience before being parachuted in as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Douthat, previously a senior editor at The Atlantic, has also written several books, including 2025’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious and 2012’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.
The Catholic commentator has also written extensively against abortion and took part in a CBS News debate with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the subject, “Do We Need God?”
