"Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism..."

"... and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).... [I]t’s the pope’s traditionalist adversaries who are more likely to don the sort of 'heavenly' garb being feted and imitated at the Met — while from his own simple choice of dress to his constant digs at overdressed clerics and fancy traditionalists, the pope believes that baroque Catholicism belongs in a museum or at a costume gala, and that the church’s future lies in the simple, the casual, the austere and the plain.... Francis and other would-be modernizers are right, and have always been right, that Catholic Christianity should not trade on fear. But a religion that claims to be divinely established cannot persuade without a lot of fascination, and far too much of that has been given up, consigned to the museum, as Western Catholicism has traced its slow decline.... [T]here is no plausible path [forward] that does not involve more of what was displayed and appropriated and blasphemed against in New York City Monday night, more of what once made Catholicism both great and weird, and could yet make it both again."

From "Make Catholicism Weird Again" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

Cannot persuade without a lot of fascination....

The etymology of "fascination" takes us back to a Latin word that means spells and witchcraft. The oldest meaning (now obsolete) is "The casting of a spell; sorcery, enchantment" (OED). Another old meaning is "The action and the faculty of fascinating their prey attributed to serpents, etc." (Example from 1848: "The fascination of the serpent on the bird held her mute and frozen.") The meaning we think of when we hear the word is "irresistibly attractive influence." Examples, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" (1860):

Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than before.