However I think you didn't give sufficient consideration to the part about:
"Somewhere along the way, I resolved to be honest with myself, if not others, about my need for Almighty God....The one thing that stayed with me from Benedict XVI’s book was the Pope’s profound meditation on the idea that Almighty God had become man and entered our history – which is to say, the central mystery of Christianity. Et incarnatus est.That the Person whom St Peter is denying isn’t just his great friend and teacher, but the very God Himself, God from God, who has entered our fallen world. And whose greatest act is to endure humiliation, be spat upon, crucified and even denied by his friends...
"The beauty of the painting became, for me, a sign of the underlying truth. The story of the three denials, in other words, was no longer just a moving narrative, but part of an event upon which all of cosmic history pivots. More than that: an event and an idea that shook me to my core. ...
Life experience had led me to see the Christian idea of the Fall, and our Lord’s gift of radical repentance, as the most sensible solution to the brokenness all around me.
"I longed for worship that gave full expression to the mysteries of the Christian faith. The Cross had to be there, but also our Lord’s crucified body – with the pierced side, and the bloodied hands, the scourged and welted back, and the thorns cutting into the forehead. The sacrifice had to be restaged, and His Mother had to be there, too, because she was our link to His divinity, to His becoming flesh. I longed for the Mass, in other words."
Who cares?
Friend, I did read it, yet we don’t know whether this led him to entrust himself to Christ alone for eternal life - or to simply join a church with meaningful art and ritual.
He never tells us.
For this reason I truly hope he has salvation, and with it eternal life.
Best