JOHN PAUL II called the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 to assess what had gone right and what had gone wrong in two decades of implementing the Second Vatican Council. In Vaticanese, it was styled “extraordinary” because it fell outside the normal sequence of synods. But Synod-1985 was extraordinary in the ordinary sense of the word, too.
Author: George Weigel
Fencing with Bigots
… BEING AN imaginary dialogue between a nominee to a federal appeals court and members of the Committee on the Judiciary of what once imagined itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body”…
The Transmigration of Theological Nonsense
DURING THE LONG Lent of 2002, Sister Betsy Conway, who lived in the Bostonian epicenter of the clerical sexual abuse crisis, spoke for many self-identified progressive Catholics when she told syndicated columnist Michael Kelly, “This is our Church, all of us, and we need to take it back.”
A Memoir I Never Expected to Write
WHEN THE SECOND volume of my John Paul II biography, “The End and the Beginning,” was published in 2010, I thought I was finished with John Paul book-making. I hoped I’d done my best in bringing to a global audience the full story of a rich, complex life that had bent the curve of history in a more humane direction.
A Conversation on Catholic Social Doctrine
CNN IS NOT the customary locale-of-choice for a catechesis on Catholic social doctrine. But that’s what Paul Ryan, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, offered viewers of a CNN national town hall meeting on Aug. 21.
Superheroes? Stardust? Vessels of the Incarnation?
WHEN I WAS first introduced to the fascinations of the DNA double-helix in a biology class at Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin H.S., 50 years ago, the “unraveling” of this key to unlocking the mysteries of human genetics had taken place just a dozen years before. Yet, in the five decades since my classmates and I built plastic models of the double-helix, humanity’s knowledge of its genetic code has grown exponentially. And it seems likely that, as a species, we’re only at the threshold of our capacity to use this knowledge for good or ill.
Resist the Temptation to Domesticate God
SOME BIBLICAL SCHOLARS consider the Book of Deuteronomy to be a collection of sermons: catechetical homilies on the great theme of the Exodus and the fulfillment of that epic adventure in God’s gifts of the Law and the land to the people of Israel.
Why Church Fights The Culture War
THOSE WHO PERSIST in denying that the Church is engaged in a culture war, the combatants in which are aptly called the “culture of life” and the “culture of death,” might ponder this June blog post by my summer pastor in rural Québec, Father Tim Moyle:
Ecumenism and Influence-Envy
Defending the indefensible is never pretty. Or so we’re reminded by recent attempts from the portside of the Catholic commentariat to defend the madcap analysis of America’s alleged “ecumenism of hate” that appeared last month in the Italian Catholic journal, La Civiltà Cattolica (edited by the Jesuits of Rome and published after vetting by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See).
Questions of Competence
IT’S A SAFE bet that 99.95 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics have never heard of La Civiltà Cattolica [Catholic Civilization], a journal founded in 1850 by Jesuits of Rome to combat evils of the age (then taken to be secularist liberalism and freemasonry). Its current circulation is perhaps half that of First Things, and while it’s recently made attempts to broaden readership by publishing English, Spanish, French and Korean editions, it’s also a safe bet that Civiltà Cattolica will remain a small-circulation magazine with a readership confined to what we might call “Catholic professionals:” clergy of various ranks; papal diplomats; officials of the Roman Curia; academics and pundits.
