THE BEST LENT OF my life involved getting up every day at 5:30 a.m., hiking for miles through ankle-twisting, cobblestoned city streets, dodging drivers for whom traffic laws were traffic suggestions, avoiding the chaos of transit strikes and other civic disturbances, and battling bureaucracies civil and ecclesiastical – all while 3,500 miles from home sweet home.
Author: George Weigel
A Modest Defense of the ‘Liberal World Order’
I think liberal democracy is in grave danger… And yet I think there are things that can and must be said for the “liberal world order” and for liberal democracy.
Paul, Apollos and Cephas, All Over Again
IN APRIL 2016, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, England, issued a pastoral letter on the interpretation of “Amoris Laetitia” (the pope’s apostolic exhortation on marriage) and re-affirmed the Church’s long-settled teaching: The divorced and civilly remarried, while members of the Christian community, are not living in full communion with that community, and should not present themselves for Holy Communion until their manner of life changes or their irregular marriage has been regularized under Church law.
Synod-talk, Again
ON JAN. 13 THE General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops published a “preparatory document” for the 2018 Synod on Young People, Faith and Vocational Discernment.
A Papal Tutor of Heroic Virtue
ON JAN. 20, Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to publish decrees acknowledging the “heroic virtues” of six men and one woman: two diocesan priests, three priests in religious orders, the foundress of an Italian religious community and a Polish layman.
Theology Isn’t Math; But It Is Theology
DURING THE HEYDAY of the Solidarity movement, a famous Polish slogan had it that, “For Poland to be Poland, 2 + 2 Must Always = 4.” It was a quirky but pointed way of challenging the communist culture of the lie, which befogged public life and warped relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, colleagues and neighbors.
Fake History
SPEAKING OF PUBLIC policy debates, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that, while everyone had a right to his opinion, no one had a right to his own facts. Something similar might be said about today’s debates in the Church: everyone has a right to their own opinion about the state of Catholicism in 2017, but no one has a right to invent their own Church history.
Lessons from an Era of Confusion
In the introduction to “Aggiornamento on the Hill of Janus: The American College in Rome, 1955-1979,” Msgr. Stephen M. DiGiovanni warns readers that his book will be most easily understood by students and alumni of the Pontifical North American College.
A ‘Merciless Assault on Human Dignity’
THE ARCHBISHOP OF Toronto is given to deprecating himself as “just a simple country cardinal.”
New Year’s Wishes for Some Catholic Brethren
2017 PROMISES to be a challenging year for the Catholic Church. Thus some new year’s wishes:
I wish Catholic progressives a calmer 2017 than they managed in 2016. The last months of the year now fading into the rear-view mirror were marked by an extraordinary number of bilious attacks on those raising questions about Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia” from the party of dialogue, collegiality and pluralism.