Over 40 years of teaching and writing about Catholic social doctrine, George Weigel has known three men who had the opportunity to embody the Church’s social teaching for a national audience. Two of them couldn’t pull it off, for different reasons.
Author: George Weigel
Saints as Spouses
ROME – Amidst all the Sturm und Drang of Synod 2015, something genuinely new in the life of the Church began, and it shouldn’t escape our notice.
‘Church of Spies’ Ends ‘Hitler’s Pope’
The great Piazza San Pietro in Rome is a five-minute walk from where I’m living during Synod-2015. About three-quarters of the Square is bounded by the famous Bernini colonnades, which reach out from the Vatican basilica as if to embrace the world. Along the open “front” of the Piazza and along the perimeter of the colonnades, a broad white stripe is embedded in the street. The casual visitor might mistake it for a kind of “No Parking” sign.
Delving Beneath the Surface at the Synod
ROME. SINCE POPE Francis announced that two Synods would examine the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family, and work to devise more evangelically dynamic responses to that crisis, a lot of attention has focused on issues of Catholic discipline: How does the Church determine that a marriage never existed, and thus grant a decree of nullity? What is to be done about the sacramental situation of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics? How does the Church best prepare its sons and daughters for marriage?
Synod 2015 Hopes
THE XIV ORDINARY General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family begins with Mass in St. Peter’s on Oct. 4. No synod in modern Catholic history has drawn such worldwide press attention or generated such controversy within the Church – with the possible exception of the special synod called by John Paul II to examine Vatican II on the 20th anniversary of its conclusion.
Rough Rider’s Lessons For Political Ruffians
SITTING AT A WRITING-desk in the White House on Dec. 11, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt was an unhappy camper. In previous letters, he addressed his correspondent as “Dear Maria.” Now, it was “Mrs. Storer” who would be on the receiving end of the presidential wrath.
Popes in These United States
THE HISTORY OF popes in these United States is full of surprises. And one of them – to begin at the beginning – includes the little-known fact that Blessed Paul VI was not the first pontiff to set foot on American territory, when he landed at newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport on Oct. 4, 1965. No, the first pope to plant a papal slipper on the sovereign territory of the U.S. was Blessed Pius IX, way back in 1849.
Remembering The Few
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1940, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine were driven from the prime minister’s country house, Chequers, to the nearby village of Uxbridge: a Royal Air Force (RAF) station and the headquarters from which Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park was directing the RAF’s No. 11 Group against the onslaught of the German Luftwaffe in southern England. When the prime minister and his wife walked into No. 11 Group’s Operations Room, Park, a doughty New Zealander who flew his own personal Hurricane fighter, said, “I don’t know whether anything will happen today. At present, all is quiet.”
The Issue Beneath the Issue at the Synod
A brilliant article by a German Catholic philosopher, Professor Thomas Stark, suggests that an argument beneath the argument may be afoot in the controversies that will be aired at the Synod of Bishops in October.
Now Is the Time for All-in Catholicism
AT CHRISTMAS 1969, Professor Joseph Ratzinger gave a radio talk with the provocative title, “What Will the Future Church Look Like?” (You can find it in “Faith and the Future,” published by Ignatius Press). One of the concluding paragraphs was destined to become perhaps the most quoted excerpt from his extensive bibliography, when Professor Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI: