According to an old Vatican aphorism, “We think in centuries here,” and viewed through that long-distance lens, the most important Catholic event of 2014 was the dramatic moment when Africa’s bishops emerged as effective, powerful proponents of dynamic orthodoxy in the world Church. The scene was the Extraordinary Synod of 2014, called by Pope Francis […]
Author: George Weigel
The Humbling of The Wise Men
IT MIGHT SEEM that everything that could be said, has been said, about the shepherds, the wise men and the Christ Child. But that’s one of the marvels of Scripture: The unfolding history of the Church draws out of the inspired Word of God allegories and images previously unrecognized. Thus the familiar Christmas story and […]
Kowtowing to Moscow Is Bad Ecumenism
In his work for Christian unity, St. John Paul II often expressed the hope that Christianity in its third millennium might “breathe again” with its “two lungs:” West and East, Latin and Byzantine. It was a noble aspiration. And when he first visited Orthodoxy’s ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople in 1979, perhaps the successor of Peter […]
Six Great Reads for Under the Tree
That “there is no end to the making of books” is attested by both revelation (see Ecclesiastes 12:12) and a browse through your local bookstore – which, if well-stocked, will help you get the following to deserving readers on your Christmas list: N.T. Wright, “Paul: In Fresh Perspective” (Fortress Press) The former Anglican bishop of […]
Lessons from Dietrich Von Hildebrand
Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977), a German Catholic philosopher, was part of a circle of thinkers that first formed around Edmund Husserl, founder of the philosophical method known as “phenomenology.” Others in that circle included Max Scheler, on whom Karol Wojtyla (St. John Paul II) wrote his second doctoral thesis, and Edith Stein, now St. Teresa […]
Vatican II and The Berlin Wall
History sometimes displays the happy capacity to arrange anniversaries so that one sheds light on another. On Nov. 21, 1964, Pope Paul VI solemnly promulgated the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, which began by proclaiming Christ the “Light of the Nations” and is thus known as “Lumen Gentium.” In November, 1989, the […]
Ecumenism and Russian State Power
Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s department of external relations and a frequent visitor to the West, is a man of parts: a widely published author, a composer, a gifted linguist. He can be charming and witty, as I discovered at the Library of Congress in 2011, and in the intervening […]
Exploded Into Being By Divine Love
Long fascinated by cosmology, George Weigel discusses the Big Bang theory, the work of Jesuit Father Georges Lemaître and a new dialogue between science and religion.
Frank Wolf: An Appreciation
For the first time since 1978, Frank Wolf’s name will not appear on the November ballot in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District (CD). The Republic will be the poorer for that.
An Extraordinary Synod, Indeed
According to Vatican-speak, a specially scheduled session of the Synod of Bishops is an “Extraordinary Synod,” meaning not-an-Ordinary Synod, held every three years or so. In the case of the recently completed Extraordinary Synod of 2014, extraordinary things did happen, in the “Oh, wow!” sense of the word.