George Weigel

The post-synodal apostolic exhortation “Querida Amazonia” (“Dear Amazonia”) did not accept or endorse the 2019 Amazonian synod’s proposal that “viri probati” – mature married men – be ordained priests in that region. So until the German church’s “synodal path” comes up with a similar proposal (which seems more than likely), a period of pause has been created in which some non-hysterical reflection on the priesthood and celibacy can take place throughout the world church. Several points might be usefully pondered in the course of that conversation.

   Her fiction may occasionally get the chop in politically correct 21st-century American high schools. But as Benjamin Alexander writes in the preface to a new collection of her letters, Flannery O’Connor’s place in the pantheon of American short story writers seems safe, up there with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. (I’d be tempted to drop Hemingway from the canon, but that’s a matter for another day.)

Immediately after news broke on Jan. 12 that retired Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Robert Sarah had written a book on the crisis of the priesthood in the 21st-century church, online hysteria erupted – which rather underscored the prudence of a New Year’s resolution I had recommended to concerned Catholics in a Jan. 1 column: “Resolve to limit your exposure to the Catholic blogosphere.”

During the 2001 Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who’d suffered through a lot of synodal speechifying and small-group discussions over the years, made a trenchant observation: “Jesus Christ didn’t intend his Church to be governed by a committee.”