George Weigel

The vacation season is an opportunity to escape TwitterWorld and do some serious reading. These books will help make your summer enjoyable, instructive, or both.

The bizarre comment and the weird gesture have not, until recently, been associated with high-ranking churchmen. Both, alas, were on vivid display last month when Cardinals Reinhard Marx and Gianfranco Ravasi had more than a few of us scratching our heads in wonderment.

A chapter in a remarkable American and Catholic life will close on June 6, when Abbot Thomas Frerking, OSB, concludes more than two decades of service as leader of the monastic community at St. Louis Abbey. His story deserves to be better known.

In a recent interview, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state of the Holy See, suggested that certain critics of a deal between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China were misconstruing the Holy See’s motivations:

With the exception of the two consistories held by Pope John XXIII in 1958 and 1959, every creation of new cardinals since Pope Pius XII has decreased the percentage of Italian members of the College of Cardinals while internationalizing it. (John XXIII’s first consistory actually increased the Italian membership to 40 percent of an expanded college.) That pattern of internationalization and, if you will, de-Italianization has continued with Pope Francis and the college now includes members from 15 countries (such as Tonga, Laos, and Papua New Guinea) that have never given the church a cardinal before.