News - George Weigel RSS Feed

If you’re feeling a bit down about the future of Catholicism in the United States, ask yourself these questions: Why haven’t American seminaries emptied over the past 16 months, as Crisis 2.0 continues to roil the U.S. church and an aggressive media regularly puts Catholicism in the worst possible public light? Why haven’t the McCarrick affair, the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the Bransfield affair, and other revelations of episcopal misgovernance (and worse) caused a mass exodus of young men from priestly formation? Can you name another profession, regularly subjected to media ridicule and popular caricature, to which young men are applying in greater numbers than 20 years ago?

Throughout the 20th century – the greatest period of martyrdom in history – persecuted Christians used the dross of this world to make religious artifacts.

A timely lamentation on the state of discourse in our church and nation. Weigel proposes "a framework for collaborative thinking in which there is ample room for serious debate over tactics," but says it will work only if ideologues stop going ballistic "at the first whiff of disagreement."

Pope Francis’s recent “motu proprio” on sexual abuse, “Vos estis lux mundi” (You Are the Light of the World), was a welcome addition to church law, as world Catholicism seeks to heal the wounds of abuse victims, promote chaste living, foster mutual accountability within the body of Christ, and restore the credibility of the church’s leadership. The response to the motu proprio by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ably summed up that document’s achievement:

In Herman Wouk’s novel “War and Remembrance,” Warren Henry shocks his Bible-reading father, the novel’s hero, by claiming that human beings are “microbes on a grain of dust ... and when it’s over we’re just dead meat.” The Washington state legislature has now topped the cynical young Warren Henry by declaring that we’re useful meat, as in potential compost, such that one can legally choose to be composted after death, then used for fertilizer.

Judging from the immediate, volatile and sometime vicious responses to Ratzinger’s memorandum from the same quarters two weeks ago, too many on the Catholic left remain in denial about the link between doctrinal and moral dissent and clerical wickedness. ... One of these frothing pundits even went so far as to charge Benedict with being, in effect, a schismatic.  

Some two millennia ago, a ragtag bunch of nobodies learned what their tortured and executed friend, the rabbi Jesus from Nazareth, meant by “rising from the dead” (Mark 9:9-10) — because they met him again, the same but utterly transformed, as the Risen Lord. The Easter Effect upturned all they had once thought about time, history, and God’s promises to Israel; it also transformed these nobodies into extraordinary evangelists, for the missionary project they launched converted perhaps as much as half the Mediterranean world over the next two and a half centuries.

Your Eminence: I noted with interest your recent announcement of a “binding synodal process” during which the church in Germany will discuss the celibacy of the Latin-rite Catholic priesthood, the church’s sexual ethic and clericalism, these being “issues” put on the table by the crisis of clerical sexual abuse.

Writing recently on women seeking the presidency and the “likability” factor in our politics, Peggy Noonan made a tart observation: “There are a lot of male candidates with likability problems. Some, such as Andrew Cuomo, a three-term governor of a large state, are so unlikable they aren’t even mentioned as contenders.”

The morality of tyrannicide is not much discussed in today’s kinder, gentler Catholic Church. Yet that difficult subject once engaged some of Catholicism’s finest minds, including Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, and it was passionately debated during the World War II by German officers –many of them devout Christians – who were pondering the assassination of Adolf Hitler. (Their efforts were known and tacitly approved by Pius XII, but that’s another story.)

The Vatican is a hotbed of rumor, gossip and speculation at the best of times – and these times are not those times. The Roman atmosphere at the beginning of 2019 is typically fetid and sometimes poisonous, with a lot of misinformation and disinformation floating around. That smog of fallacy and fiction could damage February’s global gathering of bishops, called by the pope to address the abuse crisis that is impeding the church’s evangelical mission virtually everywhere.

Take a stand against the electronification of everything – give (real) books this Christmas. Some recommendations:

Twenty years ago this month, I found myself seriously double-booked, so to speak.

By peremptorily ordering the American bishops not to vote on local remedies for today’s Catholic crisis of abusive clergy and malfeasant bishops, the Vatican dramatically raised the stakes for the February 2019 meeting that Pope Francis has called to discuss the crisis in a global perspective. How the Americans taking decisive action last month would have impeded Roman deliberations in February – the strange explanation offered by the Vatican for its edict – will remain an open question. Now, the most urgent matter is to define correctly the issues that global gathering will address. As there are disturbing signs that Those Who Just Don’t Get It are still not getting it, I’d like to flag some pitfalls the February meeting should avoid.

Perspective is at least as important when reading the signs of the times as it is in landscape painting. And so, in this autumn of our Catholic discontent, I was particularly grateful to hear from an old friend, Nina-Sophie Heereman, who offered some needed perspective on the Catholic circumstance in the United States.

The Sunday Mass Scripture during this summer of horrors have often been eerily appropriate, beginning with Jeremiah’s polemic against malfeasant shepherds who mislead the Lord’s flock (July 25) and continuing through the story of many disciples’ defection after the “hard words” of the bread of life discourse (Aug. 26). And it’s entirely understandable that more than a few Catholics have choked on the word “holy” these past few months, when asked to affirm it of the church during the Creed and the Offertory. But while understandable, that still bespeaks a misunderstanding. The reason why is given immediately after the defection story in John 6: 60-66, when the Lord asks the Twelve if they, too, are going to bail on him and Peter answers, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

When the great Tom Wolfe died on May 14 – he of the white suits, the spats, and the prose style as exuberant as his wardrobe – I, like millions of others, remembered the many moments of pleasure I had gotten from his work.

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.