Papal biographer George Weigel spoke about the call to “evangelical Catholicism” in remarks that drew more than 140 people to St. John the Apostle Church in Leesburg March 20.
The event was co-hosted by Michael and Elizabeth Ortner and Trinity House Community to benefit its capital campaign to purchase the Leesburg building that houses the ministry’s headquarters and Trinity House Café and Market.
Weigel, best known for “Witness to Hope,” his biography of St. John Paul II, spoke about the New Evangelization popularized by the late pontiff, and compared the Internet-based digital dangers facing families today to the authoritarian policies of Cold War Communist Poland in his day.
“The Communist project from the get-go tried to erode family life in Poland,” he said, describing huge, long apartment blocks with very small apartments to discourage large families, and work schedules arranged to limit parents’ time with children.
“The Communist system in Poland was so overtly brutal, that it was easy to understand what was going on, and easy to hate,” he said.
During Pope John Paul II’s first visit to Poland as pope in June 1979, Weigel shared that a reporter asked a coal miner outside Katowice in Silesia, “Why are you here?” The man replied, “To praise the Mother of God and to spite (the authorities).”
“That was easy to see and hate, and then resist,” Weigel said. “It’s a lot different today. Netflix isn’t beating you over the head with a truncheon or making you live in a small apartment or whatever, but it is sending out bad stuff. Corrosive stuff. Family-eroding stuff. The same thing for the Internet, social media, et cetera, et cetera. So, we have to be this church of the New Evangelization, what I have come to call a ‘culture-reforming counterculture.’ ”
