George Weigel

Opinions / Columnists / George Weigel

The Catechism of the Catholic Church at 25

For those expecting a Q&A format like the old Baltimore Catechism, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was a surprise. While divided into 2,865 bite-size sections, the catechism is a discursive exposition of Catholic faith in full. Its structure, which mirrors the Catechism of the Council of Trent, reaches back to the early church and the patristic catechumenate. Thus the catechism’s four parts reflect the four pillars of Christian initiation: the “Profession of Faith” (the Creed); the “Celebration of the Christian Mystery” (the Sacraments); “Life in Christ” (Christian Morality); and “Christian Prayer.”
... More

10/10/17

George Weigel

Thoughts on the Western Wall, 50 years later

Photographs can capture exceptional moments in an iconic way, making the original experience “present” emotionally as well as pictorially.
... More

6/6/17

George Weigel

Europe’s demographic suicide

Europe is committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson has called “the greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death in the 14th century.” ... More

5/30/17

George Weigel

The importance of Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson's accomplishments should rank as high as anyone’s in the pantheon of civil rights heroes.
... More

4/18/17

George Weigel

The power of the cross

Blessed John Henry Newman (1801-90) — a theologian who came to prominence in the Victorian Age — can help us check the church’s spiritual pulse in the post-modern 21st century, thanks to his prescient sense of the deep cultural currents shaping (and warping) Western civilization. On Aug. 26, 1832, Newman preached a sermon, “The Religion of the Day,” that bears reflection during Holy Week 2017:
... More

4/12/17

George Weigel

Persuasive disciples, not anarchic disrupters

We are living through a dangerous moment in our national life, of an intensity and potential for destruction unseen since 1968. Then, a teenager, I watched U.S. Army tanks patrol the streets of Baltimore around the African-American parish where I worked. Now, a Medicare card carrier, I’m just as concerned about the fragility of the Republic and the rule of law.
... More

3/15/17

George Weigel

The pivotal players

In Bishop Robert Barron's "Pivotal Players,” six of the most striking personalities in Catholic history take center stage.
... More

11/14/16

George Weigel

Intolerance and evangelization

Cardinal Robert Sarah is one of the adornments of the Catholic Church, although it's unlikely that this man of faith, humor, intelligence and profound humility would appreciate my putting it that way. His 2015 book, God or Nothing, is selling all over the world, currently available in 12 languages with more to come. The book tells his story, that of a contemporary confessor of the faith who accepted episcopal ordination knowing that he might well be killed for his witness to Christ by the madcap Marxist dictator who then ran his West African country, Guinea.
... More

6/10/16

George Weigel

Owning your baptism

During talks around the country in recent years, I've been asking Catholic audiences how many of those present know the date of their baptism. The high-end response is a little under 10 percent. The average is about 2 to 3 percent. This, brethren, is a problem.
... More

4/27/16

George Weigel

Using the ‘G-word’

In the early church, witnesses to the faith who had been persecuted and tortured but not killed were known as "martyr-confessors." It's been one of the great privileges of my life to have known such men and women: Czech priests who spent years as slave laborers in uranium mines; Lithuanian priests and nuns condemned to Perm Camp 36 in the Gulag; a Ukrainian Greek Catholic scholar who knew the bone-chilling bite of the Siberian winter because of his fidelity to Christ and to the Bishop of Rome. These modern martyr-confessors are part of that "great cloud of witnesses" who form a living link between the church here and now and "the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven" (Heb 12:1, 23).
... More

4/14/16

George Weigel

Things that can’t change

When the Second Vatican Council was putting the finishing touches on one of its key documents, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church ("Lumen Gentium,") Pope Paul VI proposed that it include a statement that the pope is "accountable to the Lord alone."
... More

3/30/16

George Weigel

Easter is not a question mark

Excavating my desk recently, I found the program notes from a Tallis Scholars concert my wife and I had attended a few months ago. The Tallis Scholars are a marvelous a capella ensemble, but most of their music that night was rather too minimalist for my tastes. In any event, the author of the program notes described "Arvo Pärt: I am the true vine" and its "qualities of stasis and timelessness" as reminiscent of what "former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as 'silently waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark.'"
... More

3/23/16

George Weigel

After Justice Scalia

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia Feb. 13 - unexpected and, for many reasons, tragic - draws a curtain on the life and public service of one of the most important Catholic figures in America over the past half-century. Justice Scalia was regarded, by admirers and detractors alike, as the most consequential jurist of his time. He brought a remarkable intellect, a clear concept of judging, a distinguished literary style and a biting wit to his work on the U.S. Supreme Court. His utter demolition of the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that invented a constitutional right for people of the same sex to "marry," is a masterpiece of devastation - as was Scalia's dissent from Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion saving Obamacare by reinventing it as a kind of tax.
... More

2/24/16

George Weigel

China’s population crisis: An evangelical opportunity?

State-sponsored cruelty has been a staple of the human condition for millennia. But has there ever been a more wicked policy with more disastrous social consequences than the "one-child policy" China began to implement in the early 1980s - a state-decreed population-control measure that resulted in, among other horrors, untold tens of millions of coerced abortions? In her new book, One Child (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), veteran China-watcher Mei Fong describes both the impact of the policy on the destruction of China's traditional social fabric and its draconian effects on China's medium- and long-term future.
... More

1/27/16

George Weigel

Two great bishops

We American Catholics are, in the main, notoriously uninterested in our own history. So it likely escaped the notice of many that Dec. 3 marked the bicentenary of the death of John Carroll, one of the greatest who ever lived among us.
... More

12/21/15

George Weigel

Books for Christmas

It's been a good reading year, and I highly recommend the following to the readers on your Christmas (not "holiday") shopping list:
... More

12/15/15

GEORGE WEIGEL

The grittiness of Christian faith

Walking through the narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem's Old City on my first visit there in 15 years, I was struck powerfully once again by the grittiness of Christianity, the palpable connection between the faith and the quotidian realities of life. For there, as in no other place, the believer, the skeptic and the "searcher" are confronted with a fact: Christianity began, not with a pious story or "narrative," but with the reality of transformed lives. Real things happened to real people at real places in real time - and the transformation wrought in those real people by those "real things" transformed the world.
... More

11/23/15

George Weigel

‘My beloved Krakow’

Several years ago, Father Raymond de Souza, one of my fellow faculty members at an annual Krakow-based summer seminar on Catholic social doctrine, made a trenchant observation about the city St. John Paul II used to call "my beloved Krakow." Krakow, Father de Souza observed, was the city where the 20th century happened in a singular way.
... More

11/10/15

George Weigel

The saints and all of us

Amidst all the Sturm und Drang of Synod 2015, something genuinely new in the life of the church began, and it shouldn't escape our notice. For the first time in two millennia, an entry in the liturgical books will now read, on the appropriate day, "Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, spouses" - a happy addition to "martyr," "confessor," "bishop," "religious," "pope," etc., in the pantheon of vocations to sanctity. Spouses: a married couple, together on the tapestry that hung from the central loggia of St. Peter's before, during and after their canonization Oct. 18; a man and a woman, a dad and a mom, who were the parents of a saint, the "Little Flower," and in whose married life mutual sanctification took place by cooperation with God's grace.
... More

10/28/15

George Weigel

Hope for synod 2015

The XIV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family begins with Mass in St. Peter's Oct. 4. No synod in modern Catholic history has drawn such worldwide press attention or generated such controversy within the church (with the possible exception of the special synod called by John Paul II to examine Vatican II on the 20th anniversary of its conclusion). Synods typically have been rather dull affairs. The special synod of 2014, called by Pope Francis to prepare for the synod about to begin, was anything but dull, and the 2015 synod promises to generate its share of fireworks, too.
... More

9/29/15

George Weigel

Popes in these United States

The history of popes in these United States is full of surprises.
... More

9/15/15

George Weigel

Remembering ‘the few’

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 15, 1940, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine were driven from the prime minister's country house, Chequers, to the nearby village of Uxbridge, a Royal Air Force station and the headquarters from which Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park was directing the RAF's No. 11 Group against the onslaught of the German Luftwaffe in southern England. When the prime minister and his wife walked into No. 11 Group's operations room, Park, a doughty New Zealander who flew his own personal Hurricane fighter, said, "I don't know whether anything will happen today. At present, all is quiet."
... More

9/9/15

George Weigel

The amazing, and now venerable, Fr. Al

At an inch or so over five feet and weighing, I would guess, something on the underside of 100 pounds, Sister Winnie, a soft spoken Filipina, is not your typical dinner speaker. Yet a few weeks ago she held a room full of Washingtonians spellbound with her story -- which is also the story of a largely unknown American of whom the Church in the United States should be very proud.
... More

8/13/15

George Weigel

The church and the 'new normal'

In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent same-sex marriage decision, these sober thoughts occur:
... More

6/30/15

George Weigel

Themes for surviving ‘ordinary time’

I'm fortunate to hear good preaching on a regular basis. But even the best Catholic preaching these days leans far more toward moral exhortation than biblical exposition. This strikes me as a missed opportunity. For if one of the tasks of preaching today is to help the people of the church "see" the world and our lives more clearly by piercing through the regnant fog of cultural confusion, then there's no substitute for expository preaching that digs into the biblical text, unpacks it and shows how it provides a unique optic on the here-and-now.
... More

6/23/15

George Weigel

The myth of Washington gridlock

"Gridlock" along the Potomac - the difficulties the Congress has in getting things done, the difficulties the Congress and the White House have in cooperating to get things done, or both - is regularly deplored by pols, pundits and citizens alike. My contrarian view is that this kind of "gridlock" can serve useful public purposes, acting as a brake on passions and a gauge of the nation's moral health.
... More

6/10/15

George Weigel

Men such as these

Like most denizens of Washington, I pay too little attention to the sites other Americans make sacrifices to visit. Earlier this month, though, prompted by reading James Scott's Target Tokyo, a comprehensive history of the famous Doolittle Raid of April 18, 1942, I strolled through Arlington National Cemetery in search of three graves.
... More

5/27/15

George Weigel

Remembering No. 84

Although he scored 40 times in an eight-year NFL career, he is best known for the touchdown he didn't score, as the sun set over Yankee Stadium Dec. 28, 1958. His wife of 59 years, Joan, said that Jim Mutscheller, who died April 10, wanted to be known as a man "who had led a good life," for he was "quiet, humble and so conservative that he'd eat crabs with a suit and tie on."
... More

4/29/15

George Weigel

Newman and Vatican II

That Blessed John Henry Newman was one of the great influences on Vatican II is "a commonplace," as Newman's biographer, Father Ian Ker, puts it. But what does that mean? What influence did Newman have on a council that opened 72 years after his death? And from this side of history, what might we learn from Newman about the proper way to "read" Vatican II, as we anticipate the 50th anniversary of its conclusion Dec. 8?
... More

4/22/15

George Weigel

Cardinal Pell's mission impossible

Shortly after George Pell was named Archbishop of Melbourne, he instituted several reforms at the archdiocesan seminary, including daily Mass and the daily celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, both of which had fallen by the wayside in the preceding years. The seminary faculty, enthusiastic proponents of "Catholic Lite," thought to call the archbishop's bluff and informed him that, were he to persist in such draconian measures, they would resign en masse.
... More

3/25/15

George Weigel

Keeping Catholic schools Catholic

There seems to be some dispute as to whether the original Trotskyite, Leon Trotsky, ever said, "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." One quotation-archaeologist, digging deeply, claims to have found the origins of Trotsky's alleged bon mot in the treatise, "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party." But, while this is Lent, excavating such rocky soil would transform penance into masochism. So let's just assume that Trotsky, as a good dialectical materialist, believed that there was no escape from history as it was being driven by "the dialectic."
... More

3/12/15

George Weigel

Challenges for Vatican diplomacy

The bilateral diplomacy of the Holy See is unique in world affairs in that it has little or nothing to do with the things with which diplomats typically occupy their time: trade issues, security matters and visas. Rather, the reason that the Vatican engages in bilateral diplomacy is to secure the freedom of the Catholic Church to be itself in the countries with which the Holy See has, or wishes to have, diplomatic relations.
... More

2/9/15

George Weigel

Europe and nothingness

In the wake of the horrific jihadist attack on the Paris-based journal Charlie Hebdo, the trope "satirical magazine" was regularly deployed to explain Charlie's character and content. But that's not quite right. And what's wrong about it - when linked to the sentiment expressed on placards reading "We are all Charlie Hebdo" - suggests just how much trouble Europe is in, as it confronts this new form of war.
... More

1/27/15

George Weigel

The Weakland memoirs

In A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, offers an account of, and an apologia for, his dramatic life. One reader, a prominent scholar and convert who lives in a very different pew than Archbishop Weakland's, so to speak, nonetheless told me that the Benedictine prelate's memoir was a fascinating education in the theological, political and personal dynamics that filled the post-Vatican II Church in America with internecine strife - the results of which are much with us today. The question is whether Archbishop Weakland's account of that period is fully accurate.
... More

8/12/09

George Weigel

Food, sex, and us

George F. Will calls Mary Eberstadt "intimidatingly intelligent." George must be easily intimidated these days, because Mary is one of the nicest (and funniest) people I know.
... More

4/1/09

George Weigel

What ‘Church’ does Notre Dame belong to?

Of all the commentary I've read on Notre Dame's decision to invite President Obama to receive an honorary doctorate of laws as the university's 2009 commencement speaker, the most disturbing came from Father Kenneth Himes of the Boston College theology department. In a Boston Globe story about Professor Mary Ann Glendon's courageous (and correct) decision to decline Notre Dame's Laetare Medal because the university had defied the U.S. bishops' policy barring honors for pro-abortion politicians at Catholic events, Father Himes said this:
... More

1/1/70

George Weigel

The crisis of a second term

President Obama's re-election and the prospect of a second Obama administration, freed from the constraints imposed by the necessity of running for re-election, have created a crisis for the Catholic Church in the United States. In the thought-world and vocabulary of the Bible, "crisis" has two meanings - the conventional sense (a grave threat) and a deeper sense (a great moment of opportunity). Both are applicable to the church in America these next four years.
... More

1/1/70

George Weigel

More

COLUMNIST BIO

George Weigel

George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America's leading public intellectuals. He has been awarded ten honorary doctorates, the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, and the Gloria Artis Gold Medal by the Republic of Poland. He serves on the boards of directors of several organizations dedicated to human rights and the cause of religious freedom and is a member of the editorial board of First Things . George Weigel and his wife, Joan, have three children and one grandchild, and live in North Bethesda, Maryland.
- Facebook
- Twitter
- YouTube
- RSS

COLUMNIST BIO