George Weigel

Real readers read books all year round. But the convention of the “summer reading list” has become so thoroughly engrained in our culture that it seems appropriate to suggest four books-for-summer that will deepen any thoughtful Catholic’s faith—and any thoughtful Catholic’s perception of the challenges Catholics face today. Continue Reading »

The Office of Readings for the solemnity of the Ascension offers a lovely excerpt from one of St. Augustine’s sermons “de Ascensione Domini,” in which the learned Bishop of Hippo takes as his text Colossians 3:1-2: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated, at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” Continue Reading »

Your Holiness: Grace and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ. Remembering with pleasure our meeting in Washington some years ago, I am prompted to write by what I once hoped was a common concern for the unity of Christ’s Church and a shared commitment to bridging the chasm that opened between America and Russia during the Cold War. Continue Reading »

As that familiar parody of bad fiction has it, “it was a dark and stormy night”—March 21, 2000, to be precise—when I made my way from the Jerusalem Hilton to the Notre Dame Center, to meet a Senior Vatican Official who had promised me a diskette with the addresses John Paul II would deliver during his epic visit to the Holy Land. The diskette was duly handed over, and back in my hotel room I browsed through the upcoming speeches, paying particular attention to what the Polish pope would say when he came to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem—a meeting about which there had been considerable controversy, involving considerable yammering. Continue Reading »

The first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan and the jump sequence in the second episode of Band of Brothers are vivid reminders of the extraordinary courage displayed on D-Day, seventy years ago. When I was a boy, Hollywood taught America about June 6, 1944, in The Longest Day: a fine movie, but rather antiseptic in its portrayal of World War II combat. The stark realism of the more recent films brings home, in a gut-wrenching way, the test of moral fiber involved when a man is asked to jump out of a C-47 into a flak-filled night sky, or to run down the ramp of a Higgins boat onto the killing fields of Omaha Beach. Continue Reading »

It’s commencement season and tens of thousands of students are graduating from inner-city Catholic elementary schools. As decades of empirical research have shown, these kids have a better chance of successfully completing high school and college, and are better prepared for life-after-the-classroom, than their peers attending government schools. These inner-city Catholic schools are “public schools” in the best sense of the term; they’re open to the public (not just to Catholics), and they serve a genuine public interest, the empowerment of the youthful poor. Continue Reading »

Prior to April 27’s canonization-doubleheader, I taped a lengthy interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, discussing both John XXIII and John Paul II. The ABC was kind enough to send transcripts of the programs it did on these giants of modern Catholicism, so I was able to read what others had to say about the Church’s two newest saints. Much of it was interesting, but some comments verged on the bizarre. Continue Reading »

When we first met in April 2011, what initially impressed me about Sviatoslav Shevchuk was his almost preternatural calm: which was striking, in that, less than a month before and still a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday, Shevchuk had been elected Major-Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine in liturgy and governance while in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Continue Reading »

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna has long been a vocal supporter of Humanae Vitae’s teaching on the morally appropriate means of family planning. So it was noteworthy that Cardinal Caffarra recently conceded that, while Humanae Vitae’s conclusions were true, its presentation of those truths left something to be desired. As the cardinal put it, “No one today would dispute that, at the time it was published, Humanae Vitae rested on the foundations of a fragile anthropology, and that there was a certain ‘biologism’ in its argumentation.” Continue Reading »

In 1936, the British writer Rebecca West stood on the balcony of Sarajevo’s town hall and said to her husband, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened.” It was World War I: the civilizational cataclysm that began, according to conventional chronology, when Archduke Franz . . . . Continue Reading »