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George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

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Pat Moynihan: The Great Catholic “What if…”

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The recent publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (Public Affairs) is cause for both celebration and sadness: celebration, because his letters reintroduce us to Pat Moynihan’s scintillating intellect, sparkling wit, and penetrating insight into some the great issues of the late 20th century … Continue Reading »

Papal Humor

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Despite the world’s fascination with All Things Papal, there isn’t much out there about papal humor. Which is, in a sense, entirely understandable: it takes a certain breadth of imagination, shall we say, to imagine Gregory XVI or Pius XI telling a joke (much less telling one on himself). Blessed John XXIII is an exception, as he was in many other ways, and two of his wisecracks have been widely circulated… . Continue Reading »

Bob Woodward, the President, and Just War

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There was considerable just war argument before, during, and after the Iraq War. Some of it was not terribly insightful, but, in the main, the debate demonstrated that the principles of the classic just war tradition, if not the tradition’s intellectual architecture, were still in place in American public life… . Continue Reading »

Newman’s Faith

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Two postcard portraits of the recently-beatified John Henry Newman have graced my office for years. One is a miniature painted by Sir William Charles Ross in 1845, the year of Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church. The second, by Emmeline Dean, gives us the aged cardinal, a year before his death in 1890, in cardinalatial house cassock and walking stick… . Continue Reading »

The Pius Wars, Continued

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In the war over Pius XII and the Holy See’s policy toward Nazi Germany before and during World War II, there are fanatically anti-Pacelli/Pius XII writers like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Sergio Minerbi, whose imperviousness to evidence that challenges their presuppositions raises grave questions about their scholarship. And then there are the serious academic historians… . Continue Reading »

A Promise to Pope John Paul II

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The conversation over dinner was wide-ranging, and at one point, after the usual papal kidding about my having written “a very big book,” John Paul asked about the international reception of Witness to Hope, his biography, which I had published five years earlier… . Continue Reading »

The Solidarity Difference

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Thirty years ago, on Aug. 31, 1980, an electrician named Lech Walesa signed the Gdansk Accords, ending a two-week-old strike at that Hanseatic city’s Lenin Shipyards. Walesa signed with a giant souvenir pen featuring a portrait of Pope John Paul II… . Continue Reading »

When Compromise Trumps Apostolic Tradition

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Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child abuse… . Continue Reading »