[When the Gospel seems to be interpreted in different ways] is the obvious challenge, perhaps even danger, here. By its very nature as a custodial office, the papacy can't be a Rorschach test, into which people read whatever they like - whatever they fear or hope for.

George Weigel

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.

George Weigel

live-free generations democracy

Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes.

George Weigel

inspiration humanity faith

History is driven, over the long haul, by culture - by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.

George Weigel

expression men art

But ripped out of context, ["Who am I to judge?" phrase] has become an all-purpose filter through which everything else - including the pope's multiple reaffirmations of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning - gets airbrushed out of the picture.

George Weigel

filters judging mean

The real challenge the rich young man faced was not just giving up his possessions, but giving up himself. The last command Jesus says ("Come, follow me") is the one that we so often overlook and think that he must have left Jesus simply because he liked his green bills.

George Weigel

giving-up real jesus

Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.

George Weigel

truth-is worst-enemy moral

In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.

George Weigel

issues rights views

Perhaps the dumbest of these story lines is that [Pope] Francis has re-opened conversation and debate in a Church that had been closed and claustrophobic for 35 years under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I defy anyone who, over the last 35 years, has spent time on the campuses of Notre Dame or Georgetown, or who has read the National Catholic Reporter, or who has gone to a meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, to make that claim without experiencing a twinge of conscience that says, "I should wash my mouth out with soap."

George Weigel

catholic religious years

A theological time bomb, set to go off with dramatic consequences.

George Weigel

dramatic theological bombs

Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses - or with a new set of ideological filters.

George Weigel

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have lethal consequences.

George Weigel

bad-ideas consequence ideas

The most enduring of the false narratives is that the signature phrase of the early pontificate - "Who am I to judge?" - was a matter of the pope jettisoning millennia of Catholic moral teaching. It was not. It was a specific response to the circumstances of a man who had repented and was trying to live an upright life.

George Weigel

teaching judging men

There's the trope about an impending "global-warming encyclical." The pope is preparing an encyclical on nature and the environment, including the human environment (which includes the moral imperative of a culturally affirmed and legally recognized right to life from conception until natural death). So what happens? A low-ranking Vatican official for self-promotion gives an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that this is a global-warming encyclical - which he couldn't possibly have known, as the document wasn't drafted yet.

George Weigel

interviews self giving

The Guardian,[is] one of the most consistently anti-Catholic newspapers in the world.

George Weigel

guardian catholic world

The story wafts across the Atlantic, where it's picked up with glee by Catholic progressives and horror by some Catholic conservatives - and the battle of the blogs is on, full blast. No one bothers to ask whether there's any basis in fact for the assertion that this is going to be a "global-warming encyclical."

George Weigel

glee catholic battle

When climate change gets some attention in a 100-page document, the most important parts of which will have to do with the theology of stewardship and the theology of "human ecology," it's almost certainly going to be rapturously embraced, or bitterly opposed, as a "global-warming encyclical," despite the evidence that it's much more broadly gauged than that.

George Weigel

climate important attention

More pro-active Vatican communications might be able to do something about all this, but when the Holy See is constantly in the mode of, "No, what the pope really meant was . . . ," the game has already been largely forfeited.

George Weigel

communication games might

One of the most important qualities in a pope is his judgment of people - can he get around him the people who can put into practice his vision of what the Church must be doing now to fulfill its mandate from the Lord.

George Weigel

vision practice people

The job now is to institutionalize all of that [Vatican finances], and I wouldn't bet against Cardinal [George] Pell, who hasn't shied away from contact sports since his days as an Australian-rules football star.

George Weigel

stars football sports

As a friend at a major American newspaper said to me when I complained about this tendency in his own paper, "You know how these media narratives are. They're like bamboo." Meaning, once they start growing, you can't kill them.

George Weigel

growing media paper