Dec. 28, 2011 - Solidarity’s triumph ought not be universalized as a one-size-fits-all model for coping with tyrants. Still, John Paul II’s instinct for reading history through cultural lenses has much to commend it. Politics and economics are important. What drives history over the long haul, however, is culture.

Dec. 21, 2011 - Posit an all-powerful and infinite God, and most of us wouldn’t have too much trouble with the idea that such a God could do anything, including coming into the finite world he created. The real question is why such a God would want to do such a thing: to submit his divinity to the limits of our humanity, to dwindle into infancy and then to go farther—to die as a tortured criminal at the hands of his own creatures. Here is the 'scandal' of Christianity.

Dec. 14, 2011 - I recently spent several days with the cardinal archbishop of Sydney, where I was giving a series of lectures in support of Campion College, a new Aussie adventure in Catholic liberal arts education of which Cardinal Pell has been a strong supporter. Seeing my old friend up close and personal gave me an opportunity to ponder just how great Cardinal Pell's accomplishment has been.

Dec. 7, 2011 - During his homily at the Mass for the election of the Roman Pontiff (April 18, 2005), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger cautioned his fellow-cardinals that John Paul II’s successor would have to deal with an emerging 'dictatorship of relativism' throughout the western world: the use of coercive state power to impose an agenda of dramatic moral deconstruction on all of society. Recent events throughout the western world have fully vindicated the latter.

Nov. 30, 2011 - If memory serves, this past year saw electronic books top printed books in the sales figures at Amazon.com. Be that as it may, books-real books-still make wonderful Christmas gifts. Here are some recently published (and read) titles I can recommend with enthusiasm.

Nov. 23, 2011 - Catholicism is in crisis all over Old Europe. Nowhere is that crisis more pronounced than in Ireland. The Church in Ireland had best look to itself, its sins, its errors and its unbecoming alliance with political power as it considers how to begin anew. That reconsideration would be aided by dramatic Vatican action that includes a major downsizing of the Irish dioceses.

Nov. 16, 2011 - ABill Doherty was one of the great Catholic laymen of 20th-century America.  A bear of a man who had been a defensive lineman at Catholic University during his student days, Bill dedicated his professional life to trade unionism as an instrument of democracy-building (and hence peace-making) in Latin America.

Nov. 9, 2011 - Andrea Riccardi is a major figure in the Catholic Church in Italy: a historian of the papacy, a commentator on all things Catholic, and a player in various ecclesiastical dramas. Riccardi has been quoted as arguing that “the Curia cannot become a kind of U.N., because it is part of the Roman Church and must maintain a particular ecclesial, human and cultural connection with it.” Permit me to disagree.

Nov. 2, 2011 - The long-awaited introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal on Nov. 27, the first Sunday of Advent, offers the Church an opportunity to reflect on the riches of the liturgy, its biblical vocabulary, and its virtually inexhaustible storehouse of images. At the same time, the changes in the words offer the Church a golden opportunity to confront, and then break, some bad liturgical habits that have accumulated.

Oct. 26, 2011 - The Oct. 11 sentencing of former prime minister and Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko to seven years in prison may or may not stand. Miss Tymoshenko has appealed the sentence and several western governments, including the Obama administration, have lodged stiff protests...

Oct. 19, 2011 - Last month, Pope Benedict XVI met with the Evangelical Church in Germany, a federation of Lutheran, Prussian Union, and Reformed (or Calvinist) Protestant communities. Together, they considered the effects of the modern-day explosion of evangelical, Pentecostalist, and fundamentalist Christianity. Weigel asks, 'What must Catholic laity and leaders do to keep people in the one true Faith?'

Oct. 12, 2011 - Two volumes recently published by Encounter Books address key issues in the New Evangelization: Marcello Pera’s “Why We Must Call Ourselves Christians," and "Living the Call,” by philosopher Michael Novak and businessman/ philanthropist Bill Simon.

Oct. 5, 2011 - Wherever the Gospel is proclaimed with fervor, it draws opposition. The ultimate source of that opposition is the Evil One, but we know what his fate will be. What we don’t know is how democracy can survive widespread, radical Christophobia.

Sept. 28, 2011 - In the flood of commentary surrounding the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I found but one reference to a related anniversary of considerable importance: the fifth anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture. That lecture, given the day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11 at the pope’s old university in Germany, identified the two key challenges to 21st-century.

September 21, 2011 — Father Barron is an old friend (and a colleague on NBC’s Vatican coverage), but I’ll risk the charge of special pleading by stating unequivocally that Father Barron’s “Catholicism,” a 10-part series premiering on public television stations around the country this fall, is a master work by a master teacher.

Sept. 14, 2011 - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known for over a century now by his Bolshevik nom-de-guerre, Lenin, was one of history’s greatest mass murderers. In the course of his ruthless efforts to impose communism on Russia and its neighbors, he became one of the greatest persecutors of the Christian church in two millennia. And yet today’s Russian Orthodox leadership cannot bring itself to say that this monster’s mummified corpse should cease, immediately, being an object of curiosity or veneration?

Sept. 7, 2011 - One of the (many) signs of our cultural decline is that verbal insults, these days, are almost invariably scatological or sexual, provoking a blizzard of asterisks whenever A wants to put the smackdown on B. Once upon a time, it was not so. Once, the ability to come up with a clever insult that could be repeated in polite society was thought an important, if not necessarily essential, component of being a gentleman.

Aug. 24, 2011 - Thomas Merton is usually thought of as a liberal or progressive Catholic, which in many respects he was: he certainly tilted left politically, on civil rights and Vietnam; he wanted to explore new modes of monastic life, putting the Western monastic tradition in conversation with Eastern religions; he chafed under authority throughout his Trappist life; he had a strong sense of self, the 20th-century equivalent of what the Reformation controversialists called “private judgment.” I’ve no ideas what Merton’s liturgical practices were, but it’s not easy to imagine him a rubrical traditionalist.

Aug. 17, 2011 - I am confident that the Catholic Church will one day celebrate the feast of Blessed Shahbaz Bhatti, martyr, whose good and brave confession of faith to Al-Jazeera was 'I know the meaning of the Cross and I am following the Cross.'

Aug. 10, 2011 - George Weigel compares the American and European perspective of Pope Benedict XVI’s social doctrine. World Youth Day 2011 will be an important moment in Pope Benedict XVI’s campaign to remind Europe of its Christian roots and to call Europe to a nobler understanding of democracy.

August 3, 2011 - Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4, was a pre-eminently intelligent and decent man. The full name he was given at his baptism in 1912—Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius—speaks volumes about the history of his family, whose rule over central Europe extended back some seven centuries.

July 27, 2011 (CRACOW) - In a 2010 interview with Catholic World Report, Cardinal Joseph Zen, S.D.B., the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong, wondered aloud about the Catholic Church's reticence to acknowledge those who had been martyred by Chinese communists during the Maoists' rise to power, and thereafter.

July 20, 2011 - CRACOW-Twenty years ago, the American Catholic thinker Michael Novak put his head together with his friend Rocco Buttiglione, a distinguished Italian thinker, to see what might be done about educating a new cadre of young Catholic leaders in the social doctrine of the Church.

July 13, 2011 - The Catholic Church is 2,000 years old; the current Chinese regime took power in 1949. The Church can afford to wait. Keeping the pressure on, especially about religious freedom and the free appointment of bishops, is more important now than a nunciature and a Vatican ambassador in Beijing.

July 6, 2011 - In a recent article, Yale professor David Gelernter noted that modern America had “two extraordinary accomplishments: victory in the Cold War and the all-but-eradication of race prejudice in a single generation … .” The back story of the latter is worth pondering around Independence Day.

June 29, 2011 - Soho, in the West End of the British capital, is "not so much a poor neighborhood as it is a wicked neighborhood. It’s a place dedicated to the appetites and built on prodigality." And in the midst of that prodigality is St. Patrick’s—a model Catholic parish and one of the flagships of the New Evangelization.

June 21, 2011 - Twenty years after it was issued, Centesimus Annus remains a hard encyclical to swallow for those whose politics require them to defend the constant growth of the welfare state, and to identify such bureaucratic and budgetary growth with compassion for the poor.

June 15, 2011 - George Weigel reviews 61*, Billy Crystal’s made-for-TV tale of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi, Whitey, Ellie, Moose, Ralph and the rest of the great New York Yankee baseball team.

June 8, 2011 - Major-Archbishop Shevchuk, the new leader of the world’s Ukrainian Greek Catholics, will play a considerable role in addressing the various challenges facing Orthodox communities in the Ukraine and in Russia. Weigel encourages the unwavering support of Catholics from around the world.

June 1, 2011 - The debate over Catholic social doctrine and U.S. social welfare policy took an unhelpful turn in May when a gaggle of academics fired a shot across the bow of House Speaker John Boehner, prior to his commencement address at the Catholic University of America.

May 25, 2011 - A son of Poland is now Blessed John Paul II. What is Poland to do now?

May 18, 2011 - The death of Osama bin Laden did not end the war against jihadism, a war bin Laden had declared against the United States in a 1996 fatwa that mandated the killing of Americans wherever they could be targeted. But it did take one key leader of jihadist Islam off the global strategic chessboard.

May 11, 2011 - Wyoming Catholic College, where students read Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin, take a mandatory freshman course in horsemanship, and go on a three-week, survival-skills trek through the Rockies before they crack a book.

May 4, 2011 - Barring an international conflagration or another 9/11, both of which may God forbid, the 2012 election is going to be fought on the question of America's fiscal future...

April 27, 2011 (ROME) —Strange as it may seem, I’ve been vaguely worried about the beatification on May 1 of a man with whom I was in close conversation for over a decade and to the writing of whose biography I dedicated 15 years of my own life.
 

April 20, 2011 - For the past six weeks, I’ve had the privilege of participating in the station church pilgrimage of Lent, a Roman tradition that dates back to Christian antiquity.

April 13, 2011 - The Hoover Institution Press at Stanford University recently published a short booklet, titled "Islamism and the Future of the Christians of the Middle East," by Dr. Malik. It should be required reading for anyone concerned with the fate of ancient Christian communities throughout the Levant, including the Holy Land. Allow me to highlight several of the book's key points.

April 6, 2011 - In the fall of 2007, I spent a week in Spain, giving lectures, meeting with Spanish Catholic leaders, and making a hair-raising climb up several hundred scaffolding stairs to the top of Antoni Gaudi’s Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona—preceded by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul II’s longtime secretary, who was doing the trip in a cassock (after confessing to me, sotto voce, that he wasn’t too fond of heights)! Over the course of numerous conversations in those days, it became clear that the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, in power since April 2004, was not simply secular in character but aggressively secularist.

March 30, 2011 - Several weeks ago, the Vatican announced that it would not grant the necessary approval for Lesley-Anne Knight's second, four-year term as secretary general of Caritas International, a global network of 165 Catholic agencies working primarily in the Third World on development and health-care issues.

March 23, 2011 - Judging by the impassioned commentary from some Catholic quarters during recent confrontations between unionized public-sector workers and state governments, you'd think we were back in 1919, with the Church defending the rights of wage slaves laboring in sweat shops under draconian working conditions.

March 16, 2011 - Something quite remarkable happened recently: Cardinal William Wakefield Baum-emeritus Archbishop of Washington, emeritus Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, emeritus Major Penitentiary of the Catholic Church-passed the late Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore (who died in 1921) to become the longest-serving American cardinal in history. It's an astonishing record that drew little public attention.

March 9, 2011 - In Russian Federation president Dmitri Medvedev’s recent visit to the Vatican, which included an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, is being trumpeted in some quarters as further evidence of a dramatic breakthrough in relations between the Holy See and Russia, and between the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. While I wish that were the case, several recent experiences prompt a certain skepticism.

March 2, 2011 - In “The Joys of Yiddish,” Leo Rosten defined chutzpa as “…Presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to” and then offered classic examples of chutzpa in action: “Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. A chutzpanik may be defined as the man who shouts ‘Help! Help!’ while beating you up.”

Feb. 23, 2011 - The recent controversy over the termination of a pregnancy at Phoenix’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, which Phoenix bishop Thomas Olmstead determined to have been a direct abortion and thus a grave moral evil, has generated a secondary controversy over the meaning of the Church’s traditional moral principle of “double effect.” Some have argued—mistakenly, in my view—that what was done in Phoenix satisfied the classic double effect criteria of Catholic moral theology

Feb. 16, 2011 - R. Sargent Shriver, who died on Jan. 18, was the last of the classic American Catholic liberals. Advocate of racial justice when that took real courage; founding director of the Peace Corps and inspiration of a generation of Americans dedicated to serving the global poor; director of Lyndon Johnson’s well-intended if ill-conceived domestic War on Poverty; ambassador to France and vice-presidential candidate—Shriver lived one of the richest of public lives, which included his partnership with his equally pro-life wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, in the Special Olympics movement.

Feb. 9, 2011 - For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative.

Feb. 2, 2011 - Where can you find a Catholic chaplaincy at an institution of higher learning that’s looking to expand its church to seat 1,400, because the current 850 just isn’t enough?

Jan. 26, 2011 - The otherwise inexplicable cure of a French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease was accepted in early January by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and Pope Benedict XVI as the confirming miracle that clears the way for the beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1, Divine Mercy Sunday.

Jan. 12, 2011 - February 6 is the centenary of the birth of Ronald Wilson Reagan, one of the most intriguing public figures of our time.

Jan. 5, 2011 - Throughout his recently completed three-year term as president of United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George, OMI, gently but firmly led his brother bishops through a reflection on their duties as defenders of the integrity of the Catholic “brand.” A deeper commitment on the bishops’ part to being the stewards of Catholic identity in their dioceses was, one may speculate, one factor in the election of Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York—a robust defender of Catholic truth—as Cardinal George’s successor in the president’s chair at the USCCB. Not everything that is labeled “Catholic” warrants that label, the bishops have come to understand; and if anyone is to do something about that, the bishops are going to have to be the principal agents of change.