Feb. 8, 2012 - There are many good arguments against quickly convening a Third Vatican Council—a notion beloved of Catholics who occupy the portside cabins on the Barque of Peter.

Feb. 1, 2012 - On the solemnity of the Epiphany, I heard a sermon—a rather well-delivered one at that—about the Magi as religious “seekers.”  But isn’t there something a bit askew here? Isn’t the point of Matthew’s tale of the “Wise Men from the East” (Matt 2:1) that they were finders, not just seekers?

Jan. 25, 2012 - The Hebrew Bible is not for the squeamish. And its harshest maledictions are called down upon those who practiced the abomination of child-sacrifice. Thirty-nine years after Roe v. Wade created an unrestricted abortion license in the United States, all Americans ought to ponder the ancient words of the psalmists and prophets — and the kind of country to which Roe v. Wade led.

Jan. 18, 2012 - The candidate who can speak with the kind of moral clarity similar to that voiced by Václav Havel about the decisions we face as Americans, is the candidate who should take the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, 2013.

Jan. 11, 2012 - Why do adults become Catholics? There are as many reasons for “converting” as there are converts.

Jan. 4, 2012 - The point of correcting bad habits is to celebrate the Novus Ordo of Paul VI with dignity and beauty, so that Holy Mass is experienced for what it is: our participation in the liturgy of saints and angels in heaven.

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...