George Weigel Quotes
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The pope [Francis] speaks with great passion about the shame we should all feel when, as he puts it, "a man does not have the dignity of earning bread for his family," but is turned into a peripheral person, a welfare client, a dependent.
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The world needs a pastor, whether it knows it or not.
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[Pope Francis] is 78 years old and knows that his will be a short pontificate.
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In the Vatican, if you don't get something new done quickly you may not get it done at all.
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Then [Catholics] owe [pope] the loyalty that is expressed in speaking the truth to him - and that puts a premium on knowing whether what you're happy about, on unhappy about, has a basis in fact, or is merely a reflection of the "narrative.
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We're used to institutional-maintenance Catholicism, in which the institution ticks along by its own inertia and people are "born" into the Church. Francis knows that is over and done with: "Kept" Catholicism, whether "kept" by legal establishment or by cultural habit, has no future.
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Vital parishes built on the Bible and the sacraments, committed to evangelizing their neighborhoods, will continue to flourish. The poor will be served, the sick healed, and the dying comforted. None of that is going to change, and I'd wager that it's going to get better.
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The most important appointment Pope Francis has made is the appointment of the Australian cardinal, George Pell, as the Vatican's financial overseer.
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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.
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[Pope Francis] comes to that conviction [of family crisis] as a pastor, not as Brad Wilcox or Charles Murray. So he wants to challenge the Church to find pastoral responses to that crisis that meet real human needs.
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The "encounter" with the people on the peripheries is intended to draw them into the circle of common care and concern - that call to encounter is, to use a favorite world of John Paul II's, a call to solidarity. And that means, it seems to me, aggressive Catholic efforts to empower the poor - and a profound Catholic challenge to all those cultural forces that are eroding stable families, which are the elementary schools where we learn to take responsibility for our lives, which is the highest exercise of freedom.
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Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible - and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto.
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[Pope Francis] has felt the mercy of God in his own life and wants to share that experience with others.
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Ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have lethal consequences.
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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.
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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.
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[Jesus Christ to Pope Francis] is the Lord with whom he speaks for hours every day in prayer. The Risen One who reached out, touched his life, and called him into mission.
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The Church offers the medicine of the divine mercy so that healed souls can grasp the truth that will liberate them in the fullest meaning of human freedom.
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A theological time bomb, set to go off with dramatic consequences.
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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.
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In the Church the transformative power of the Eucharist is experienced through the dignified celebration of Holy Mass, and people are empowered for mission because of that.
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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.
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Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.
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The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.
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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."
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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.
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These [conservative] people, if they're Americans, look back on the last 35 years of our ecclesial experience and take heart from that. The dramatic reform of seminaries continues. The priests and bishops who take their pastoral model from John Paul II will continue to do so, perhaps learning a lesson or two from Francis along the way - and they'll be the overwhelming majority of the Church's ordained ministers ten, twenty, thirty years from now.
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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.
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[Pope Francis]sees a world in need of the Gospel, and of friendship with Jesus Christ, as an antidote to the self-absorption and loneliness that are eating away at the solidarity of the human community.
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The Guardian,[is] one of the most consistently anti-Catholic newspapers in the world.
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