George Weigel

Asked to name the most populous American dioceses, alert Catholics would likely name Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. I rather doubt that most of us would rank Brooklyn (the country’s only completely urban diocese) as high on the league table as it in fact is, and I’m willing to wager that not 1 in 20 Catholics would put Rockville Centre and Orange (California) in the top 10. … . Continue Reading »

Press coverage of New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan’s recent election as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops exemplified what my colleague Meghan Clyne calls “paint-by-numbers” reporting… . Continue Reading »

Two weeks before Pope Benedict’s visit to the United Kingdom this September, former British prime minister Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, was published in the United States. At first glance, the events may seem unrelated: a politician’s memoir, with its . . . . Continue Reading »

The murder of more than 50 Catholics by jihadists during Sunday Mass in Baghdad on Oct. 31 is the latest in a series of outrages committed against Christians by Islamist fanatics throughout the world: Egypt, Gaza, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and on the list goes… . Continue Reading »

During three years of outstanding service as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has often drawn the bishops’ attention”and indeed the whole Church’s attention”to the challenges posed by a new secularism that is, in its way, as great a threat to the integrity of Christian faith as the lethal totalitarianisms of the mid-20th century… . Continue Reading »

In mid-September, I ran into retired General Barry McCaffrey in the green room at the NBC studios in Washington. He was discussing the latest turn in the don’t-ask-don’t-tell wars … Continue Reading »

On a recent visit to San Antonio to help support an exciting new project, John Paul II Catholic High School, I had the opportunity to re-visit the Alamo, one of my favorite American historical sites, and San Fernando Cathedral, a masterpiece of Hispanic Catholic architecture and decoration… . Continue Reading »

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 »

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 »

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 »