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George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

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Catholicism’s Empty Quarter

From Web Exclusives

Québec, a flourishing Catholic region for centuries, is now Catholicism’s empty quarter in the Western Hemisphere. There is no more religiously arid place between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego; there may be no more religiously arid place on the planet. And it all happened in the blink of an eye. Continue Reading »

God and Brexit

From Web Exclusives

When biblical religion collapsed, as it manifestly has in most of Old Europe and too much of New Europe after 1989, commitments to subsidiarity and its respect for difference imploded as well. Continue Reading »

The Washington Post and the Church of Me

From Web Exclusives

The idea of freedom in the Church of Me was neatly captured by that great moral philosopher, Frank Sinatra, when he sang, “I did it my way.” Underwriting that self-centered (indeed, selfish) concept of freedom is the idea that the human person is just a twitching bundle of desires, the satisfaction of which is what we mean by “human rights.” Continue Reading »

The Ostpolitik Failed. Get Over It.

From Web Exclusives

In the 1960s, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI initiated a new Vatican approach to the countries behind the iron curtain, the Ostpolitik.The tactics included a cessation of all public Vatican criticism of communist regimes. No serious student of these matters judges the Ostpolitik a success. Those claiming otherwise are willfully ignorant, obtuse, unwilling to learn from the past—or, perhaps, all of the above. Continue Reading »