George Weigel

The common orientation of priest and people during the Liturgy of the Eucharist symbolizes—or perhaps better, lives out—the Church’s conviction that the Mass is an act of worship offered to the Thrice-Holy God. Continue Reading »

What went wrong with the public life of American Catholics? How far back does the problem go? Continue Reading »

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 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 »

Our deeply wounded political culture has produced two impossible options in the 2016 Republican and Democratic tickets. Continue Reading »

Catholics aren’t wrong to feel that the Democrats and the Republicans have left them. Continue Reading »

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 »

John Quincy Adams stands out as a model for twenty-first-century American politicians because he aimed not to please, but to do the right thing, irrespective of the cost. Continue Reading »

That summons to strive for heroic virtue—don’t settle for second-best; no matter what others ask of you, ask the best of yourself—was one facet of John Paul II’s remarkably magnetic appeal for young people. Continue Reading »

At a moment like this when there doesn’t seem to be a lot going right—ascendant authoritarianisms throughout the world; lethal violence by ideological fanatics; feckless responses to both from the democracies—it’s good to be reminded that things can be different, and in fact were different, . . . . Continue Reading »