The Catholic Difference – Madison Catholic Herald

Readers of a certain vintage (say, over 60) will remember the Imperial Margarine TV ad that dismissed butter as “the high-priced spread.”

That image came to mind rather unexpectedly when I was addressing the parents’ associations of two prestigious Catholic prep schools several years ago.

Parents favor ‘elite’ secular universities

No, no one threw a margarine-smeared dinner roll at me during my talk. The Q&A, however, was full of contention when I said that a first-class liberal arts education at a college or university with a strong Catholic identity would prepare their sons and daughters for anything.

On March 23, 2017

George Weigel

On ‘owning’ the Church

The question of “who owns the Church” has had a stormy history in Catholic America, although the terms of reference have changed considerably over time.

In the 19th century, “lay trusteeism” — lay boards that owned parish property and sometimes claimed authority over the appointment and dismissal of pastors — was a major headache for the U.S. bishops.

Today, the question is more likely to arise from the wetlands of psychobabble; thus one Midwestern diocesan chancellor recently spoke about a diocesan “needs assessment” that “can give ownership to the people,” presumably of their lives as Catholics.

On November 30, 2016

George Weigel

Our need for the real Thomas More

Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the film, A Man for All Seasons.

And if it’s impossible to imagine such a picture on such a theme winning Oscars today, then let’s be grateful that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got it right by giving Fred Zinnemann’s splendid movie six of its awards in 1967 — when, reputedly, Audrey Hepburn lifted her eyes to heaven before announcing with obvious pleasure that this cinematic celebration of the witness and martyrdom of Sir Thomas More had beaten The Sand Pebbles, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Alfie, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for Best Picture.

On June 30, 2016

George Weigel

A cinematic lesson in hope

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, not so very long ago.

Recapturing those days and summoning memories of a time when the good folks won, cleanly and against all the odds, is the singular accomplishment of a splendid new documentary, Liberating a Continent: John Paul II and the Fall of Communism, which should be on everyone’s summer must-watch list.

On April 28, 2016

George Weigel

The best nuncio we’ve had thus far

The announcement that Archbishop Christophe Pierre will succeed Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States is an opportunity to pay tribute to a courageous churchman who has served Catholicism, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis in an exemplary way during his tenure in Washington.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with each of the nuncios in Washington since full diplomatic relations were established between this country and the Holy See under President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.

And at the risk of embarrassing him, I have to say that I consider Archbishop Viganò to have been the best of them all thus far.

On March 31, 2016

George Weigel

Easter is not a question mark

Excavating my desk recently, I found the program notes from a Tallis Scholars concert my wife and I had attended a few months ago.

The Tallis Scholars are a marvelous a capella ensemble, but most of their music that night was rather too minimalist for my tastes. In any event, the author of the program notes described Arvo Pärt’s I am the true vine and its “qualities of stasis and timelessness,” as reminiscent of what “former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as ‘silently waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.”

Changes in Harvard’s crest

Which put me in mind of an old joke that used to circulate in the editorial offices of First Things. Harvard University’s crest, it seems, used to read Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae [Truth for Christ and the Church].

Christ and the Church were jettisoned over a hundred years ago; the crest now reads, simply, Veritas.

On February 17, 2016

George Weigel

ISIS, genocide, and us: West should respond

The Monuments Men was a disappointing movie, but one of its most chilling scenes sticks in my mind as an analogue to the appalling wickedness underway in the Middle East.

In the film, SS Colonel Wegner supervises the destruction of art works plundered by the Nazis: treasures intended for Hitler’s fantasized Fuehrer Museum in Linz, Austria.

Destroying paintings

But as the Allies close in on Germany in 1945, Hitler decides that, if he and his goons can’t have these masterpieces, their rightful owners — and the future — won’t have them, either.

On January 27, 2016

George Weigel

China’s population crisis: an evangelical opportunity?

State-sponsored cruelty has been a staple of the human condition for millennia.

But has there ever been a more wicked policy, with more disastrous social consequences, than the “one-child policy” China began to implement in the early 1980s a state-decreed population-control measure that resulted in, among other horrors, untold tens of millions of coerced abortions?

In her new book, One Child (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), veteran China-watcher Mei Fong describes both the impact of the policy on the destruction of China’s traditional social fabric and its draconian effects on China’s medium- and long-term future.

On December 9, 2015

George Weigel

Synod-2015 revisited

As I write, just before Thanksgiving, it’s been over a month since Synod-2015 finished its work.

Yet there is still no official translation of the synod’s Final Report into the major world languages from the original Italian (a language regularly used by eight-tenths of one percent of the world’s population).

That’s a shame because, in the main, the Relatio Finalis is an impressive, often-moving statement of the Church’s convictions about chastity, marriage, and the family: biblically rich, theologically serious, pastorally sensitive, and well-crafted to meet the challenge of the cultural tsunami responsible for the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family, which has left a lot of unhappiness in its wake.

On December 2, 2015

George Weigel

The grittiness of the Christian faith

Editor’s note: George Weigel wrote this column from Jerusalem.

Walking through the narrow, winding streets of Jerusalems Old City on my first visit here in 15 years, I was powerfully struck once again by the grittiness of Christianity, the palpable connection between the faith and the quotidian realities of life.

For here, as in no other place, the believer, the skeptic, and the “searcher” are confronted with a fact: Christianity began, not with a pious story or “narrative,” but with the reality of transformed lives.