difference – Page 3 – Madison Catholic Herald

We turn on our faucets and out comes water — clean, refreshing, plentiful, life-sustaining water. But we rarely give it a thought.

We just tend to take for granted that it will always be there. We even forget to thank God — the well-spring of life.

Lack of access to clean water

But for 768 million fellow human beings, clean plentiful water is a distant dream, according to the United Nations. For them, the water they drink, cook with, and bath in, is polluted and often disease-ridden, and must be carried long distances in many cases.

According to figures released by the United Nations Children‘s Fund in 2013, lack of access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene is a leading cause of death from diarrhea in children under five, amounting to approximately 1,400 children dying each day.

On March 22, 2012

George Weigel

It’s not just an issue in Pakistan and China

Thirty-some years ago, I spent a fair amount of time on religious freedom issues: which meant, in those simpler days, trying to pry Lithuanian priests and nuns out of Perm Camp 36 and other GULAG islands.

Had you told me in 1982 that one of my “clients,” the Jesuit Sigitas Tamkevicius, would be archbishop of Kaunas in a free Lithuania in 2012, I would have thought you a bit optimistic.

If you had also told me, back then, that there would eventually be serious religious freedom problems in the United States, I would have thought you a bit mad.

On March 15, 2012

George Weigel

Converts and the symphony of truth

Why do adults become Catholics? There are as many reasons for “converting” as there are converts.

Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic with, by his own admission, “little emotion but clear conviction”: this was the truth; one ought to adhere to it.

Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that his journey into the Catholic Church began when, as an unbelieving Harvard undergraduate detached from his family’s staunch Presbyterianism, he noticed a leaf shimmering with raindrops while taking a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.; such beauty could not be accidental, he thought — there must be a Creator.

On December 28, 2011

George Weigel

The cardinal Down Under

In the Baltimore of the 1960s, my canny pastor devised a neat scheme for getting “Father Visitor” (as the confessional doors read) to fill in during the summer for his vacationing curates: bring over newly-ordained Australians from their studies in Rome.

There were no language issues (save for those of, er, accent); by the standards of student priests fresh from the Urban College of Propaganda Fidei, the young Aussies were recompensed handsomely and got to see something of the United States; it was win-win, all around.

Thus in the summer of 1967 I met Fr. George Pell of Ballarat, who, with the oils of ordination still wet on his forehead, spent several months at my parish before embarking on doctoral studies at Oxford.

On October 20, 2011

George Weigel

Tim Tebow and Christophobia

Two weeks into the NFL season, ESPN ran a Sunday morning special exploring why the third-string quarterback of the Denver Broncos, Tim Tebow, had become the most polarizing figure in American sports.

He has become more polarizing than trash-talking NBA behemoths; more polarizing than foul-mouthed Serena Williams; more polarizing than NFL all-stars who father numerous children by numerous women, all out of wedlock.

Why does Tebow, and Tebow alone, arouse such passions? Why is Tebow the one whom “comedians” say they would like to shoot?

On August 18, 2011

George Weigel

Pope Benedict XVI on Europe’s future

World Youth Day 2011, being held in Madrid from August 16 to 21, will be an important moment in Pope Benedict XVI’s campaign to remind Europe of its Christian roots and to call Europe to a nobler understanding of democracy.

As the Holy Father demonstrated in an address in Zagreb, Croatia, in early June, the two parts of that campaign — the recovery of Christian roots and the deepening of 21st-century Europe’s idea of democracy — go together.

On April 28, 2011

George Weigel

Remembering Pope John Paul II

Strange as it may seem, I’ve been vaguely worried about the beatification on May 1 of a man with whom I was in close conversation for over a decade and to the writing of whose biography I dedicated 15 years of my own life.

My worries don’t have to do with allegations of a “rushed” beatification process; the process has been a thorough one, and the official judgment is the same as the judgment of the people of the Church.

I’m also unconcerned about the fretting of ultra-traditionalists for whom John Paul II was a failure because he didn’t restore the French monarchy, impose the Tridentine Mass on the entire Church, and issue thundering anathemas against theologians and wayward politicians.