-About the Author (wikipedia)
- George Weigel article archive at National Review Online..
"I was once seated at a table with Weigel before I knew anything about him. He was probably the most pompous, boorish and shallow conversationalist I've ever encountered. He just assumes that he can make up stuff and nobody will challenge him because he's such an 'expert.' A most irritating evening" - Comment Box post on a very anti-Weigel article in the National Catholic Reporter.
"To believe in this God, the father of Jesus Christ, is to believe that order and reason, rather than chaos and indifference, are at the root of things. To know this Father, through Jesus Christ, means to know "that love is present in the world, and that this love is more powerful than any kind of evil."
We "cannot live without love," Pope John Paul writes. We cannot understand ourselves, we cannot make sense of life, unless love comes to us and we "participate intimately" in it. We sense our profound need for love instinctively. The God whom Jesus reveals is the guarantor that this intuition is one of the great truths of the human condition, not a psychological illusion." (8)
"Many of those engaged in various forms of spirituality today understand religion as the human search for God; so do some Christians. In the Catholic view of things, though, Christianity is God's search for us, and our taking the same path as God does.
That is what the Christmas story teaches us, for that is what the angels announced to the shepherds in the fields above Bethlehem. God had become man so that God might enter fully into the world's sorrow, transforming it to joy. The shepherds are invited to undertake this journey, to go to meet God, who is to be found "wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger" (Luke 2.7)
That curiosity - the Son of God submitting his freedom to human binding in order to set us free - is but the first of the sometimes disturbing surprises presented by the story of God incarnate, God in search of us....
God in search of us is not just an example of religion. It is not another episode in spirituality. It is, the Catholic Church proposes, nothing less than the truth of the world." (33)
"If the Church is the continuation in time of Christ's mission and the mission of the Holy Spirit, then the Church's first task is evangelization - the sharing of the good news that God loves the world, gave his son for the salvation of the world, and invites all humankind to a life of eternal happiness. That astonishingly good news demands to be shared. The Church, by its very nature, is missionary, and every baptized Christian has responsibility - a vocation - to be an evangelist. The Council described this by saying that all the baptized share in Christ's vocation as prophet: every Christian shares in the prophetic mission of Christ by speaking the truth, by proposing to the world the truth about its story." (43)
"None of this is easy to engage, much less grasp, in a culture that treats sexual differentiation as accidental, not sacramental - a unisex culture, so to speak. Still, the truth of the matter is that the Catholic tradition of ordaining only men to the priesthood is an expression of the Catholic sacramental imagination. It is not a question of misogyny. It is not a question of rights. It is not a question of power. It is a question of sacramentality. The extraordinary that lies just on the far side of the ordinary is made present through the things of this world, weak and as inadequate as they may be - as weak and as inadequate as those men called to the priesthood would say they undoubtedly are. But God's ways, as the prophet Isaiah reminded God's people, are not ours (Isaiah 55.8). That is abundantly true of the sacramental imagination." (68)
"Six weeks after meeting his would-be assassin in a Roman prison cell, John paul published an apostolic letter entitled Salvifici Doloris (Salvific Suffering) . The letter begins with the observation that suffering is a universal human experience. Suffering is an entire human world, and no one can avoid passing through it. Everyone suffers. There is no escape from the questions "Why" and "What for?"
Suffering, the Pope suggests, cannot be merely accidental. The universality of the experience of suffering suggests that suffering "seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man." Our suffering is not mere animal pain. In addition to physical suffering, human beings experience "moral suffering," the "pain of the soul." When we betray or are betrayed, when we are denied what is justly due us, when we lash out and wound someone we love, when we are wounded ourselves by a friend or relative, our pain is not just psychological. It is spiritual. Men and women can be wounded deeply, in the depths of their persons, by the death of a child, a parent, a spouse, a friend of the heart.
The experience of moral suffering tells us something important about ourselves. It tells us that we have a soul, not just a psyche. Suffering, John Paul is suggesting, is a signal of transcendence. In what seems to be the devil's work, we can detect another rumor of angels. Suffering, the Pope writes, is "one of those points in which man is in a certain sense 'destined' to go beyond himself." Suffering is not just an unsettling human problem. It is a profound human mystery. Just as with the mystery of love or the mystery of insight, we meet God through the mystery of suffering." (116)
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