Category: The Catholic Difference

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George Weigel

Issues beneath issues at synod 2015

Editor’s note: George Weigel is in Rome reporting on the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family.

Since Pope Francis announced that two synods would examine the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family and work to devise more evangelically dynamic responses to that crisis, a lot of attention has focused on issues of Catholic discipline.

How does the Church determine that a marriage never existed and thus grant a decree of nullity? What is to be done about the sacramental situation of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics? How does the Church best prepare its sons and daughters for marriage?

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George Weigel

John Paul II and “America”

In the years preceding the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II held a series of continental synods to help the Church in different locales reflect on its distinctive situation at the end of the second millennium and to plan for a future of evangelical vigor in the third.

These special assemblies were easily named in the case of the Synods for Africa, Asia, and Europe. But when it came to the synod for the western hemisphere, John Paul threw a linguistic curve ball that made an important point.

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George Weigel

St. John Paul II and the ‘tyranny of the possible’

The reputations of the great often diminish over time. Ten years after his holy death on April 2, 2005, Karol Wojtyla, St. John Paul II, looms even larger than he did when the world figuratively gathered at his bedside a decade ago.

Tens of millions of men and women around the world felt impelled, and privileged, to pray with him through what he called his “Passover” — his liberation through death into a new life of freedom in the blazing glory of the Thrice-Holy God.

On this anniversary, as at his canonization last year, what seems most memorable about the man, at least at this historical moment, was that he refused to accommodate to the “tyranny of the possible:” the idea that some things just can’t be put right; that we’re stuck with the way things are, however much we may dislike them.

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George Weigel

Nonsense on 60 Minutes

60 Minutes, the CBS News “magazine” that helped redefine television journalism, prides itself on challenging conventional wisdom, discomfiting the comfortable, kicking shibboleths in the shins, and opening new arguments.

No such challenge, alas, was evident in the program’s recent segment on Pope Francis.

The ‘Francis effect’

One of the principal interviewees in that piece was Robert Mickens, formerly of the London-based Tablet and currently of the National Catholic Reporter. Here’s a part of what Mickens had to say about the “Francis effect”:

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George Weigel

An extraordinary synod, indeed

According to Vatican-speak, a specially scheduled session of the Synod of Bishops is an “Extraordinary Synod,” meaning Not-an-Ordinary Synod, held every three years or so.

In the case of the recently-completed Extraordinary Synod of 2014, extraordinary things did happen, in the “Oh, wow!” sense of the word. And if this year’s Extraordinary Synod was a preview of the synod for which it was to set the agenda, i.e., the Ordinary Synod of 2015, that synod, too, promises to be, well, extraordinary.

How was the Extraordinary Synod of 2014 extraordinary? With apologies to the Bard, let me count the ways:

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George Weigel

Wanted: A synod of affirmation

Pope Francis has called a special session of the Synod of Bishops, which will meet from October 5 to 19 and prepare the agenda for the ordinary session of the synod that is scheduled for the fall of 2015; both sessions will focus on the family.

In my view, the synod should focus on two related themes: marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world; the answer to that crisis is the Christian view of marriage as a covenant between man and woman in a communion of love, fidelity, and fruitfulness.

To focus the conversation elsewhere is to ignore a hard fact and a great opportunity.

Collapse of marriage culture

The collapse of marriage culture throughout the world is indisputable. More and more marriages end in divorce, even as increasing numbers of couples simply ignore marriage, cohabit, and procreate.

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George Weigel

The covenant of marriage

My son Stephen and I recently attended the golden wedding anniversary celebration of my friends Piotr and Teresa Malecki.

It began with a Mass of Thanksgiving in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of Cracow’s Wawel Cathedral — the place where Piotr and Teresa had exchanged vows on July 4, 1964, kneeling before their old kayaking and hiking friend, the archbishop of Cracow (who, as St. John Paul II, was canonized two months before the Maleckis’ jubilee).

Network of Wojtyla’s friends

Piotr Malecki, Karol Wojtyla’s altar boy at St. Florian Parish and the self-described “enfant terrible” of that network of Wojtyla’s friends known as Srodowisko, is a distinguished physicist.

Teresa Malecka, who had to convince Wojtyla (whom she and others called Wujek, “Uncle”) that she was ready for marriage at age 20, is an accomplished musicologist and the former vice-dean of the Cracow Academy of Music.

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George Weigel

The difference Easter made

One of the striking things about the Easter and post-Easter narratives in the New Testament is that they are largely about incomprehension: which is to say that, in the canonical Gospels, the early Church admitted that it took some time for the first Christian believers to understand what had happened in the Resurrection and how what had happened changed everything.

In Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches (Basic Books), I draw on insights from Anglican biblical scholar N.T. Wright and Pope Benedict XVI to explore the first Christians’ unfolding comprehension of Easter and how it exploded their ideas of history and their place in history.

So, what changed after Easter?

Understanding of history

The disciples’ understanding of history changed. The first Jesus community lived in expectation of the “last days,” even while Jesus walked among them in his public ministry, but they thought the “last days” involved a history-ending cataclysm.

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