A forum of Catholic Thought

The Vatican as peacemaker in Ukraine?George Weigel

A few days after Cardinal Matteo Zuppi's appointment as head of a Vatican "peace mission" to "help ease tensions in the conflict in Ukraine" (as Vatican News put it), a startling picture appeared ...

John Paul II's 'Centesimus Annus' and today's debates George Weigel

In a recent article on the social doctrine of John Paul II in the Jesuit journal La CiviltÀ Cattolica, Father Fernando de la Iglesia Viguiristi, SJ, had this to say about one facet of John Paul's ...

Ike's insightGeorge Weigel

Three days before Christmas 1952 and a month before his inauguration as the 34th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the Freedoms Foundation at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. ...

On not being paralyzed by history (or the misunderstanding thereof) George Weigel

TRIGGER WARNING: The next few sentences will upset some of you. There is a case to be made that the United States lost the Vietnam War -- or, at the very least, that the war's military endgame ...

Blessed Henri de Lubac?George Weigel

On March 31, the bishops of France announced that they would petition the Holy See for permission to open a beatification cause for Father Henri de Lubac, SJ. Whatever the outcome of the cause, paying ...

The Catholic crisis over 'us' George Weigel

Cambridge historian Richard Rex has provocatively proposed that Catholicism today is embroiled in the third great crisis of its bimillennial history. The first crisis was the fierce, Church-dividing ...

'Pacem in Terris' after 60 yearsGeorge Weigel

On April 11, 1963, John XXIII issued the encyclical "Pacem in Terris," a powerful call for a world in which there were neither victims nor executioners that cemented the pontiff's reputation as "Good ...

They're back! George Weigel

As the estimable Larry Chapp recently put it on his blog, "Gaudium et Spes" 22, "the deepest, most important, most contentious, most divisive, and most destructive debates [after Vatican II] surrounded ...