Quotes from George Weigel

I hope ["reanimated the papacy"] means that the new interest in the pope evokes a new interest in the Church's teaching, of which the pope is the custodian.

[Jesus Christ to Pope Francis] is the Lord with whom he speaks for hours every day in prayer. The Risen One who reached out, touched his life, and called him into mission.

A world where yesterday's classmate and fellow altar server becomes tomorrow's martyr to the firing squads.

In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.

What I hope my liberal friends (and I have more than a few) take from this pontificate is that mercy and truth are never separable in Catholic pastoral life.

Younger theologians will continue to pursue and understand truth rather than deconstructing it, as a lot of their elders seemed to want to do.

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".

Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way.

Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom. The life of Karol Wojtyla and his accomplishment as Pope John Paul II suggest a dramatic, alternative possibility: that a man who has been seized and transformed by the "more excellent way" can bend the curve of history so that freedom's cause is advanced.

European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences or European public life and European culture.

This life of ours... is a gift from God. It is not of our choosing. It comes to us by his choice. Since it is of his choosing, it is of his designing. We neither made ourselves nor can we manage ourselves as we like, nor manage the life that comes to us. For that reason we can take a most hopeful view of life.... [For] the thought that it is his gift and after his design gives us courage.

Young—never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which you're capable, with the help of God's grace.