Quotes from George Weigel

We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.

Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.

Concerns about democracy's future are better directed elsewhere, John Paul argues, for if "there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.

The failure of Lateran V was the prelude to the Reformation, which shattered the unity of the Christian West and set in motion the dynamics that eventually led to the European wars of religion. Failures of reform carry a high cost.

If moral relativism was legally absolutized in the name of tolerance, basic rights were also relativized and the door was open to totalitarianism.

Karol Wojtyla, the disciple who was a product of the Church in the modern world, not of the Roman bureaucracy.

He is an intellectual who is unbeholden to the shibboleths of the professoriat and who has a deep appreciation for untutored popular piety.

The real challenge the rich young man faced was not just giving up his possessions, but giving up himself. The last command Jesus says ("Come, follow me") is the one that we so often overlook and think that he must have left Jesus simply because he liked his green bills.

Religious conviction, and the truths Christianity teaches about the inalienable dignity of every human life, can be a dynamic, creative force, bending history in a more human direction.

Our lives are best understood, and our sorrows are best borne, when they are recognized as "playing" within a drama that God himself entered, in the person of his Son, so that the human drama might become, through the redemption, a divine comedy, not a cosmic tragedy or absurdity.

Love is not "fulfilling" oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.