
2015 Simon Lecture: Lessons in Statecraft
This article is adapted from the fourteenth annual William E. Simon Lecture, delivered on February 4, 2015. When the Catholic Church celebrated the canonizations of John Paul II and Pope John

What Jews and Christians Can Do Together
On March 25, 2000, the media flap of the day in Jerusalem centered on the question of whether John Paul II would wear his pectoral cross when he visited the

Cardinal Francis George, R.I.P.
Francis Eugene George was many things: a dedicated missionary priest; a first-rate intellectual; a shrewd observer of the public square; the first native of the Windy City to be named

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, Pope St. John Paul II, looms even larger than

New Interview with George Weigel on Evangelical Catholicism
The following interview with EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel was recently published by the French magazine Famille Chretienne, to coincide with the publication of the French edition of Weigel’s

George Weigel Interviewed on the Second Anniversary of Pope Francis’s Election
Two years ago today, Pope Francis was introduced to the world in a rainy St. Peter’s Square, asking for prayers. George Weigel, who was there that night with NBC News,

To See Things As They Are
This piece is a response to Michael Hanby’s essay “The Civic Project of American Christianity” in the February 2015 issue of First Things. For some time now, the cultural crisis

Kowtowing to Moscow is Bad Ecumenism
In his tireless work for Christian unity, St. John Paul II often expressed the hope that Christianity in its third millennium might “breathe again” with its “two lungs”: West and

St. John Paul II, Europe and Church Reform: 10 Questions for George Weigel
George Weigel is a Washington, D.C.-based Catholic theologian and writer, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Vatican analyst for NBC News. His weekly column, “The Catholic Difference,” is

John Paul and Francis at Yad Vashem
As that familiar parody of bad fiction has it, “it was a dark and stormy night”—March 21, 2000, to be precise—when I made my way from the Jerusalem Hilton to

The First Human Right
Extensive Catholic use of the language of “human rights” begins with Pope St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris, but it was Pope St. John Paul II (happily canonized with

Two Popes, Two Saints, One Message
It’s doubtful that Pope Francis is familiar with the signature quote of Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks: “Let’s play two!” But in celebrating today the canonizations of both Pope John
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