“Christendom was over.” These stark words, repeated several times by the great American scholar George Weigel in his new book, To Sanctify the World, sum up the Church’s predicament on the eve of the Second Vatican Council.
In his magisterial apologia for “the vital legacy” of Vatican II, Weigel argues that the ecumenical council was summoned by John XXIII in order to address the unprecedented crisis created by “a world simply irreligious”, as Newman had once prophesied. In such a world, says Weigel, “Catholicism would cease to be an ethnic, national, or cultural inheritance”.
Sixty years after Vatican II, that is indeed the world we now inhabit. European nations have, with a few exceptions, long since turned their back on the Church, while busily dismantling her rich moral and cultural heritage. Even in the United States, fewer than half of Americans are now affiliated to a church. The Nones — the proportion who answer questions about religious affiliation with “none” — are now approaching a third of the population.
In such a time of secular triumphalism, Weigel is one of the few voices who speaks with clarity and conviction about “the courage to be Catholic”. Born 71 years ago in Baltimore, he has risen to become America’s preeminent Catholic public intellectual. Indeed, Weigel’s influence resonates on both sides of the Atlantic, as disinherited souls cry out for spiritual nourishment in their post-Christian wilderness.
With Witness to Hope, his multi-volume biography of John Paul II, Weigel staked his claim to interpret the full meaning of the most tumultuous pontificate of modern times. Having enjoyed unique access to the man we now revere as St John Paul the Great, he has devoted himself to preserving the saint’s words, deeds and legacy.
Not content with that, over the past three decades Weigel has spent almost every summer in Krakow leading the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society. There, in the ancient Polish capital that was once the home and later archdiocese of Karol Wojtyła, generations of young European and American Catholics have gathered to learn how to build on the foundations laid by the Polish pope. The cumulative counter-cultural impact of these annual seminars on the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe has been incalculable. Without Weigel and his scholarly confraternity, the flourishing of Catholicism in post-Communist intellectual life might have been stillborn.
Weigel, indeed, has always been inspired by the model of what he calls “the Resistance Church” of the Cold War era. Like the late Pope Benedict XVI, to whose defence he also devoted a tract significantly titled God’s Choice, this intrepid knight of the faith has never been intimidated by the task of defending Christ, if necessary alone and against overwhelming odds.
For Weigel, however, the Benedictine vision does not imply retreating to the hills, let alone vacating the public square for the benefit of the secularists. On the contrary: he is an ardent advocate of “Evangelical Catholicism”, the concomitant of which is “deep reform” of the Church. Weigel’s credo is conservative but never reactionary, a faith undiluted by concessions to the zeitgeist, yet unafraid to engage with contemporary life and culture.
It comes as no surprise that Weigel was an old friend of that embodiment of muscular Catholicism, George Cardinal Pell, whose ordeal of false accusations and unjust imprisonment in Australia undoubtedly shortened his life. The late Cardinal’s untimely death last month, coming so soon after that of the Pope Emeritus, marks the end of an era.
For we are all called to be martyrs — that is, witnesses to the truth, the truth of the crucified Christ. As Weigel sees it, especially since Vatican II, the Church has stood firmly for civil and religious liberty, while in its harsh intolerance of individual conscience and institutional independence, the secularised West increasingly mimics the surveillance societies of totalitarian systems. To confront this insouciant atheism — which Benedict dubbed “the dictatorship of relativism” — with the Catholic transfiguration of the inner life is no mission impossible, but an inescapable imperative for clergy and laity alike.
Yet the Church is still riven by the wilful misunderstanding of Vatican II. St John XXIII intended his council to be “Christocentric and mission-focused”, filled with Pentecostal zeal “to sanctify the world”. In his book, Weigel explains in detail how the 16 conciliar documents embodied that vision, only for it to be clouded by “the new Gnosticism”, which since the 1960s has filled the spaces vacated by Christianity. It was, he argues, only when Wojtyła and Ratzinger, both Vatican II veterans, combined that the Church acquired the theological “master key” to unlock the true legacy of the council.
George Weigel’s reinterpretation of Vatican II will not be universally popular. It will please neither the ultra-progressives who hijacked it, nor the ultra-traditionalists who reject it entirely. But he is surely right that the council began an almost miraculous process through which the Church is rediscovering herself. When the history of Catholicism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is written, it will be impossible to ignore his colossal contribution to that rediscovery.
Daniel Johnson is an author, founding editor of www.thearticle.com and associate editor of The Critic
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