The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church

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Summary: An outstanding book!
Review: George Weigel has performed another great service for the Church by writing "The Courage To Be Catholic." This book, which is his response to the scandals that have shaken the Catholic Church in the United States during the year 2002, not only explains what the scandal is and how it happened, but also what the scandal is NOT and what the appropriate response from all Catholics should be.

I am a priest, and I was cheered and inspired by his chapter on the priesthood. Mr. Weigel, who is not ordained, demonstrates remarkable insight into the priesthood - not only from a theological point of view, but he seems to understand the practicalities of living the priestly life. I wish every priest and bishop in the United States would read this book (or at least the chapter on the priesthood) and take it to heart.

Throughout the book, he points to Pope John Paul II as the model for all priests in the Church today, and explains this great pope's many contributions to the Church. The passages about the pope as a model for priests are some of the most inspiring passages in the book. At the same time, he does not shy from placing blame at the feet of the Vatican bureaucracy, when he believes that such blame is deserved.

Most importantly, Mr. Weigel reminds us that we cannot have "reform" in the Church unless we return to the "form" that has been lost. This is not about sweeping changes in the nature of the priesthood itself; instead, it includes a call to all Catholics to a life of fidelity and holiness; a call to every priest to see himselves as the "alter Christus" that he is; and a call to all bishops to see themselves as shepherds and as successors to the apostles, not just as CEOs.

Well done, Mr. Weigel! Thank you!

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Summary: Well argued case for reform
Review: George Weigel has produced a book of profound importance that is written from the perspective of traditional Catholic values. He logically begins by examining the crisis and it's causes and effects by looking at various levels of the Church's heirachy from Parish to Diocese to Vatican. I found his argument that a "culture of dissent" helped to foster an environment that would explain the way in which the Church leadership reacted to the crisis persuasive.
His recommendations for a re-forming based in a reliance on Church tradition rather than a deconstruction of those traditions also resonated with me.
A very timely and important contribution to discussions regarding the future of the Church.

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Summary: Reform Not Deconstruction
Review: George Weigel has written a valuable book on the ongoing crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. Weigel rightly calls this crisis "the long Lent."

I'm 58, a product of 12 years of Catholic education. I was 18 when the Second Vatican Council commenced. After that, the Church entered a period of turmoil and change which still resonates today.

I liked the incense, Latin, and Gregorian Chant of my childhood. I have come to appreciate being able to more fully participate at services, but still long for the Tridentine Mass.

Weigel identifies the "culture of dissent" as the principal culprit. This culture along with poor formation of priest and woefully inept guidance by American bishops have led the Catholic church astray. The Bishops unwillingness to confront incidents of Sexual misconduct by priests catapulted serious problems into fullblown crisis.

The author also corrects the common impression that the public has of the sexual abuses as pedophelia. The vast majority of cases involve priests relationships with teenage boys---in other words homosexuality.

Weigel's suggestions for true reform in the Catholic Church:

1. A Return to true Catholic teaching and a rejection of what he calls Catholic Lite.

2. Better training and selection of priests along with closer pastoral care and guidance from bishops.

3. A more personal and less managerial style from the Bishops themselves.

The book ends on a hopeful note describing the many young priests who have rededicated themselves to the church and its mission.

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Summary: You don't have to agree to find this book worthwhile...
Review: George Weigel is a noted author and commentator on the Catholic Church, firmly in the traditionalist camp. This book is a scathing critique of the Church during the recent sexual abuse scandal that few would quarrel with. Although Weigel ascribes no responsibility whatsoever to the Pope, he spreads the blame among the Vatican, the bishops, lawyers, the Papal Nuncio and assorted others. He rightfully debunks the notion that the scandal was a media creation, and rightfully identifies it as a failure of leadership.

Many of Weigel's suggested reforms are similarly well-balanced. He suggests that the criteria for selecting bishops are flawed, and makes important suggestions for change. He also shines a spotlight on seminaries and novitiates. If the incidents he cites are true, there are serious problems to be addressed. Is it true that cruising gay bars was an issue in one seminary? Is it true that no inquiry is made into a priest's personal religious beliefs during training? Surely these problems should be corrected.

But other of his prescriptions for reform are very troubling. Weigel maintains that the "crisis of fidelity" began in the 60's--he says that just as Vatican II opened the windows of the Church to change, ill-winds were blowing. Among these were "irrationality, self-indulgence, fashionable despair, contempt for authority," and above all the sexual revolution, according to Weigel. But what a bleak view of the second half of the 20th century! Weigel pays no attention to the changed status of women as one of the great achievements of our age. Similarly, I failed to find a reference to the civil rights movement anywhere in the book. And what about the dismemberment of the remains of the European colonial empires and the spread of democracy? Surely he would agree that these were positives in the history of mankind.

But these positive factors are the very things the Church is struggling with, and Weigel's call to return to "faith" fails to take them into account. Take the changing role of women--not only are women not priests, but the positions of power in the Church are almost exclusively male, even in positions where being a priest wouldn't seem to be a mandatory qualification. What is the theological basis for this, other than guys like to work with other guys? Weigel fails to address this issue.

Or take the spread of democracy and the modern values of free speech and expression. Weigel attempts to show that the Church is not authoritarian, and he defines an authoritarian as "a person who makes someone do something purely as a matter of willfulness...there are no subjects of an authoritarian regime, only objects to be manipulated by the ruler."

I'd argue Weigel has described a dictatorship, not an authoritarian institution. The American Heritage Dictionary describes authoritarian as "characterized by or favoring absolute obedience...as against individual freedom." Isn't this what Weigel says should be the case in his reformed Church? Weigel says that if the Pope says 2+2 equals 5, the correct public response is "Perhaps I have misunderstood His Holiness' meaning," even though privately you may think the Pope is no longer sane. Surely this is a notion many good Catholics would find hard to swallow. And how does Weigel suggest we live in a world where the highest authority maintains that 2+2 equals 5?

Weigel also seems uncomfortable with the increasing role of the laity in Church institutions. He fails to take into account that the great success story of the Church in the US in the last 50 years is in health care and education, and that these are institutions largely run and supported by lay persons. Will the laity continue to devote time, energy and above all money without control and accountability, without being equal partners in the Church?

Weigel is correct that dumbing down the priesthood and Catholicism is not the way to go. But he fails to consider that the Church changes over time--surely any student of Church history knows this. The Church could certainly go back to the past and reaffirm traditional ways, as many fundamentalist religions have done. But such a Church would be much smaller, as the vast majority of catholics would, I believe, search for a solution that would allow them to live as free and equal beings in the modern world.

You don't have to agree with Weigel to find this book an articulate expression of the traditionalist/conservative point of view. Despite the occasional cheap shots and failure to attribute sources, the book is well-written and worthwhile to anyone interested in the future of the Church.

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Summary: A Must Read for Understanding Catholic Hierarchy
Review: George Weigel is highly readable. He explains the division of authority in the Catholic Church and its impact on dealing with the crisis of sexual abuse in the United States.

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Summary: Balanced, Deeply Insightful and at the Heart of the Matter
Review: George Weigel is one of the most acomplished writers on the scene. His credentials and his analysis are impeccible. Catholics are luck to have him in these days of scandle and the tissue of lies that are spun out.

His view is that the Catholic Church has always been in a crisis of fidelity from its very beginings. This particular crisis has specific causes, causes that he traces back in history. Many Catholics will be surprised to know the history he presents here. No where else are you getting this historically sound analysis.

Fidelity, infidelity, repentance, penance, reform, fidelity - this is the cycle of reform for an institution like the Catholic Church.

This is a must read for everyone who is concerned about this most recent crisis.

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Summary: The Church Needs Better Apologists Than This
Review: George Weigel's "The Courage to be Catholic" is a lame attempt to whitewash the Catholic Church and the corrupt way it has dealt with the recent scandals involving sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests.

First, let me get my own biases out of the way: although I am part Irish, and come from a Catholic background, I was not raised Catholic (although relatives of mine were). I never attended parochial schools, and was never molested by a priest or smacked on the palm by a nun's ruler. I have no particular animus, in other words, against the Church. I assume that an institution that's been around for 2,000 years must have something going for it.

Let me give some examples of the intellectual dishonesty that is rampant in this book:

When Weigel writes about "a new generation of Catholic intellectuals bored by the classic agenda of dissent," you want to ask, "Could you name at least some of these intellectuals, please?"

When he says that "A distinguished Catholic philosopher who thinks himself extremely orthodox once said, 'If the Pope said '2+2=5,' I'd believe him.'" you want to demand: "Who the hell was this idiot?"

When he quotes "one reporter for a prominent national daily" and refuses to name said reporter, or even the "prominent national daily," you just start thinking that this is a pattern of dishonesty.

This book has no scholarly apparatus of any kind: no footnotes, no endnotes, no bibliography: nothing. No way to check his sources or determine his credibility. When you're acting as an apologist for an institution as troubled (and whose credibility is as harshly questioned) as the Catholic Church, you'd better be able to back up what you say. Weigel doesn't even bother.

I get the distinct impression that George Weigel thinks his readers are complete imbeciles. How else to explain the fact that he feels it necessary to identify Robert Frost as "poet Robert Frost"? Or the fact that he repeats the same points in the same words over and over again (I'd like to have a dime for every time Weigel uses the word "countercultural")? Is he just lazy? Sloppy? Badly edited? Or does he have the same contempt for his readers that Catholic Bishops have seemed to have had towards their parishioners, expecting to have everything he says unquestioningly accepted at face value?

Everything wrong with the Church, according to Weigel, is the fault of anything and anyone except the Church itself. At various times he blames Protestantism, liberals, the media, Catholic "dissenters" -- he simply refuses to see the reason why American Catholics are so outraged by the fact that so many examples of priestly misconduct (which is a polite euphemism for priests raping children) have been covered up and paid off by the Church for decades.

Weigel claims that "there is no reliable data to support [the] claim" that clerical sexual abuse is ongoing and widespread, although the millions of dollars paid out in what can only be described as hush money to outraged victims and parents might seem to belie that assertion. It may not be "ongoing" (priests seem to have finally gotten the message that messing with children is considered unacceptable), but saying that the pattern of deception is not widespread (and probably ongoing) is just jesuitical quibbling.

Weigel resorts to the most blatant sophistry to try and deny that the Catholic Church is "authoritarian" when it's obvious to just about anyone that it is exactly that -- and that this is the cause of so much of the tension between American Catholics and the Vatican. Lord Acton is famous for saying that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," but few people realize that he was talking about the Pope when he said it. The Catholic Church is an absolute autocracy in which the Pope is judged infallible and cannot be overruled. Americans believe in dissent while the Church demands obedience. Too many American Catholics are under the delusion that the Church is a democracy -- they could not be further from the truth. And the fact that the Church does not consider itself to be accountable to its members is a large part of the problem.

Weigel writes that the fact that so many Americans were asking "Why doesn't Rome do something about this?" was testimony to "the confidence that the great majority of U.S. Catholics have in Pope John Paul II." It was nothing of the kind. It testified to the very American attitude that if there is a screw up in a corporation and it's seen to be systemic (such as Enron or WorldCom), the guy in charge should step up and take responsibility. If the Church was a regular corporation, the Pope would have been forced to resign by the stockholders years ago. Instead, it's the stockholders, so to speak, who have been voting with their feet -- and leaving the Church in droves.

This book is a miserable and intellectually dishonest attempt to whitewash the Catholic Church from its culpability in a disgraceful scandal that has demolished whatever credibility the Church may have had with many Americans. Will it survive? Probably. The Church has undergone many trials in the past 2,000 years and has always survived them. It may even emerge from this painful time in its history stronger and better than before. One can always hope. But I can tell you one thing: it's going to need a hell of a better defense than this.

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Summary: Orthodoxy is the path to renewal
Review: George Weigel's book is a brilliant, concise defense of orthodoxy as the way to renew the Church in America. He explains that the central lesson of the last 40 years is that Catholics ignore the eternal truths of the Faith at their peril.

The "progressive" secular culture that began to infect the Church in the years before Vatican II came into full bloom in the late sixties and early seventies. It led to the creation of several generations of poorly-formed priests, bishops who winked at or even encouraged dissent, and a laity confused as to what the priesthood meant.

Weigel recognizes that priests are icons who stand "in the person and place" of Christ, and he calls for the renewal of a heroic vision of the priesthood to inspire new vocations. As one successful seminary rector and current bishop put it, "a man will give his life for a mystery, but not for a question mark."

Those dioceses that have earned a reputation for orthodoxy are leading the way. They typically have full seminaries and growing priestly vocations. Denver, under the courageous leadership of Archbishop Charles Chaput, broke ground last spring on a $4.7 million seminary to accommodate over 80 men studying for the priesthood.

By contrast, my hometown diocese of Rochester, N.Y., has earned a reputation for dissent under Bishop Matthew Clark. Not surprisingly, the bishop ordained only one new priest this spring to serve a diocese of 350,000 Catholics.

There are signs of a renewed Catholicism in the true spirit and letter of Vatican II: orthodox lay apostolates are booming, the new generation of priests is known for its fidelity, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church has been snapped-up by something like 10 million readers. Surely, there is a thirst amongst the laity for Truth.

But problems remain, chiefly the abundance of weak, overly collegial bishops, an entrenched culture of dissent in many parish ministries, and several generations of uncatechized Catholics.

For instance, when Pope John Paul II issued the encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesia to reclaim the Catholic identity of Catholic universities, it was largely ignored by Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati-and he led a task force to implement it nationally! Pilarczyk clamed that his own diocese "didn't have a problem with heresy" even though Cincinnati's Xavier University has two notorious dissenting theology professors.

XU's Art Dewey is associated with "The Jesus Seminar", a movement that denies Christ's divinity, and Paul Knitter was rebuked by name by the Vatican for promoting an indifferentist, "any road will get you there" view of salvation. (He too denies critical aspects of Christ's divinity.) In short, they are the sort of theologian targeted by the encyclical.

Time is on the side of orthodoxy, however. The old hippy creed of "never trust anyone over thirty" has a Catholic analog. Young, faithful Catholics are steadily replacing their older, dissenting peers on university faculties, parish ministries and in the ranks of the priesthood. What Weigel identifies as "Catholic Lite" is, thank God, on its last legs.


Rating:
Summary: Required reading for today's Catholics
Review: George Weigel's impeccable theological credentials and extraordinary ability to express his ideas in the vernacular have produced a desperately needed review of the current crisis in the US Catholic Church. It is clear enough to be understood by non-Catholics and written in a way that individual chapters on specific issues can be read and quoted independently without losing their context.
Mr. Weigel's theological and practical knowledge are partnered in a way that looks at the priesthood and the church hierarchy from many angles while remaining firmly rooted in the essentials: The teachings and example of Jesus,the first Priest, the head of the church and the architect of it's structure.
I will use this book as an essential tutorial to explain the issues of the current scandal, its origins and solutions to family, friends and anyone with a serious interest in these vital and agonizing issues that affect not just Catholics but all of us.

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Summary: A Courageous Critique of Contemporary Catholicism in America
Review: George Wiegel acclaimed author of the international bestseller "Witness to Hope, the Biography of Pope John Paul II" attempts here an overview of the contemporary Catholic Church in America, torn by the sex abuse scandal among the clergy. Analyzing the crisis and the circumstances that led to it, Wiegel exposes the culture of dissent and self-deception among the seminarians, priests and ultimately among bishops who failed in their ministry of shepherding the flocks. Greater fidelity is the proper response to this crisis and just like any other crisis, this too must be turned into an opportunity. Therefore he lays out a blueprint for a genuine reform of the Catholic Church in America.

One may or may not agree with all the opinions, arguments and conclusions of Wiegel; but the book surely provides a mine of information and a wealth of wonderful insights.