George Weigel Quotes About Pope
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The pope [Francis] speaks with great passion about the shame we should all feel when, as he puts it, "a man does not have the dignity of earning bread for his family," but is turned into a peripheral person, a welfare client, a dependent.
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[Pope Francis] is 78 years old and knows that his will be a short pontificate.
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Then [Catholics] owe [pope] the loyalty that is expressed in speaking the truth to him - and that puts a premium on knowing whether what you're happy about, on unhappy about, has a basis in fact, or is merely a reflection of the "narrative.
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The most important appointment Pope Francis has made is the appointment of the Australian cardinal, George Pell, as the Vatican's financial overseer.
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[Pope Francis] comes to that conviction [of family crisis] as a pastor, not as Brad Wilcox or Charles Murray. So he wants to challenge the Church to find pastoral responses to that crisis that meet real human needs.
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[Pope Francis] has felt the mercy of God in his own life and wants to share that experience with others.
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[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.
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But ripped out of context, ["Who am I to judge?" phrase] has become an all-purpose filter through which everything else - including the pope's multiple reaffirmations of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning - gets airbrushed out of the picture.
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The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.
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More pro-active Vatican communications might be able to do something about all this, but when the Holy See is constantly in the mode of, "No, what the pope really meant was . . . ," the game has already been largely forfeited.
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[Pope Francis]sees a world in need of the Gospel, and of friendship with Jesus Christ, as an antidote to the self-absorption and loneliness that are eating away at the solidarity of the human community.
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The colossal mess in Vatican finances that [Pope] Francis inherited has been cleaned up, and cleaned out. Real budgeting and accounting procedures are in place; so are real professionals, not somebody's nephew.
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The emphasis on the "peripheries" is also a distinctively "Franciscan" way of expressing the pope's respect for untutored popular piety - a respect, I might add, that was shared by St. John Paul II.
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The papacy is an impossible job. So the best thing Catholics can do for the pope is to pray for him.
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[Pope] Francis communicates the pastoral embrace of the Church, the breadth and inclusiveness of Catholicism symbolized by the Bernini colonnade around St. Peter's Square, in a powerful way.
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When media "narratives" about [Pope] Francis get set in concrete, and act as filters bending or distorting (or ignoring) aspects of his vision and his teaching that don't fit the established story line, the Church has a problem.
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One of the most important qualities in a pope is his judgment of people - can he get around him the people who can put into practice his vision of what the Church must be doing now to fulfill its mandate from the Lord.
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If [Pope's Francis] media-generated popularity, fragile as that may turn out to be when the world discovers that the pope is really a Catholic, opens windows of possibility for explaining that divine mercy leads us to the truths God revealed to us (and inscribed into the world and into us), then his reanimation of the papacy will advance the "Church in permanent mission" for which he called in Evangelii Gaudium, which is the grand strategy document of his pontificate.
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"You don't believe what you read in the papers about anything else; why do you believe it about the pope?" That's where I'd start.
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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.
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There's the trope about an impending "global-warming encyclical." The pope is preparing an encyclical on nature and the environment, including the human environment (which includes the moral imperative of a culturally affirmed and legally recognized right to life from conception until natural death). So what happens? A low-ranking Vatican official for self-promotion gives an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that this is a global-warming encyclical - which he couldn't possibly have known, as the document wasn't drafted yet.
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Perhaps the dumbest of these story lines is that [Pope] Francis has re-opened conversation and debate in a Church that had been closed and claustrophobic for 35 years under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I defy anyone who, over the last 35 years, has spent time on the campuses of Notre Dame or Georgetown, or who has read the National Catholic Reporter, or who has gone to a meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, to make that claim without experiencing a twinge of conscience that says, "I should wash my mouth out with soap."
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There's an obvious investment in some media circles in the "narrative" of "the pope who's finally going to get with it."
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I'd also hope that my liberal friends, who find in this pope a critic of what they're pleased to call "culture-warrior" Catholics, will read carefully, and ponder even more carefully, what Pope Francis had to say about the "ideological colonization" implicit in Western decadence when he was giving robust pro-life, pro-family talks in the Philippines.
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The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.
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By the same token, the new and stringent Ultramontanism on the Catholic Left - in which even the mildest questions about how things are working in this pontificate are denounced as treasonous disloyalty - is an affront to the open conversation for which the pope [FRANCIS] has called.
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[Pope] Francis ought to be taken at his word when he says, as he has often done, that he is a son of the Church who believes and teaches what the Catholic Church believes and teaches.
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The most enduring of the false narratives is that the signature phrase of the early pontificate - "Who am I to judge?" - was a matter of the pope jettisoning millennia of Catholic moral teaching. It was not. It was a specific response to the circumstances of a man who had repented and was trying to live an upright life.
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