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Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses - or with a new set of ideological filters.

George Weigel

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George Weigel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: April 17
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Political Scientist
Theologian
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Baltimore
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Optics
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More quotes by George Weigel

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Vital parishes built on the Bible and the sacraments, committed to evangelizing their neighborhoods, will continue to flourish. The poor will be served, the sick healed, and the dying comforted. None of that is going to change, and I'd wager that it's going to get better.
George Weigel
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The people who are behind the curve of the Catholic future are the institutional-maintenance types.
George Weigel
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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.
George Weigel
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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.
George Weigel
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We're used to institutional-maintenance Catholicism, in which the institution ticks along by its own inertia and people are born into the Church. Francis knows that is over and done with: Kept Catholicism, whether kept by legal establishment or by cultural habit, has no future.
George Weigel
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Younger theologians will continue to pursue and understand truth rather than deconstructing it, as a lot of their elders seemed to want to do.
George Weigel
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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.
George Weigel
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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.
George Weigel
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In the Church the transformative power of the Eucharist is experienced through the dignified celebration of Holy Mass, and people are empowered for mission because of that.
George Weigel
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The job now is to institutionalize all of that [Vatican finances], and I wouldn't bet against Cardinal [George] Pell, who hasn't shied away from contact sports since his days as an Australian-rules football star.
George Weigel
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Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible - and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto.
George Weigel
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What I hope my liberal friends (and I have more than a few) take from this pontificate is that mercy and truth are never separable in Catholic pastoral life.
George Weigel
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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.
George Weigel
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That's what the liveliest parts of the world Church today - ranging from the booming Church in Africa to FOCUS missionaries on American campuses - are living: a Catholicism that has discovered that it doesn't have a mission, it is a mission.
George Weigel
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Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes.
George Weigel
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Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.
George Weigel
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The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.
George Weigel
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[Pope Francis] has felt the mercy of God in his own life and wants to share that experience with others.
George Weigel
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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.
George Weigel
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The only future is intentional Catholicism, evangelical Catholicism.
George Weigel