Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Weigel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: April 17
Author
Political Scientist
Theologian
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Doe
Welfare
Francis
Persons
Bread
Client
Person
Shame
Earning
Feel
Dignity
Clients
Feels
Turned
Pope
Great
Passion
Speaks
Men
Family
Puts
Speak
Dependent
Peripheral

More quotes by George Weigel

Image
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
Image
The only future is intentional Catholicism, evangelical Catholicism.
George Weigel
Image
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.
George Weigel
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.
George Weigel
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
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.
George Weigel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.
George Weigel
Image
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
Image
The Guardian,[is] one of the most consistently anti-Catholic newspapers in the world.
George Weigel
Image
[Pope Francis] has felt the mercy of God in his own life and wants to share that experience with others.
George Weigel
Image
[When the Gospel seems to be interpreted in different ways] is the obvious challenge, perhaps even danger, here. By its very nature as a custodial office, the papacy can't be a Rorschach test, into which people read whatever they like - whatever they fear or hope for.
George Weigel
Image
The people who are behind the curve of the Catholic future are the institutional-maintenance types.
George Weigel
Image
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
Image
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