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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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George Weigel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: April 17
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More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Younger theologians will continue to pursue and understand truth rather than deconstructing it, as a lot of their elders seemed to want to do.
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Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.
George Weigel
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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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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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The people who are behind the curve of the Catholic future are the institutional-maintenance types.
George Weigel
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The only future is intentional Catholicism, evangelical Catholicism.
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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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.
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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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 Church offers the medicine of the divine mercy so that healed souls can grasp the truth that will liberate them in the fullest meaning of human freedom.
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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Ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have lethal consequences.
George Weigel
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[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