{"id":7099,"date":"2004-06-25T08:31:23","date_gmt":"2004-06-25T08:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/from_the_tablet.html"},"modified":"2004-06-25T08:31:23","modified_gmt":"2004-06-25T08:31:23","slug":"from_the_tablet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/from_the_tablet.html","title":{"rendered":"From the Tablet"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interview\/discussion with George Weigel<\/a><\/p>\n

But this lacuna aside, Weigel\u2019s political vision, drawn from Catholic social teaching as updated by the Pope, is attractive: the State defers to the moral values embedded in a free society in which the Churches are free to develop a vibrant moral culture. He set out this vision in his recent Tyburn lecture in London, entitled \u201cThe Free and Virtuous Society\u201d. It was a typically learned, meaty tour of the three great principles underpinning social Catholic thought: personalism (the dignity of the human person), the common good, and subsidiarity, to which John Paul II, in his three social encyclicals, has added the fourth principle of solidarity (civic friendship). The twenty-first century, said Weigel in his speech, was faced with a clash between pragmatic utilitarianism and radical Islam; what the Church proposed was a radically different option: a society in which freedom and virtue are interlocking, and interdependent, human pursuits. Such a society has a democratic political community, a market economy, and a vibrant public moral culture. The primary public task of the Church was to form that culture. \u201cThus the Church is not in the business of proposing technical solutions to questions of governance or economic activity,\u201d he argued. \u201cThe Church is in the business of forming the culture that can form the kind of people who can develop those solutions against a transcendent moral horizon.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

So has post-conciliar Catholicism \u2013 Poland excepted \u2013 lost its nerve? Weigel does not disagree with that, although he would not put it so starkly. But he does believe that John Paul II has restored \u201ca joie de vivre and perhaps even a joie de combat in fighting the public struggle for the free and virtuous society. And he has provided an intellectual armamentarium for conducting this contest.\u201d The pontificate of John Paul II will be framing the Catholic debate \u201cfor the next 200 years\u201d, he says. \u201cThat\u2019s a very exciting accomplishment.\u201d But what he hopes Letters does is to connect that achievement to Christian culture and history, to show that \u201cthis is not simply the achievement of a winsome and brilliant individual\u201d.<\/p>\n

I ask Weigel why this brilliant individual has had less success in speaking to the heart of European culture. The question, he says, is one that the Pope is very aware of, as are the cardinals who will vote in his successor. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is it that this most pan-European of popes, who has invested enormous energies in the re-evangelisation of Europe, has had so few palpable successes in doing that?\u201d Weigel wonders, adding \u2013 as if speaking for the Pope \u2013 that \u201cit\u2019s a great sorrow\u201d. <\/p>\n

One problem could be that the Pope is perceived as a pre-modern mind in a continent which considers itself the guardian of the modern project, says Weigel, whereas in fact John Paul II is a modern man with a different reading of that project, one that \u201cdoes not end up in a postmodern despair over the possibility of knowing anything except your truth and my truth but not the truth\u201d. <\/p>\n

But this is just a hypothesis, says Weigel as we walk over to his book-signing, to be tested in his next project, an analysis of the great European malaise. You have been warned. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interview\/discussion with George Weigel But this lacuna aside, Weigel\u2019s political vision, drawn from Catholic social teaching as updated by the Pope, is attractive: the State defers to the moral values embedded in a free society in which the Churches are free to develop a vibrant moral culture. He set out this vision in his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the Tablet - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/from_the_tablet.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From the Tablet - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An interview\/discussion with George Weigel But this lacuna aside, Weigel\u2019s political vision, drawn from Catholic social teaching as updated by the Pope, is attractive: the State defers to the moral values embedded in a free society in which the Churches are free to develop a vibrant moral culture. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}