Quotes from George Weigel

Karol Wojtyla, the disciple who was a product of the Church in the modern world, not of the Roman bureaucracy.

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.

This life of ours... is a gift from God. It is not of our choosing. It comes to us by his choice. Since it is of his choosing, it is of his designing. We neither made ourselves nor can we manage ourselves as we like, nor manage the life that comes to us. For that reason we can take a most hopeful view of life.... [For] the thought that it is his gift and after his design gives us courage.

The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.

Younger theologians will continue to pursue and understand truth rather than deconstructing it, as a lot of their elders seemed to want to do.

Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.

The failure of Lateran V was the prelude to the Reformation, which shattered the unity of the Christian West and set in motion the dynamics that eventually led to the European wars of religion. Failures of reform carry a high cost.

Young—never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which you're capable, with the help of God's grace.

Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way.

[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.

Love is not "fulfilling" oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".