The Full Catholic Faith

George Weigel has some gems. On "Deep Catholicism":

What's the alternative to Catholic Lite? I found one answer in a new book by Father Aidan Nichols, O.P., one of the intellectual adornments of Anglophone Catholicism, who teaches at Cambridge University in England. In Criticizing the Critics: Catholic Apologias for Today (Family Publications), Father Nichols responds to the challenges posed (according to the book's table of contents) by "modernists, neo-gnostics, academic biblical exegetes, feminists, liberal Protestants, progressive Catholics, the erotically absorbed, and critics of Christendom" in a series of trenchant essays. Toward the end, he gives us a luminous description of the Catholicism-in-full that we need. That kind of Catholicism is not sectarian, nor does it attempt to re-create the Catholic 1950s, "which...showed its Achilles' heel by the manner in which its adherents subsequently fell way." Rather, what we should seek is

...a deep Catholicism [that] is not simply sure of its dogmatic basis and at home in its corporate memory, though these are essential. It is also profoundly rooted in the Scriptures, the Fathers, the great doctors and spiritual teachers, and receptive to whatever is lovely in the human world of any and every time and place, which the Word draws to himself by assuming human nature into union with his own divine person.

That's the Catholicism, Father Nichols suggests, that can give people "strong reasons for living." Strong truths, beauty appreciated, and lives lived nobly: there's one compelling answer to Catholic Lite.

On European Catholicism, Christ's Passion and the Shroud:

European Catholicism has little of the infrastructure for cultural combat that has been built in the United States over the past few decades. For example: there is simply nothing in Europe like First Things and its stable of writers, whose essays and articles demand attention from public officials, academics, the general media, and other opinion merchants. That's not my idiosyncratic view as a longtime First Things contributor and now the chairman of its board; that's what my European friends and colleagues tell me.

Getting that kind of cultural traction requires hard work and resources. Above all, however, it requires a critical mass of radically converted Christian disciples, who have been through moments like Father Robert Barron of Chicago lived in Turin:

"I have to admit that it was one of the most extraordinary religious experiences of my life. The marks on the Shroud -- including the blood stains -- are clearly visible, which means that the brutal reality of the Passion is clearly visible. Staring at the Shroud, I was brought vividly back to that squalid little hill outside the city walls of Jerusalem in the year 30 where a young man was tortured to death. But then the face of the figure comes into focus: that strange, haunting, noble, peaceful face, which discloses, at the same time, the depth of human misery and the fullness of divine mercy. In the face of the crucified God, the full drama and poetry of Christian faith is on display, the Answer which is anything but an easy answer, the Word which surpasses the word of any philosopher..."

And on the recently promoted Cardinal Marc Oullet:

Several weeks ago, Cardinal Ouellet spoke to a Canadian pro-life rally, praised the present Canadian administration for not including abortion-funding in its G8 global maternal health proposals, deplored the lack of legal restrictions on abortion in Canada, and reaffirmed the Church's ancient conviction, recorded in the earliest sub-apostolic literature, that abortion is a grave injustice whatever the circumstances. Pretty standard stuff, that, although said, I'm sure, with Marc Ouellet's usual passion and elegance. But the commentariat and the politicians went bonkers...

Just to be clear on what's being claimed here: to articulate publicly a biological fact recognized by embryology textbooks -- that human life begins at conception -- and then to draw two logical moral conclusions from that fact -- that the product of conception is an innocent life that deserves the protection of the law, and that abortion is the taking of that innocent life -- is to be an "extremist": or even worse, a "religious extremist" of the sort whose minions throw acid into the faces of little girls wanting to learn how to read.

The Quebec National Assembly quickly got into the act, unanimously affirming the so-called "right to choose." But again, it was not the thought of back-alley abortions with coat-hangers but another Great Bugaboo that horrified some Quebecois legislators. "What we're seeing here is the rise of the religious right in Canada," fretted a Parti Quebecois legislator, Carole Poirier. Such are the phantoms that haunt the secularist mind: Marc Cardinal Ouellet, a mild-mannered intellectual and pastor, is really a French-speaking version of Pat Robertson, determined to force women into sexual peonage and likely to claim that volcanic eruptions in Iceland are divine retribution for Nordic unbelief.

Cardinal Ouellet backed down not an inch (or, to be precise in Canadian terms, not a centimeter). Rather, he returned service with brio, suggesting that those determined to foist state-funded abortion on Third World countries were guilty of "neocolonialism" and asking whether the smug secularists of Quebec were not themselves living in an "underdeveloped country," morally speaking, as they evinced so little regard for the dignity of the human person.

I have no idea what the Holy Spirit has in mind for Cardinal Marc Ouellet's future. But I do know that Quebec -- once one of the most vibrantly Catholic parts of North America; now arguably the most religiously arid space between Baffin Island and Tierra del Fuego -- is immensely blessed to have as its chief shepherd a man of solid Catholic faith, genuine piety, well-honed intelligence, and deep compassion. Perhaps one day the commentariat and the politicians of La Belle Province will figure that out. That might be one small step toward their reclaiming a lost patrimony that is religious and cultural, not just linguistic.