The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church

by WEIGEL GEORGE

• ISBN13: 9780465092604
• ISBN10: 0465092608
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

The Catholic Church in America is in a state of crisis. Yet few understand what the crisis really is, why it happened, or how the Church must respond to it. As no other commentator or critic has done, George Weigel situates the current crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance in the context of recent Catholic history. With honesty and critical rigor, he reveals the Church's failure to embrace the true spiritual promise of Vatican II, a failure that has resulted in the gradual but steady surrender to liberal culture that he dubs "Catholic Lite." Drawing upon his unparalleled knowledge of how the Church works, both in America and in Rome, Weigel exposes the patterns of dissent and self-deception that became entrenched in seminaries, among priests, and ultimately among the bishops who failed their flock by thinking like managers instead of apostles. But, Weigel reminds us, in the Biblical world a "crisis" is a time of great opportunity, an invitation to deeper faith. Every great crisis of the Church's past, from the Dark Ages to the Reformation, has resulted in a period of reform that returned the Church-and its priesthood-to its roots. Weigel sets forth an agenda for genuine reform that challenges seminarians, priests, bishops, and the laity to lead more integrally Catholic lives. As he argues so persuasively, the answer to the present crisis will not be found in "Catholic Lite" but in classic Catholicism: a Catholicism that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past in order to face the corruptions of the present and create a strong future.

Author Biography

George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's leading commentators on religion and public life, is the author of the acclaimed The Courage to Be Catholic, the international bestseller,Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II, and numerous other books that include The Truth of Catholicism and The Final Revolution. Now a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where he holds the John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy, Weigel writes a weekly column, "The Catholic Difference," that is syndicated to more than forty newspapers around the United States. He is an NBC consultant on the Vatican and appears regularly on network and cable television programs as well as national and local radio. Weigel lives with his wife and their three children in North Bethesda, Maryland.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
What the Crisis Is	p. 9
A Three-Headed Monster	p. 19
A Crisis of Priestly Identity	p. 22
A Crisis of Episcopal Leadership	p. 29
A Crisis of Discipleship	p. 32
What the Crisis Is Not	p. 35
Celibacy	p. 37
An "Authoritarian" Church?	p. 42
A Failure to Implement Vatican II?	p. 44
A "Pedophilia Crisis"?	p. 47
A Media-Created Crisis?	p. 48
Is the Catholic Sexual Ethic at Fault?	p. 54
How the Crisis Happened	p. 57
Why Now? Why This Way?	p. 60
The "Truce of 1968"	p. 68
Dissent Among Theologians	p. 73
The Impact on Seminaries	p. 75
The "Wounded Healer" Syndrome	p. 78
The Beginnings of Reform	p. 80
Faithful Dissent?	p. 83
Why Bishops Failed	p. 87
A Crisis of Identity	p. 93
The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy	p. 96
Clericalisms Old and New	p. 100
The Triumphant Therapeutic	p. 102
The Travail of Compassion	p. 104
On Not Appearing "Conservative"	p. 106
Clubmen	p. 110
A Failure of Imagination	p. 112
Rome and the Crisis	p. 117
Off the Information Superhighway	p. 120
Old Habits Die Hard	p. 125
Culture Wars	p. 129
A Problem of Communications	p. 130
An Oversold Product?	p. 134
The Turn	p. 136
The Learning Curve	p. 144
Agenda for Reform--Seminaries and Novitiates	p. 147
Apostolic Visitations?	p. 149
Recruitment and Screening	p. 151
Education for Chastity	p. 155
Homosexuality and the Seminary	p. 160
Putting Psychology in Its Place	p. 163
The Riches of Theology	p. 166
Agenda for Reform--The Priesthood	p. 173
A Continuing Education	p. 177
Deepening Fraternity	p. 180
Welcoming the Newly Ordained	p. 182
Asceticism and Lifestyle	p. 183
Priests and Lay People	p. 185
Priests and Vocations to the Priesthood	p. 189
Handling Malfeasance	p. 191
Agenda for Reform--The Bishops and the Vatican	p. 197
The Selection of Bishops	p. 202
The National Conference	p. 210
Changes in Rome	p. 214
From Crisis to Reform	p. 219
The Last Hurrah	p. 220
The Iron Law	p. 224
The Second Sorrowful Mystery	p. 225
Whose Church?	p. 228
The Great Adventure	p. 230
Acknowledgments	p. 233
Index	p. 237
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