Review: George Weigel and the Irony of Catholic History

George Weigel, like his mentor St. John Paul the Great, offers incredible depth and meaning to a meme-driven, emoji-filled world starving for substance and meaning.

The secular world thinks it’s the future and faith is the past. Weigel shows how the Church moved over the past 250 years from opposing to exploring to embracing to critiquing modernity. Since John Paul, Weigel demonstrates, Catholicism has been converting modernity (transcending “modern’’ ideas like atheistic communism).

“Put out into the Deep,” Weigel explains, “was John Paul II’s metaphor for… the drama of Catholicism-and-modernity: the Church must leave the shallow, comfortable waters of institutional maintenance and set out into the roiling, turbulent ‘deep’ of the late modern and increasingly postmodern world. To do what? To make a great catch — to convert the 21st century world to Christ and to help strengthen the moral and cultural foundations of modernity’s noblest aspirations and achievements.”

George Weigel books take us to new, unexpected levels. Newt Gingrich, one of the great thinkers of both of the Trump era and the 1990s Republican Revolution, notes two Weigel books helped cement the former Speaker’s decision to convert to Catholicism a decade ago.