The Dispatch

“Sinicization” is not inculturation

August 28, 2024 George Weigel 9

“Inculturation” has been a Catholic buzzword for over a half-century. It’s not the most elegant neologism, smacking as it does of sociologese. Still, it expresses a truth of Catholic missionary practice two millennia old: the […]

The Dispatch

When was baseball’s Golden Age?

August 21, 2024 George Weigel 19

Amidst a presidential campaign in which many of our countrymen deplore the choices we face in November, let’s take a break, follow the counsel of Ecclesiastes 3:1 (“For everything there is a season…”), and turn […]

The Dispatch

Potholes on the road to Synod 2024

August 7, 2024 George Weigel 27

The ecclesiastical propaganda machine created for last October’s Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church is still grinding away, and it’s getting both tiresome and worrisome. As for tiresome: Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, the General […]

The Dispatch

The Summer Reading List

July 10, 2024 George Weigel 6

A long time ago (but not in a galaxy far away), Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin High School had us reading six or seven books every summer. I confess that I never finished some of them; […]

The Dispatch

Only one name

July 3, 2024 George Weigel 53

Rome is chaotic at its calmest, but three weeks working there in May suggested that the chaos has intensified to what may be unprecedented levels. Public transport is regularly stymied by strikes. Graffiti is everywhere. […]

The Dispatch

Rupture by stealth?

June 26, 2024 George Weigel 72

According to a source well-positioned to know, one of the behind-the-scenes dramas of the present pontificate involved Pope Francis’s determination to amend the Catechism of the Catholic Church and declare capital punishment an intrinsically evil act: […]

The Dispatch

Ticket to oblivion?

June 19, 2024 George Weigel 16

In the days before Pope Paul VI simplified the rituals surrounding the creation of new cardinals, men who had previously been informed that they had been chosen gathered in Rome; there, a day or so […]