George Weigel

Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies

George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

From 1989 through June 1996, Mr. Weigel was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he led a wide-ranging, ecumenical and inter-religious program of research and publication on foreign and domestic policy issues.

Mr. Weigel is perhaps best known for his widely translated and internationally acclaimed two-volume biography of Pope St. John Paul II: the New York Times bestseller, Witness to Hope (1999), and its sequel, The End and the Beginning (2010). In 2017, Weigel published a memoir of the experiences that led to his work as a papal biographer: Lessons in Hope — My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II.

George Weigel is the author or editor of more than thirty other books, many of which have been translated into other languages. Among the most recent are Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (2013); Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches (2013); Letters to a Young Catholic (2015); The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times (2018); The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020);Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (2021); and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (2022). His essays, op-ed columns, and reviews appear regularly in major opinion journals and newspapers across the United States. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is also Senior Vatican Analyst for NBC News. His weekly column, “The Catholic Difference,” is syndicated to eighty-five newspapers and magazines in seven countries.

Mr. Weigel received a B.A. from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and an M.A. from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto. He is the recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates in fields including divinity, philosophy, law, and social science, and has been awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, Poland’s Gloria Artis Gold Medal, and Lithuania’s Diplomacy Star.

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The Good News Is That The Bad News Isn’t All The News There Is

George Weigel

A suggestion for a different kind of Lenten fast: Give up Catholic bad news-mongering.

Articles

Syndicated Column / March 13, 2024

Pope Francis Waves a White Flag at Vladimir Putin

George Weigel

In urging the victim to yield to the aggressor, he repudiates centuries of Catholic teaching.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / March 13, 2024

Two Who Didn’t Run

George Weigel

Both Stanley Rother and Alexei Navalny exemplified the cardinal virtue of courage, which is also a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Articles

Syndicated Column / March 6, 2024

Weigel: “Many in the West would prefer if Russia returned to the forests from which…

George Weigel

But it should be understood that the Catholic Church cannot abandon the just war tradition because that tradition is rooted in both revelation and reason and is the permanently valid method of moral analysis that Catholics should use in thinking through issues of war and peace.

CREDO / March 5, 2024

“Gendered” Nonsense is Dangerous Nonsense

George Weigel

As is typically the case with falsehood, the gender ideology now infesting the Department of State seeks to impose itself by bureaucratic power and personal intimidation.

Articles

Syndicated Column / February 28, 2024

Two Years On, Still Unbroken

George Weigel

The contemporary Russian propaganda barrage has had its effects in a dysfunctional U.S. Congress.

Articles

Syndicated Column / February 21, 2024

Lenten Literary Companions

George Weigel

Having literary companions along the Lenten journey can help us live those traditional practices more intensely.

Articles

Syndicated Column / February 14, 2024

Secularist Blinders and the Middle East

George Weigel

The U.S. foreign service, like its counterparts in the major powers of Europe, is so thoroughly soaked in the juices of rationalist secularism that the professionals find it hard to take religiously-based political radicalism seriously.

Articles

Syndicated Column / January 31, 2024

Standing with Ukraine

George Weigel

Today’s geopolitical blindness about Ukraine—this willful deconstruction of the Western capacity to deter aggressive authoritarian powers—is a failure of moral insight and moral nerve as well as a political failure.

Articles

Syndicated Column / January 24, 2024

Claudine Gay, Jimmy Lai, and the Truth of Things

George Weigel

Hard as it may be for normal people to grasp, the notion that there is only “my truth” and “your truth,” but nothing properly describable as the truth, is virtually axiomatic in the humanities departments of American “elite” universities, and has been for some time.

Articles

Syndicated Column / January 17, 2024

“Contextual” Theology and Fiducia Supplicans

George Weigel

What does it mean for the future discussion of “synodality” that so many individual bishops—and indeed entire episcopal conferences—have severely criticized, and in some instances repudiated, Fiducia Supplicans?

Articles

Syndicated Column / January 10, 2024

The MAD Magazine Caricature of U.S. Catholicism

George Weigel

2024 will see an intensifying debate over the complex legacy of Francis’s pontificate.

Syndicated Column / January 3, 2024