KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
November 27, 2018
By Michael Sean Winters
In his most recent column at First Things, titled “Vatican Autocracy and the U.S. Bishops,” George Weigel, who once posed as the “authoritative biographer” of Pope Paul II, writes:
I recently spent almost five weeks in Rome, during which I found an anti-American atmosphere worse than anything I’d experienced in 30 years of work in and around the Vatican. A false picture of the Church’s life in the United States, in which wealthy Catholics in league with extreme right-wing bishops have hijacked the Church and are leading an embittered resistance to the present pontificate, has been successfully sold. And in another offense against collegiality, this grossly distorted depiction of American Catholicism has not been effectively challenged or corrected by American bishops enjoying Roman favor these days.
This paragraph provokes several plausible responses, the most obvious of which is to say that this picture was not “sold” so much as it was “discovered,” one might even say “discerned.” Weigel once defined natural law as the result of “disciplined reflection on the dynamics of human action,” and something similar could be used to describe how Vatican officials came to the conclusion that “wealthy Catholics in league with extreme right-wing bishops have hijacked the Church” in the United States.
An even simpler response is found in a recent news story: “Catholic Business Leaders Hold Back Donation to Vatican Amid Church Crisis,” as The Wall Street Journal headline had it. Legatus, an organization for Catholic CEOs, has decided to withhold the organization’s tithe to the Holy See. Talk about throwing your money around or, in this case, not throwing your money around. I want to ask these titans of industry how their action is not merely an updated version of simony?
But the best response would be for Weigel to simply consult past issues of the National Catholic Reporter.
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