NRO Interview: “Evangelical Catholicism”

From Stand Firm:


National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews author George Weigel.

“Lukewarm Catholicism has no future; submitting to the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit is no longer optional,” George Weigel writes in his new book, Evangelical Catholicism. We live in a time when “religious faith, commitment to a religious community, and a religiously informed morality can no longer be taken for granted. . .  The Son of Man, coming as the Risen Lord returning in glory, would find the usual human confusion, in the midst of which he’d also find a lot of faith: some of it remarkably compelling and attractive, like the faith of a John Paul II; some of it full of sheer heroism, like the faith of persecuted Christians in Islamic lands and in China; much of it a bit catechetically unformed, despite various expressions of piety; all of it struggling against the usual enemies — the world, the flesh, and the devil. And he would find a Catholic Church leaving one phase of its history — the Church of the Counter-Reformation, in which the faith could be absorbed by osmosis from the ambient public culture and then sustained by simple, question-and-answer catechesis and devotional piety — and entering another: the Church of the New Evangelization, ‘Evangelical Catholicism,’ in which Biblically literate and sacramentally formed Catholics, who have a clear understanding of their missionary vocation as baptized persons, are offering their families, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens the Gospel: friendship with Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life.”