With the official news that Fr. Serra will be canonized in September when the Holy Father comes to the U.S., permit me to call your attention to an event this coming Wednesday that is being sponsored by the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies called "Founding Padres." The event will feature experts on the three priests whose statues are placed in the U.S. Capitol building: Fr. Serra, Fr. Kino, and Fr. Marquette. More details can be found here. The event is free and open to the public but advance registration is highly recommended.
"Who am I to judge?" Pope Francis famously opined about a gay cleric who was seeking to follow the Lord. Turns out, Pope Francis will leave the judging to the witch hunt specialists at LifeSiteNews and the Lepanto Institute, as they attack an employee at CRS who has evidently entered into a same sex marriage. This is so ugly. Do these people have nothing better to do than troll around public records? Why not get out and help the poor, the way CRS does each and every day.
I permit those who grieve a lot of space, but George Weigel's tribute to Cardinal Francis George is too much. First, he makes it sound like Cardinal George was the only intellectual in the American hierarchy and the rest of the bishops can barely tie their shoe laces. Cardinal George would be embarrassed. Then there is this quote:
The old post-conciliar battles are, largely, over, and the course has been set. Francis George helped set that course. And when it comes time to write his story in full, he will be remembered as the most consequential archbishop of Chicago in the modern history of the Church — and a leader in American Catholicism whose intellectual and physical courage was instrumental in making the Church in the United States, for all its challenges and problems, the most vital in the developed world.
I wonder if Mr. Weigel reads the papers or visits the Vatican website. It seems to me that the post-conciliar Church is still wrestling with the reception of the Council. If the battles are "over," it will be because there is no going back to the days when the preoccupations of conservative culture critics in the West set the agenda for the Church and the concerns of the Global South take center stage.
