An interview/discussion with George Weigel

But this lacuna aside, Weigel’s political vision, drawn from Catholic social teaching as updated by the Pope, is attractive: the State defers to the moral values embedded in a free society in which the Churches are free to develop a vibrant moral culture. He set out this vision in his recent Tyburn lecture in London, entitled “The Free and Virtuous Society”. It was a typically learned, meaty tour of the three great principles underpinning social Catholic thought: personalism (the dignity of the human person), the common good, and subsidiarity, to which John Paul II, in his three social encyclicals, has added the fourth principle of solidarity (civic friendship). The twenty-first century, said Weigel in his speech, was faced with a clash between pragmatic utilitarianism and radical Islam; what the Church proposed was a radically different option: a society in which freedom and virtue are interlocking, and interdependent, human pursuits. Such a society has a democratic political community, a market economy, and a vibrant public moral culture. The primary public task of the Church was to form that culture. “Thus the Church is not in the business of proposing technical solutions to questions of governance or economic activity,” he argued. “The Church is in the business of forming the culture that can form the kind of people who can develop those solutions against a transcendent moral horizon.”

So has post-conciliar Catholicism – Poland excepted – lost its nerve? Weigel does not disagree with that, although he would not put it so starkly. But he does believe that John Paul II has restored “a joie de vivre and perhaps even a joie de combat in fighting the public struggle for the free and virtuous society. And he has provided an intellectual armamentarium for conducting this contest.” The pontificate of John Paul II will be framing the Catholic debate “for the next 200 years”, he says. “That’s a very exciting accomplishment.” But what he hopes Letters does is to connect that achievement to Christian culture and history, to show that “this is not simply the achievement of a winsome and brilliant individual”.

I ask Weigel why this brilliant individual has had less success in speaking to the heart of European culture. The question, he says, is one that the Pope is very aware of, as are the cardinals who will vote in his successor.

“Why is it that this most pan-European of popes, who has invested enormous energies in the re-evangelisation of Europe, has had so few palpable successes in doing that?” Weigel wonders, adding – as if speaking for the Pope – that “it’s a great sorrow”.

One problem could be that the Pope is perceived as a pre-modern mind in a continent which considers itself the guardian of the modern project, says Weigel, whereas in fact John Paul II is a modern man with a different reading of that project, one that “does not end up in a postmodern despair over the possibility of knowing anything except your truth and my truth but not the truth”.

But this is just a hypothesis, says Weigel as we walk over to his book-signing, to be tested in his next project, an analysis of the great European malaise. You have been warned.