-THE TRUTH OF CATHOLICISM

George Weigel

ISBN 9780060937584

6 – Jesus is, as He said of Himself, the Way, the Truth, and the Life

7 – “But who do you say that I am?” [the most important question of all]

8 – order and reason, rather than chaos and indifference, are at the root of things

28 – the reality of God means that we do not live in an irrational nor absurd world

We are not just something, we are someone, going somewhere

9 – Lord, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you” – St. Augustine

10 – we reach our fulfillment as human beings not by asserting ourselves, but by giving ourselves

173 – a mysterious process in which the gift of ourselves comes back to us multiplied

11 – Jesus Christ is the center of the universe and of history

12 – at a certain time, in a certain place, . . . the Creator of the universe entered His creation in order to redirect the human story back toward its true destiny, which is eternal life with Him

15 – tolerance does not mean avoiding differences

16 – Christ: true God and true man

17 – the Christian lives beyond fear

18 – because He is the Redeemer, Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life

23 – what atheistic humanism has proven is that, without God, human beings can organize the world only in a brutal contest of wills one against another

24 – the fact of God’s existence can be rationally known

27 – in . . .God we find liberation, not bondage

God tells us Who He is – through His relationship with His chosen people (Israel), and through His Son, Jesus Christ, Who reveals God’s attributes in His person, His teaching, and His actions

29 – God, in Whom justice and love meet

To seek out the Father of mercies is to recognize our neediness for what it is, and to recognize ourselves for who we are. That is the path of maturity. It is also the path of authentic freedom

30 – What God does teaches us something important about Who God is

31 – the God Whom Christians believe to be a Holy Trinity [i.e., 3 Persons in 1 God] is a God overflowing with self-giving: the self-giving of the Father begets the Son, and the self-giving between Father and Son proceeds the Holy Spirit

God is a living, eternal event – a community of self-giving love and receptivity

32 – we are created to live forever within the light and love, the giving and receiving, of the Holy Trinity

The Trinity . . . casts a penetrating light on the meaning and purpose of every human life. The doctrine of the Trinity reinforces the Christian claim that self-giving and receptivity are the road to human flourishing

33 – Catholicism has never understood itself as simply one example [among many]. Catholicism is different

139 – Judaism is not just another “world religion”, but a religion intrinsic to our own

34 – the Son . . . is vindicated by the Father in the Resurrection

God in search of us is not just an example of religion. It is, the Catholic Church believes, nothing less than the truth of the world

42 – the Catholic Church is where the human family learns the truth about its origins, its dignity, and its destiny

43 – this astonishingly Good News demands to be shared. The Church, by her very nature, is missionary, and every baptized Christian has a responsibility – a vocation – to evangelize

54 – evangelization and charity

44 – sanctity is for everyone

Grow in holiness. Our vocation is the way in which we each live our distinctive Christian witness, and thus are fitted to become the kind of people who can live with God forever

50 – the undeniable reality of the Catholic Church demands a decision

51-52 – authority in the Catholic Church exists to insure that we do not settle for mediocrity, . . . and to help all Catholics hold themselves accountable to the one supreme “rule of faith” – the living Christ

58 – the Kingdom of God is the really real world

59 – God has structured reality sacramentally

64 – worship God because God is to be worshiped

67-68 – femaleness and maleness are neither accidents of evolutionary biology nor cultural constructs, but icons pointing to deep truths about the nature of reality

69 – it is God Who first seeks us

74 – the moral life is fundamentally a question of goodness, of becoming a good person. . . . it equips us to live eternal life

We have to grow into the kind of people who can do that. That growth takes place through our freedom. The prescriptions and proscriptions of the moral law are boundaries for exercising our freedom. They help us to freely choose the good, and that is how we develop into the kind of people who can live with God forever

75 – Give yourself away, Jesus invites. Make yourself, not just your possessions, into a gift

Our lives are inescapably moral lives

76-77 – our actions have profound consequences, because what we do makes us into the kind of people we are

Changes it from “How far can I go?” to “What should I do to become a good person?”

78 – freedom is having the right to do what we ought. Freedom and goodness are intimately, inextricably linked

79 – freedom for excellence

80 – we need to be educated in freedom

“One becomes freer only by becoming better”

Rules bind and free at the same time

86 – to be seized by the power of the truth is to be seized not by mere rationality, but by the Truth who is Love

88 – to empty the Gospel of its power to set a rule of life is not compassion, and it does not lead to anyone's healing. Moral doctrine – the rule of life that embodies the rule of faith, which is Christ, makes real compassion possible

93 – God saw everything that He had made, and declared it very good {Gen 1:31}

99 – Woman and man were made in the image and likeness of God {Gen 1:26}

The couple themselves are the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony [the priest/deacon/bishop witnesses it for the Church]

96 – loving is the opposite of using

97 – genuine human sexual expression requires permanence and commitment

98 – chastity [the right use of sex] is the virtue that allows me to love another as a person

99 – in genuine loving, in a genuine gift of myself to another that is reciprocated by the other’s love, my own identity is not only kept intact, it is enhanced

100 – that radical giving and receiving is an image of the interior life of God, a Trinity of divine Persons

101 – lust is the opposite of true attraction

102 – holiness is a reflection of the sanctity of God

God created the world in an act of love

104 – sexual love must be understood like any other Chrisitan vocation: as a means of living the law of the Gift, the call to self-giving inscribed on every human heart. The vocation to sexual love is one of the ways in which we become the kind of people who can live with God forever

106 – Catholicism rejects an ideology of fertility at all costs. The Catholic Church teaches that all married couples are called to a “responsible parenthood”, and she espouses natural family planning (as opposed to artificial contraception)

110 – the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are morally wrong because they violate the sexually-differentiated complementarity of heterosexual union that makes possible the generation of new human life (of which homosexual unions are incapable)

But the Catholic Church does not teach that homosexuality, as an orientation, is in itself sinful

113 – a world of freedom is a world in which things can, and do, go wrong

114 – suffering is a mystery, a reality that can only be grasped and comprehended in an act of love

115 - God’s answer to suffering is to embrace it [and to offer it up to Him for others]

118 – that missing something is in fact Someone: Jesus Christ

119 – the Kingdom of God, a world beyond suffering, is breaking into this world

124 – compassion: the ability to suffer with someone else

126 – “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men’ {Rev 21}

129 – “the truth will make you free” – Jesus {Jn 8:32}

144-145 – does the Catholic Church teach . . .

. . . that God wishes the salvation of all? YES

. . . that that salvation was only made possible through Christ, the unique Savior of the world? YES

155 – the Gospel has public implications

157 – Authentic democracy is possible only in a state ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct concept of the human person

158 – as history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism

If a democracy were to ban any consideration of binding moral norms as a horizon for its public life, on the grounds that moral truth were either illusory or sectarian, then conflicts within that democracy could be resolved only by resort to force

Democracy without values is self-cannibalizing. Freedom, absent moral truth, becomes its own worst enemy

160 – democracies need a critical mass of virtuous citizens

161 – “values-neutral democracy” is a contradiction in terms. The Catholic Church insists that religiously informed moral truths have a place in public life

162 – The Catholic Church teaches that “the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral”

The unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception

164 – abortion is a justice issue, not a sexual one

It’s a civil rights issue – for if the state claims the right declare an entire class of human beings (the unborn) – outside the boundaries of legal protection, then no one is safe

166 – the Catholic Church does not demand the continuation of “medical procedures that are overly burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome” ; but she does not consider food and water to be extraordinary measures

Anything that denies the inalienability of the right to life is an assault on human dignity

171 – we are to become saints [i.e., citizens of Heaven]

174 – the Catholic Church doesn't “make” saints

she recognizes the saints that God has made

Saints are all around us, in all walks of life. Sanctity is not just for the sanctuary on Sunday. Sanctity is a very real possibility for everyone, everywhere, all the time

179 – the ubiquitous vocation to sanctity

180 – Catholicism tells us not only that we are capable of greatness, but that greatness is demanded of us