George Weigel – his hubris and relativism

George Weigel is one of the darlings of the Catholic Restorationist movement, especially in the English speaking world. His interest in Catholic conservative or Traditionalist causes dates back to the election of Karol Wojtya as Pope and the early policy formulations of his long pontificate.

Weigel soon found himself swept up into the ideological entourage of the Eurocentric JP II as he embarked on a single minded crusade to bring down the monolith of atheistic Communism. This political agenda soon began to take on a religious shape as the Polish Pope determined to create a pasteurized and homogenized Catholic monolith set in apocalyptic conflict with the neo-pagan world.

Weigel became the number one JP groupie, apologist, Papal biographer and fellow traveller on the Crusade.

With the support of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and a dedicated Roman Curia, the Catholic Church under JP II would be re-branded and marketed as doctrinally pure with centralised authority structures and a membership of the docile and compliant.

The authoritarian agenda of Pope Benedict later interlocked with that of JP II. It was in fact engineered by Ratzinger and it crystalized for Weigel and his colleagues of the right wing the very essence of Catholic Identity, place, mission and message. There is now a whole grown industry  servicing the niche market of Catholic reactive apologetics predigested for consumers both ad intra and ad extra. Its genre is at best Catholic tabloidism and at worst what John Allen would query Taliban Catholicism - Now Taliban Orthodoxy? (NCR 04/03/10).

Weigel continues to support himself by writing the biographies, commentaries and apologias for the pontificate of Benedict XVI. Forever the committed groupie and ideologue, he finds the principle of continuity a very convenient one. It’s his bread and butter. The alternative would mean moral and professional penury.

He has, along the way, had to effect some critical editorial adjustments, make those vital nuances and distinctions necessary for his own journalistic survival and personal credibility. He has, however, fallen victim to his own cognitive dissonance when, despite the growing and overwhelming evidence, he for a long time refused to accept as fact that Marcial Marciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, was a totally corrupt fraudster and a monstrous sexual predator.

Weigel has also, over the last decade or so, strongly aligned himself ideologically and theologically with a rather curious and eccentric group of Catholic capitalist necons who have sought to ground and validate their free market economic theories in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. They are often very loosely called the New Scholastics. Selective quotations from Catholic Social teaching from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI mixed in with eclectic and a-contextual biblical references are employed to construct a capitalist narrative which would find favour with dictatorial Fascist regimes in their various incarnations. They would also be a very welcome guest at the Republican Tea Party in its celebration of America’s manifest destiny.

Weigel’s self-protective hubris, misrepresentation and dissembling on these issues are of lamentable and breathtaking proportions. He belongs to the minority which cannot recognise it at all.

‘Loyalty to the Pope and to the Magisterium,’ the new litmus test of Orthodoxy, is the boast and common ground shared by Weigel and the easily led and regimented phalanx of the new Ecclesial Movements. While claiming a position of leadership, George in fact is just one of the foot soldiers of the New Evangelization.

Over the past decade or so Weigel’s identity and authority have been rooted and anchored in at times vitriolic diatribe and churlish nagging which have been directed at a large bloc of fellow believers whom he regards as heterodox dissenters. In his paradigm of contempt he has authored a kind of Restorationist lexicon, listing terms such as Cafeteria Catholicism, NewChurch and Catholicism Lite. This has equipped a legion of the small minded, insecure, noisy and intellectually lazy minority with the rhetoric of rage and resentment they so crave.

On the other hand, if the Neocons determine that it might be financially possible, then even the Holy Spirit might be persuaded that it is worth the opportunity cost. It has probably happened before in Church History!

George Weigel has locked himself inside his own narrative and become a prisoner within his own myth. His efforts at a Catholic apologia for an end to the conversation about Vatican II and his promotion of a divinely sanctioned globalized economic system of free markets have exposed him to the charge that he has become, in fact, that which he despises most, a representative of religious and secular relativism.