Weigel: Remembering Father Neuhaus | Newsweek Religion

How to Sell a Better Pope
Lisa Miller 5/14/2009 12:00:00 AM
I say this with respect: Pope Benedict XVI has a public-relations problem. You need only remember the 2000 visit of John Paul II to Jerusalem—which earned wall-to-wall cable coverage and produced the unforgettable image of the frail pope praying by the Western Wall—to know it's true. Pope Benedict, by contrast, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial last week and in so doing turned what should have been a moment of transcendent grief into a small international brouhaha because he did not refer to his own German past and appeared to some in the Israeli press to be insensitive to the fates of 6 million Jews. Otherwise, Benedict's Holy Land visit was largely ignored by the U.S. media. Benedict makes international news only when he does something thoughtless (like "reconciling" with a Holocaust-denying bish-op) or when he fumbles in public, as he did on the plane to Cameroon in March when he awkwardly noted that AIDS "cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics; on the contrary, they increase it." This remark, though in keeping with his theology, reverberated in the media echo chamber for a week—overshadowing other stops that might have served him better, such as meeting with representatives of Cameroon's Muslim community and a mass for as many as a million people in Angola. Benedict will never be John Paul, but why don't he and his people do a better job—to be perfectly crass about it—marketing their message?
VIEWPOINT
Parsing the Pontiff
George Weigel 5/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
No matter how much the Vatican rightly insists that the primary purpose of Benedict XVI's journeys outside Rome is to "strengthen the brethren"—as Christ instructed Peter to do—papal travel is inevitably political travel. Especially when that travel is to the Holy Land.
RELIGION
The Pope’s Denial Problem
Christopher Hitchens 1/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
Ever since Pope John XXIII made history by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, there have been believing Roman Catholics who regarded the whole thing as having been a ghastly mistake. The best known of these outside the church was probably Evelyn Waugh, who went to his death, after Easter service in 1966, convinced that Christendom had been betrayed by the capitulation of the Holy See to the fashionable heresies of modernism. The best known inside the church was the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a highly traditional French cleric who took his differences with Rome into open schism and was excommunicated, along with the four men he dared to "ordain" as bishops, in the year of our lord 1970. The most notorious (which I choose to distinguish from being merely well-known) of the extremist Catholic dissenters are the Father-Son team—if I may annex such profane imagery—of Hutton Gibson and his son Mel, whose highly lurid version of the sacrifice of Jesus was brought to the multiplex as "The Passion of the Christ."
RELIGION
Rome’s Reconciliation
George Weigel 1/26/2009 12:00:00 AM
What do the Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XVI, the Bastille and the Reign of Terror, the Bourbons and Robespierre, the revolutionary depredations in the Vendée, the Dreyfus Affair, the anti-clericalism of the French Third Republic, and the World War II Vichy regime have to do with the schismatic movement that the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre led out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988—a movement that Pope Benedict XVI is now trying to move toward reconciliation by lifting the excommunications of its four illegally ordained bishops on Jan. 21?
ART
The Vatican Breaks Its Da Vinci Code
Barbie Nadeau 9/12/2008 12:00:00 AM
When Renzo Piano sketched his initial plans for the church of San Padre Pio in Puglia, Italy, in 1993, he envisioned a contemporary space decorated with modern interpretations of Roman Catholic symbolism. Sure, he included plenty of traditional mainstays in church design like nooks for fonts, crucifixes and statues of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Padre Pio himself. But he also incorporated a 150-square-foot sunshade printed with what he refers to as a mirthful interpretation of the apocalypse by Roy Lichtenstein. Back then, the Vatican was warming to the idea of stark modern structures instead of baroque palaces for its new churches—which is why Piano got the job—but it wasn't yet willing to compromise on how to decorate them. "Our feet echoed in the giant halls inside the Vatican as we walked in with 30 fragments of our happy apocalypse," Piano told NEWSWEEK, describing the day he presented the avant-garde idea to the Holy See. "But they simply wouldn't have it. They loved the church design, and they had no problem with the sunshade, but in the end I had to use a solemn 12th-century apocalypse interpretation from a book that was Vatican-approved."
LETTERS
Mail Call: A Global Problem
7/12/2008 12:00:00 AM
Readers of our May 19 coverage of the world food shortage expressed concern. One wrote, "we can't afford uncontrolled population growth." Another said, "rich countries must lift barriers to farm imports." A third, linking oil prices to food scarcity, advised "economic sanctions for OPEC countries."