Monday, November 26, 2007

An Excerpt from "Letters To A Young Catholic"


George Weigel is, perhaps, best known in Catholic circles for his book, A Witness To Hope: A Biography of Pope John Paul II. Although Pope John Paul II is considered the "Pope of the Young" because of his love for young people, tonight I'd like to talk about another one of Weigel's books.
Letters To A Young Catholic is a book that every Catholic, regardless of age, should read. The title was clearly taken from Ranier Maria Rilke's "Letters To A Young Poet", written at the beginning of the 20th century in response to one of his fans who wrote to him asking about the lifestyle of a poet. In that same vein, Weigel's book discusses the Catholic lifestyle. While Rilke wrote his letters in poetic verse, Weigel writes in a more journalistic tone, fitting since he has a syndicated newspaper column, "The Catholic Difference".
Weigel takes his readers on a journey through the Catholic world, starting with American Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor's Georgia home and travelling all over the world until ending in Krakow, Poland-- the home of Pope John Paul II.
Here is one of my favorite excerpts from "Letters To A Young Catholic" about the Catholic worldview that I hope you enjoy!

"'If you live today, you breathe in nihilism... it's the gas you breathe,' wrote Flannery O'Connor; 'if I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest locical positivist you ever say right now.' So, I expect, would I. So, perhaps, would you. So here's one more way to think about Catholicism and its distinctive optic on the world and on us: Catholicism is an antidote to nihilism. And by 'nihilism', I mean, not the sour dark, often violent nihilism of Neitzsche and Sartre, but what my friend, the late Father Ernest Fortin (who borrowed the term from his friend, Alan Bloom), used to call 'debonair nihilism': the nihilism that enjoys itself on its way to oblivion, convinced that all of this-- the world, us, relationships, sex, beauty, history-- is really just a cosmic joke. Against the nihilist claim that nothing is really of consequence, Catholicism insists that everything is of consequence, because everything has been redeemed by Christ.
And, if you believe that, it changes the way you see things. It changes the way everything looks. Here is Flannery O'Connor again, refelecting on the Catholic difference in her own artistic and spiritual life, and that of fellow author Caroline Gordon Tate:
I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything. I am a born Catholic, went to Catholic schools in my early years, and have never left or wanted to leave the Church. I have never had the sense that being a Catholic is a limit to the freedom of the writer, but just the reverse. Mrs. Tate told me that after she became a Catholic, she felt she could use her eyes and accept what she saw for the first time, she didn't have to make a new universe for each book but could take the one she found.

To be sure, Catholicism wants to change the world, primarily by converting it. At the same time, Catholicism takes the world as it is-- Catholicism tries to convert this world, not some other world or some other humanity of our imagining-- because God took the world as it is. God didn't create a different world to redeem; God, in the person of His Son, redeemed the world he had created, which is a world of freedom in which our decisions have real consequences, for good and for evil."


From "Letters To A Young Catholic" by George Weigel, pages 13-14.

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