Pope Benedict, the Catholic Church and the Dignity of Man

I love this video from Monday:

George Weigel keeps his eye on the prize here. This is a good model of communicating in uncertain times, subtly and clearly communicating Gospel truth with fraternal love.

That’s what we’ve been trying to do with Catholic Voices USA — help people who love the Catholic Church do just that. (I talk with my sister in the project, Kim Daniels, about rebuilding a Catholic culture, too, here. And I talk with one of our brothers who inspired the idea here, Austen Ivereigh, one of the co-founders of Catholic Voices, which initiated in England, here. He is the author of a not-to-be-missed book, How to Defend the Church without Raising Your Voice.)

George’s MSNBC interview reminded me, too, of our own exchange upon the release of his new book — the book for our moment — Evangelical Catholicism:

LOPEZ: How does the sexual revolution have anything to do with the Incarnation of Christ? Does this assertion just feed the conventional notion that Catholics are obsessed with sex — specifically with saying no to it and taking all the fun out of it?

WEIGEL: In a culture of Abercrombie & Fitch ads, MTV, and HBO soft-porn channels, it’s rather a hoot to suggest that it’s the Catholic Church that’s obsessed with sex. The culture is obsessed with sex. But it’s a very weird kind of sex, a kind of disembodied sex, in which there is neither commitment nor fruitfulness. In that culture, the ancient Christian conviction that, as the Lutheran theologian Gilbert Meilaender once put it, Christians only make love with people to whom they’ve made promises can sound dreadfully old-hat. But is a life of one-night-standing really all there is?

The Catholic Church loves man. Lifts man up. And woman! You deserve better than what the world has come to expect. Women know that. Woman, we need you! Women, the world needs you!!