George Weigel Defends Americanism: Again.

Once again George Weigel proposes something for the reasonable consideration of Roman Catholics in the USA. He banks on the fact that most Americans are unaware of what was at stake when the Masonic Garibaldi finally triumphed over the Papal forces to unify Italy in that fateful year of 1870, while the Prussians trounced the French further north, and he does not fail to disappoint in that he adds more confusion than clarity in the bargain while running rough shod over Church teaching in the bargain. In his latest article for the National Review he says, after piling some well deserved abuse on the Masonic republics that have ruled Italy since 1870, that the Church somehow benefited from the loss of its temporal power. He even gets a few licks in on the old Soviet Union, continuing to try to convince us that Communism was overcome and that John Paul II had something to do with it. Perhaps what he's selling is favored with a few in the modern Papacy, but his verbiage would have been regarded unfavorably by sensible churchmen before 1965.

Weigel is aware of these things, but he explains sentences like this away by an appeal to a historical argument, suggesting a decided Modernist cant to his daring do.

76. The abolition of the temporal power of which the Apostolic See is possessed would contribute in the greatest degree to the liberty and prosperity of the Church. —Allocutions "Quibus quantisque," April 20, 1849, "Si semper antea," May 20, 1850. (Condemned as error).

He even makes a citation of good old Evelyn Waugh writing in his Sword of Honor, citing the incomparable Norman, Guy Crouchback:

News of the King’s flight came on the day the brigade landed at Salerno. It brought Guy some momentary exhilaration.

“That looks like the end of the Piedmontese usurpation,” he said to his father. “What a mistake the Lateran Treaty was. It seemed masterly at the time — how long? Fifteen years ago? What are 15 years in the history of Rome? How much better it would have been if the Popes had sat it out and then emerged, saying, ‘What was all that? Risorgimento? Garibaldi? Cavour? The House of Savoy? Mussolini? Just some hooligans from out of town causing a disturbance. Come to think of it, wasn’t there a poor boy whom they called King of Rome?’ That’s what the Pope ought to be saying today.”

Mr. Crouchback regarded his son sadly. “My dear boy,” he said, “you’re really talking the most terrible nonsense, you know. That isn’t what the Church is like. It isn’t what she’s for.”

It's interesting reading, but is that really what Evelyn Waugh had in mind to reconcile the Papacy's concordat with Italy in 1933? He leaves this unanswered and proceeds on to defend the erroneous notion that the Papacy need not have had its temporal power, and that this temporal power was an impediment.

George Weigel is in love with the State, but like Frederick II of Prussia, he knows the importance of religion to the run of the mill out there, and he writes for them, he influences them in terms they appreciate and understand, even if he leads them down the wrong path in the end.

You can have the Church as the institution She claims to be, with the rules she's always had, or you can deny that she has those rights ascribed to her in the Syllabus of Errors, but you can't have it both ways. If you're not a Catholic of all times, you're not really a Catholic at all, you're just an apologist for Modernism and Freemasonry, which is what Weigel has always been. No friend of the Church is he.

Next thing you know, old George Weigel will be saying that the Church was wrong about there being no separation of Church and State, cheeky devil.

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