Witness to Hope Quotes

“Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom. The life of Karol Wojtyła and his accomplishment as Pope John Paul II suggest a dramatic, alternative possibility: that a man who has been seized and transformed by the “more excellent way” can bend the curve of history so that freedom’s cause is advanced.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“The crucial issue of the times, he suggested, was the human person: a unique being, who lived in a material world but had intense spiritual longings, a mystery to himself and to others, a creature whose dignity emerged from an interior life imprinted with the image and likeness of God. The world wanted to hear what the Church had to say about the human person and the human condition, particularly in light of other proposals—“scientific, positivist, dialectical”—that imagined themselves humanistic and presented themselves as roads to liberation. At the end of 2,000 years of Christian history, the world had a question to put to the Church: What was Christian humanism and how was it different from the sundry other humanisms on offer in late modernity? What was the Church’s answer to modernity’s widespread “despair [about] any and all human existence”?”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“The ability to love authentically, not great intellectual capacity, constitutes the deepest part of a personality. It is no accident that the greatest commandment is to love. Authentic love leads us outside ourselves to affirming others: devoting oneself to the cause of man, to people, and, above all, to God. Marriage makes sense…if it gives one the opportunity for such love, if it evokes the ability and necessity of such loving, if it draws one out of the shell of individualism (various kinds) and egocentrism. It is”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“young—never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which you’re capable, with the help of God’s grace.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“If moral relativism was legally absolutized in the name of tolerance, basic rights were also relativized and the door was open to totalitarianism.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Concerns about democracy’s future are better directed elsewhere, John Paul argues, for if “there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“beings can only be free in the truth,”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Love, for Karol Wojtyła, was the truth at the very center of the human condition, and love always meant self-giving, not self-assertion.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Love is not “fulfilling” oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“La castidad es la “integración del amor", la virtud que hace posible amar a otro como persona. El amor sexual casto es extático, en el sentido original griego del éxtasis, que es el de ser transportado al "exterior" de uno mismo. El amor casto implica poner el centro emocional de uno mismo y, en cierto sentido, nuestro propio ser, al cuidado del otro. Nos ha hecho criaturas libres, de modo que podemos disponer de nosotros mismos para donarnos a los demás.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Cardinal Wojtyła and one of his auxiliary bishops, Juliusz Groblicki, clandestinely ordained priests for service in Czechoslovakia, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Holy See had forbidden underground bishops in that country to perform such ordinations. The clandestine ordinations in Kraków were always conducted with the explicit permission of the candidate’s superior—his bishop or, in the case of members of religious orders, his provincial. Security systems had to be devised. In the case of the Salesian Fathers, a torn-card system was used. The certificate authorizing the ordination was torn in half. The candidate, who had to be smuggled across the border, brought one half with him to Kraków, while the other half was sent by underground courier to the Salesian superior in Kraków. The two halves were then matched, and the ordination could proceed in the archbishop’s chapel at Franciszkańska, 3.

Cardinal Wojtyła did not inform the Holy See of these ordinations. He did not regard them as acts in defiance of Vatican policy, but as a duty to suffering fellow believers. And he presumably did not wish to raise an issue that could not be resolved without pain on all sides. He may also have believed that the Holy See and the Pope knew that such things were going on in Kraków, trusted his judgment and discretion, and may have welcomed a kind of safety valve in what was becoming an increasingly desperate situation.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“religious conviction, and the truths Christianity teaches about the inalienable dignity of every human life, can be a dynamic, creative force, bending history in a more human direction.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“The very question of who counts as a human being is now being debated in a way our grandparents could not imagine. Is a cloned human being a member of the human community? What about the socially unproductive and the inconvenient, the gravely handicapped, the elderly, the unborn? If the question, “What are these putative people good for?” is the only question our cultures and our laws recognize, then we really are living in Aldous Huxley’s brave new world, and tyranny cannot be far around the corner.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“He is an intellectual who is unbeholden to the shibboleths of the professoriat and who has a deep appreciation for untutored popular piety.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“He is arguably the most well-informed man in the world, yet he rarely reads newspapers.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“but he has never played the demagogue.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Karol Wojtyła, the disciple who was a product of the Church in the modern world, not of the Roman bureaucracy.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“the crisis of the modern world was first of all a crisis of ideas, a crisis in the very idea of the human person. History was driven by culture and the ideas that formed cultures. Ideas had consequences. And if the idea of the human person that dominated a culture was flawed, one of two things would happen. Either that culture would give birth to destructive aspirations, or it would be incapable of realizing its fondest hopes, even if it expressed them in the most nobly humanistic terms.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“a world where yesterday’s classmate and fellow altar server becomes tomorrow’s martyr to the firing squads.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II