Our friendship and collaboration began in the early 1990s, when Herb Schlossberg, the evangelical author, buttonholed me at a Washington reception and expressed concern about the ongoing fracture between Catholics and evangelical Protestants, two communities that Herb thought should be working together to shore up America’s public culture. I mentioned Herb’s concern to Richard John Neuhaus; Neuhaus called Colson; and within a matter of months “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” was born.

What began as co-belligerency in the American culture-war soon evolved in ways none of us had anticipated. Led by Neuhaus and Colson, and prodded by such towering intellects as Avery Dulles, S.J., and J. I. Packer, “ECT,” as we called it, developed into what was arguably the most important theological encounter ever between evangelical Protestant and Catholics. Issues that we had once imagined completely off-the-table—Mary; the communion of saints; justification—were not only broached but examined, pondered and prayed over. And the result was not only a deepening of fellowship but a refinement of thought. That a leading evangelical theologian should today be working on a book on Mary-for-evangelicals says something about the miles traveled, and the centuries of misunderstanding bridged, in those conversations.

ECT returned to the culture-wars in 2010, this time in defense of religious freedom. And just before Chuck Colson died, the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty commended and cited the ECT statement, “In Defense of Religious Freedom,” that Chuck had helped push to completion.

Life with Chuck Colson also involved adventures. My favorite took place in Rome, about 10 years ago. At a conference held in the old Synod Hall of the Apostolic Palace I ran into Colson, who asked if I might do him a favor. Obviously, I replied. Well, Chuck said, he had met John Paul II on several occasions, but his wife, Patty, a Catholic, had never met the pope and would be ecstatic if that could be arranged. Nothing easier, I said—at which point Chuck asked if he could bring along another Major Evangelical Figure (as I shall discretely style him) and his wife. No problem, said I.

So Patty Colson, Chuck, Major Evangelical Figure, and Mrs. Major Evangelical Figure met John Paul II, and Chuck called me the night of the general audience to express his thanks. I then asked if he thought a picture of the encounter in the English edition of L’Osservatore Romano would serve our common ecumenical purposes. Chuck, initially enthusiastic, then got cautious: “Wait; I’d better check with (Major Evangelical Figure).” The next day I got another phone call from Chuck: “Don’t do anything. The pope was sitting when he received us, and (Major Evangelical Figure’s) picture was taken when he was down on one knee in front of the pope. He’s afraid his fundraising will collapse if that picture gets out!” I laughed, assured him that I would abandon any idea of having the photo run in the Vatican newspaper—and reflected on the still-supple political instincts of a man who found his true vocation only after being driven out of politics.

Chuck knew the threat Major Evangelical Figure feared: at the beginning of our common work, Colson’s leadership in ECT cost Prison Fellowship, the marvelous ministry he founded, millions of dollars in lost donations. Chuck took the hit and soldiered on because he believed that the truth of Christ would prevail, eventually, over hardened hearts. It was a conviction he came to him from hard personal experience. And it made him one of the great Christian witnesses of our time.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

The hegemony of the historical-critical method of biblical study has taught two generations of Catholics that the Bible is too complicated for ordinary people to understand: so why read what only savants can grasp? Inept preaching, dissecting the biblical text with historical-critical scalpels or reducing Scripture to a psychology manual, has also been a turn-off to Bible-study. Then there is the clunkiness of the New American Bible, the pedestrian translation to which U.S. Catholics are subjected in the liturgy: there is little beauty here, and the beauty of God’s Word ought to be one of its most attractive attributes.

Credit: salon.com

But it was not until I read “Our Babel of Bibles” by Baylor University’s David Lyle Jeffrey, published in the March/April 2012 issue ofTouchstone, that I began to understand that the proliferation of modern biblical translations and editions is also part of the problem. Not only are there a plethora of different translations from which to choose; as Dr. Jeffrey points out, there are now “niche” Bibles:

“If you are tired of your mother’s old Bible, which printed the words of Jesus in red, you can choose a more trendy Green Bible, with all the eco-sensitive passages printed in green ink. If you are a feisty woman unfazed by possibly misdirected allusions, then maybe you would like the Woman Thou Art Loosed edition of the NKJB (New King James Bible). If you should be a high-end of the TV-channel charismatic, there are ‘prophecy Bibles’ coded in several colors to justify your eschatology of choice.”

And that’s before we get to the super-trendy editions like the Common English Bible, which renders Psalm 122:1 (“I was glad when they said unto me/Let us go to the Lord’s house”) as “Let’s go to the Lord’s house.” This is not just dumb;  as Dr. Jeffrey points out, is also “verges on a grotesque secularism at the level of ‘Let’s go to Joe’s place – he has the biggest TV.’” And lest you think Jeffrey exaggerates, please note that the CEB renders “Son of Man” as “the Human One.” Yuck.

Dr. Jeffrey’s dissection of our Bible Babel also makes an important point about the use of sacral vocabulary, noting that Venerable Bede and the other first translators of the Bible into Anglo-Saxon understood the limits of their own vernacular and borrowed words from Latin to express what the biblical text meant. A minor point? Not really, because these words came into English that way: alms, altar, angel, anthem, apostle, ark, canticle, chalice, creed, deacon, demon, disciple, epistle, hymn, manna, martyr, priest, prophet, psalm, Psalter, rule, Sabbath, shrift, and temple. Later in the process of making English English, more words entered our language via the Vulgate: absolution, baptism, beatitude, charity, communion, confession, confession, contrition, creator, crucifixion, devotion, faith, homily, mercy, miracle, obedience, passion, pastor, penance, religion, sacrament, saint, sanctuary, savior, temptation, theology, trinity, virgin, and virtue.

All of which is an answer to those who fretted that Anglophone Catholics couldn’t handle “consubstantial” in the new translations of the Roman Missal. As Dr. Jeffrey writes, “What would have happened if someone had said, in that time and place, ‘We just have to find dynamic equivalents in Anglo-Saxon?’ There weren’t any. Appropriately, the first translators were not intimidated by the prospect of teaching people the meaning of biblical and sacral terms not to be found anywhere in their ordinary language. They gratefully borrowed the language of Scripture as they found it in another tongue.”

What to do today? My suggestion is to get yourself the Ignatius Press edition of the Revised Standard Version, and read it over and over again until its language works its way into the crevices of your mind and the texture of your prayer. Maybe, some day, we can hear that translation at Mass.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

Cover Photo Credit: livingtext.wordpress.com

I dug out “Pugin”—stuck among the oversized art books in my home library for the better part of two decades—when I learned that 2012 is the bicentenary of Augustine Welby Northmore Pugin, pioneer of the Gothic Revival style and one of the aesthetic geniuses of the 19th century. Best known for his work on the Palace of Westminster (home of the Houses of Parliament), Pugin was also an ecclesiastical architect of note, with almost 50 churches to his credit. And although the Luftwaffe and the Blitz wrecked what may have been his masterwork of church design, the Cathedral of St. George in Southwark, there are still Pugin churches to be admired throughout Great Britain, Ireland and Australia.

As I suggested at the top, however, Pugin’s genius was not limited to architecture and other grand schemes of design. He also worked magic on a much smaller scale: custom-designed wallpaper; magnificent pieces of furniture (dining-room cabinets, armoires, tables, desks and tables); beautifully intricate ceramic tiles, plates, and dinner and tea services—all of them a delight to the eyes.

Born on March 1, 1812, Pugin was received into the Catholic Church in 1835, and his passion for the Gothic (by which he meant, not hair-raising horror novels but the civilization of the Middle Ages and its distinctive aesthetic) was obviously enmeshed with his religious convictions. For the Gothic, as Pugin understood it, communicated even more than that sense of transcendence that is palpable in a great medieval cathedral like Chartres. The Gothic bespoke a sensibility about this world, the human place in it, and the moral life appropriate to men and women made in the image and likeness of God. Buildings tell us something about the people who live, work and worship in them, Pugin, believed: they tell us what those people think of themselves, their destiny and their responsibilities.

Thus in an 1836 polemic, Pugin, arguing on behalf of the Gothic Revival to which he and Sir Charles Barry gave noblest expression in the Palace of Westminster, contrasted a medieval monastery with a 19th-century poorhouse. The monastery, Pugin noted, was a place where the monks grew their own food, made their own clothes, shared what they grew and made with others, and offered the poor a decent place to be buried. Compare this, Pugin wrote, to “a panopticon workhouse where the poor were beaten, half-starved, and sent off after death for dissection. Each structure was the built expression of a particular view of humanity: Christianity versus Utilitarianism.”

Considering which, we may well hope that the Department of Health and Human Services never gets into the architecture business.

Pugin’s magnificent ecclesiastical architecture and church decoration, like the extraordinary interiors he designed for the Palace of Westminster, were, to adapt Blessed John Paul II, material exercises in philosophical anthropology—expressions of an idea of the human person. Pugin’s churches were built for people whose baptism had given them a unique dignity: through the eternal priesthood of Christ, exercised through the ordained ministry of the Church, the baptized were empowered to offer true worship to the Father. The same was true of the Houses of Parliament. They were designed by Barry and Pugin to reflect the dignity of self-governance among free citizens, whose participation in public affairs was another expression of their innate human dignity.

Churches that look like Pizza Huts are expressions of a dumbed-down theology and (if you’ll pardon the word twice in one column) anthropology. On Pugin’s bicentenary, the Church might well reflect on how it can do better than that.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

The Congresswoman’s appeal was specifically Catholic—“my Church, the Catholic Church, needs to speak out loud on this issue”—which involved an irony left wholly unexamined by CNS. For Rosa DeLauro’s voting record is in some tension, to put it gently, with Catholic understandings of justice.

The Catholic Church teaches the inalienable right to life of the unborn and insists that that obvious moral truth be acknowledged in law; Rep. DeLauro is a consistent pro-abortion vote in the House. The Catholic Church worked with the District of Columbia education authorities to provide “opportunity scholarships” to Catholic inner-city schools for poor children; Rep. DeLauro supported the Obama administration’s cruel refusal to fund that program. The bishops have declared that religious freedom is under serious assault in the United States today; the gentlewoman from Connecticut has been notably AWOL in defending the first of American liberties.

How, then does Congresswoman DeLauro imagine herself as someone who speaks for “my Church, the Catholic Church?”  My hunch is that she imagines herself a spokesperson for authentic Catholicism because she, like many other Catholics on the port side of both American politics and the Church, have long thought that they alone hold the high ground at the intersection of Catholic social teaching and public policy.

Memo to Congresswoman DeLauro and friends: Those days are over.

They’re over because four decades of intellectual and political work, coupled with extensive care for women in crisis pregnancies, have made the pro-life cause the cultural marker of serious Catholicism in America.

They’re over because much of the Catholic left has obstinately refused to promote religious freedom in full and the inalienable right to life as priority social justice issues.

And they’re over because contemporary history has vindicated Catholicism’s anti-statist social justice principle, subsidiarity.

The impending fiscal meltdown of European welfare states vindicates subsidiarity by making clear that providing necessary aid to those in genuine need means, among other measures, developing the associational and charitable instincts of civil society. The alternative is state bankruptcy and social chaos.

Then there is Obamacare, which flatly contradicts subsidiarity and its principled rejection of vast concentrations of state power—the dangers of which are amply demonstrated by the coercive HHS “contraceptive mandate.” The universal health care the Church rightly seeks must be accomplished by means other than handing over one-sixth of the economy (and critical medical decisions) to unregulated regulators.

These home truths are bad news for Rosa DeLauro and those of her persuasion. Now, to make matters worse, here is Paul Ryan, a congressman of uncommon intelligence who can ably argue the public policy implications of Catholic social doctrine and who understands that what the Church asks of a just society is the empowerment of the poor: breaking the cycle of welfare dependency and unleashing the creativity the Church believes God builds into every human soul.

Paul Ryan is the Catholic left’s worst nightmare and his demonization from that quarter has just begun. Ryan is a big boy, though, and he’ll fight his corner well. That argument might even lead to some consensus about empowerment-based anti-poverty strategies and fiscally responsible social welfare policies among serious Catholics of both political parties.

Rather than being a megaphone for dissenting Catholics posing as authentic representatives of the Church and hyperventilating about people being “eviscerated” by a budget, might CNS help provide a level playing field for the debate?

“What if…? questions involve more than politics, of course. What if the apostles had turned right rather than left on leaving the Holy Land, so that Christianity was first “inculturated” in a civilization (India) lacking the Greek principle of non-contradiction: Could the Church have developed a doctrinal architecture if Christianity had first been planted in a culture where something could both “be” and “not be”?

Then there is the great “What if….?” involving Christianity and China, of which I’ve only become aware, thanks to a November 2011 lecture by the distinguished historian, Hugh Thomas, published in the March 2012 issue of the British journal Standpoint.

According to Lord Thomas, a combination of Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, led by a remarkable character named Lopez de Legazpi, proposed to use the new Spanish colony of the Philippines as the launch-pad for a Spanish and Christian takeover of China—an ambition they styled la empresa de China, “the China project.” The “project” fired the imaginations of Legazpi’s successors, who pressed the Spanish monarch, Philip II, for permission to bring China under Spanish control. Philip, whom Hugh Thomas styles “the Great Procrastinator,” dithered, being preoccupied with rebellion in the Spanish Netherlands, and eventually cooled to the idea.

True to the original Ignatian charism, the fires of evangelical (and political) ambition were rekindled by a Jesuit, Alonso Sanchez, who went to China in 1582 and returned to the Philippines determined to revive la empresa de China. It would not be a walkover, Father Sanchez conceded; but he thought 8,000 men and 12 galleons could do the job.

And what a job it would be. For Sanchez and his supporters imagined a China filled with Christian universities and monasteries as well as Spanish forts, a China in which the Spaniards would intermarry with Chinese women (“serious, honest, retiring … and usually of great grace, beauty and discretion”) to form a new mestizo race that would be thoroughly Catholic, and from whose numbers the Gospel would then come (along with Spanish hegemony, of course) to India, Southeast Asia, Borneo, the Moluccas and Sumatra.

Yet the Great Procrastinator in the Escorial continued to, well, procrastinate, and the defeat of the Invincible Armada by Howard and Drake in 1588 gave Philip II even more reason to dither about schemes of conquest and conversion in the Far East. Eventually, as Lord Thomas concludes, “nothing was done.” The plan was never explicitly rejected. Philip II simply let it die of inattention, as consummate bureaucrats know how to do.

But what if Philip had forged ahead—and succeeded? In the 1990 encyclical, “Redemptoris Missio” (“The Mission of the Redeemer”), John Paul II, noting that the great failure of Christian mission in the first two millennia had been in East Asia, urged that the mission ad gentes (the mission to the nations) be focused on Asia in the third millennium. But what if China had been evangelized in the 17th century and had subsequently developed a vibrant form of Catholicism that blended the best of European and Chinese talents and personalities? Might the mission ad gentes, in the third millennium, be one in which this Euro-Asian Catholicism re-evangelized the religiously arid societies of Old Europe? Might we be speculating about a Chinese pope, not as something fantastic, but as something obvious?

Hugh Thomas is old-fashioned enough to lament a lost religious, cultural and geopolitical opportunity: “Christianity did not, alas, become the dominant religion of China as it had become in New Spain.” “What if” it had, merits a moment’s speculation.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

Now, in the course of promoting the “NIV Lessons for Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter,” the 39th president (who promised a government as good as the American people and delivered an administration as inept as the St. Louis Browns) takes on the mantle of biblical scholar, dipping into such knotty questions as the inerrancy of the Bible and the proper methods of biblical interpretation.

The results are not pretty. In the course of an interview promoting the Carter Bible, the former chief executive allowed as how the Bible was written “by human beings deprived of modern-day knowledge,” opined that there is “some fallibility in the writings of the Bible,” and offered his endorsement of same-sex “marriage,” which he implied would be Jesus’s view of things, the Lord having “never said a word about homosexuality.” Such Carterisms are, perhaps, not surprising, given the former president’s previously expressed views that the “mandated subservience of women by Christian fundamentalists” contributes to the practice of female genital mutilation by Islamists, and that pro-lifers “do not extend their concern to the baby who is born.”

Obviously, the Georgian sage has never quite grasped the moral-theological concept of calumny.

But now he has taken to reinventing history.

I was on the north lawn of the White House in October 1979 when a beaming Jimmy Carter welcomed Pope John Paul II to the Executive Mansion, the trademark presidential teeth amply displayed as the Baptist Sunday school teacher gave the 264th Bishop of Rome a two-handed handshake. All seemed sweetness and light. But not so, Carter avers. Now he says he had a harsh exchange over the “pope’s perpetuation of the subservience of women,” after which the two locked horns on liberation theology. John Paul’s adherence to settled Catholic doctrine, Carter charges, made him a kind of “fundamentalist,” a category of Bad People who, Carter has written, “are often angry and sometimes resort to verbal or even physical abuse against those who interfere with the implementation of their agenda.”

No doubt Carter, mercifully retired from the White House by the time of the pope’s visit to Nicaragua in 1983, expected the “fundamentalist” John Paul II to punch out Ernesto Cardenal on the tarmac at the Managua airport.

In the hands of a theological illiterate like Jimmy Carter, “fundamentalism”is a “Gotcha!” word that substitutes flatulence for thought. Blessed John Paul II was no more a “fundamentalist” than the mid-20th century Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Carter once claimed as an influence—an avowal that doubtless had Reinie spinning in his grave, for there were few, if any, modern American political figures less Niebuhrian than Carter. Indeed, Carter’s self-regard is the very inversion of the Niebuhrian ethic, which taught a healthy skepticism about anyone’s righteousness, not least one’s own.

H.L. Mencken, the bad boy of Baltimore journalism in the Roaring Twenties, once suggested, tongue firmly in cheek, that all failed candidates for president should be quietly hanged, so that their further maunderings would not upset the young. One can only imagine what Mencken (who used to deride the sanctimonious President Wilson as “the Archangel Woodrow”) would say about condign punishment for Jimmy Carter. In any case, Mr. Carter would do us all a great favor if he would lay off theology and exegesis. Like foreign policy, these are disciplines manifestly beyond his capabilities.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

In this prophetic and symbolic act, Ravasi writes, Jesus draws a sharp contrast between a religion of superficiality and self-absorption and a pure faith, centered on his person. God can no longer be present in a Temple that has ceased to be a place of encounter, the “meeting tent” of the ancient Hebrews; that Temple, however magnificently constructed, had become a place of superstition and self-interest. In cleansing the Temple, Jesus is declaring that God is now present to his people in a new and perfect way and in a new “meeting tent”: the incarnate Son, “the Word … made flesh” who dwells among us, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). He, Jesus, is the new Temple, and to recognize that and live in this new mode of the divine Presence one must “remember,” as St. John writes at the end of the Temple-cleansing story (2:22).

And remember what? Remember Easter. Remember the Resurrection. Through the prism of that extraordinary event that changed both history and nature, everything comes into clearer focus. Only a mature, paschal faith—an Easter faith—can perceive who Jesus is, understand what Jesus taught, and grasp what Jesus has accomplished by his obedience to the Father. Only in the power of this paschal “memory,” Cardinal Ravasi concludes, can we recognize that Jesus is the Christ, the Holy One of God.

Easter faith—the faith which proclaims that “he … rose again on the third day”—is not one article of Christian conviction among others. As St. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 15, Easter faith is that conviction on which the entire edifice of Christianity is built. Without Easter, nothing makes sense and Jesus is a false prophet, even a maniac. With Easter, all that has been obscure about his life, his teaching, his works and his fate becomes radiantly clear: this Risen One is the “first-born among many brethren” (Rom 8:29); he is the new Temple (Rev 21:22); and by embracing him we enter the dwelling place of God among us (Rev 21:3).

In the Gospel readings of the Easter Octave, the Church annually remembers the utterly unprecedented nature of the paschal event, and how it exploded expectations of what God’s decisive action in history would be. No one gets it, at first; for what has happened bursts the previous limits of human understanding. The women at the empty tomb don’t understand, and neither do Peter and John. The disciples on the road to Emmaus do not understand until they encounter the Risen One in the Eucharist, the great gift of paschal life, offered by the new Temple, the divine Presence, himself. At one encounter with the Risen Lord, the Eleven think they’re seeing a ghost; later, up along the Sea of Galilee, it takes awhile for Peter and John to recognize that “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7).  These serial episodes of incomprehension, carefully recorded by the early Church, testify to the shattering character of Easter, which changed everything: the first disciples’ understanding of history, of life-beyond-death, of worship and its  relationship to time (thus Sunday, the day of Easter, becomes the Sabbath of the New Covenant).

Easter also changed the first disciples’ understanding of themselves and their responsibilities. They were the privileged ones who must keep alive the memory of Easter: in their preaching, in their baptizing and breaking of bread, and ultimately in the new Scriptures they wrote. They were the ones who must take the Gospel of the Risen One to “all nations,” in the sure knowledge that he would be with them always (Matt 28:19-20).

They were to “be transformed” (Rom 12:2). So are we.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

As the talismanic year 2000 approached, and like virtually every other talking head and scribe in the world, I was asked what I thought the history-changing scientific discoveries of the 20th-century had been. And like the rest of the commentariat, I answered, “splitting the atom (which unleashed atomic energy for good or ill) and unraveling the DNA double-helix (which launched the new genetics and the new biotechnology).” Today, after a decade of pondering why the West is committing slow-motion demographic suicide through self-induced infertility, I would add a third answer: the invention of the oral contraceptive, “the Pill.”

With insight, verve and compassion, “Adam and Eve after the Pill” explores the results of what Mary Eberstadt bluntly describes as the “optional and intentional sterility in women” the Pill has made possible for three generations. A careful analysis of empirical studies, plus a close reading of literary sources, leads Eberstadt to conclude that the “human fallout of our post-Pill world” has been severe. How? “First, and contrary to conventional depiction, the sexual revolution (which the Pill made possible) has proved a disaster for many men and women; and second, its weight has fallen heaviest on the smallest and weakest shoulders in society—even as it has given extra strength to those already strongest and most predatory.”

Elite culture has been in comprehensive denial about this fallout, argues Eberstadt—a claim reinforced in February by the lynch mob that attacked the Susan G. Komen foundation for daring to hold Planned Parenthood to account for monies Komen had donated to PP (chief guardian of the flame of the sexual revolution) and which PP had misused. Such public quarrels, however, touch the surface of the cultural implosion that followed widespread use of the Pill. Weaving her way through the social sciences and literature with equal dexterity, Mary Eberstadt digs deeper and describes the human costs of the sexual revolution: the “pervasive themes of anger and loss that underlie much of today’s writing on romance;” the “new and problematic phase of prolonged adolescence through which many men now go”; the social and personal psychological harm caused by the availability of pornography on a historically unprecedented scale; the “assault unleashed from the 1960s onward on the taboo against sexual seduction or exploitation of the young”; and the “feral rates of date rapes, hookups and binge drinking now documented on many campuses” (the direct result of a sexual revolution that has “empowered and largely exonerated predatory men as never before”).

“Adam and Eve after the Pill” also explores the cultural weirdness that has followed the Pill’s inversion of classic western and Judaeo-Christian values; in a particularly insightful chapter, Eberstadt analyzes the food taboos that have replaced discarded sexual taboos. The book ends with a telling, if ironic, judgment on the long-term impact of the 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae”: “one of the most reviled documents of modern times, the Catholic Church’s reiteration of traditional Christian moral teaching, would also turn out to be the most prophetic in its understanding of the nature of the changes that the (sexual) revolution would ring in.”

Contrary to what you read in the papers, the “birth control debate” isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel’s column is distributed by theDenver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3215.

That historian’s-eye view of the contemporary scene and its antecedents in the immediate past, linked to a deep insight into the meaning of Vatican II and the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, produced a remarkable speech to the College of Cardinals on Feb. 17, the day before Dolan received his red hat. Like everything else Cardinal Dolan does, his speech that day was delivered with brio, and it was that bubbling energy that got most of the press attention. Yet Dolan’s key proposal—that the Church is entering a new phase of its history—was a bold one, and may set the terms of discussion for the Church of the future:

“As John Paul II taught in ‘Redemptoris Missio,’ the Church does not ‘have a mission,’ as if ‘mission’ were one of many things the Church does.

“No, the Church is a mission, and each us of who names Jesus as Lord and Savior should measure ourselves by our mission-effectiveness. Over the 50 years since the convocation of the Council, we have seen the Church pass through the last stages of the Counter-Reformation and rediscover itself as a missionary enterprise. In some venues, this has meant a new discovery of the Gospel. In once-catechized lands, it has meant a re-evangelization that sets out from the shallow waters of institutional maintenance, and as John Paul II instructed us in ‘Novo Millennio Ineunte,’ puts out ‘into the deep’ for a catch. In many of the countries represented in this college, the ambient public culture once transmitted the Gospel, but does so no more. In those circumstances, the proclamation of the Gospel—the deliberate invitation to enter into friendship with the Lord Jesus—must be at the very center of the Catholic life of all of our people. But in all circumstances, the Second Vatican Council and the two great popes who have given it an authoritative interpretation are calling us to call our people to think of themselves as missionaries and evangelists.”

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the convocation of Vatican II, which will be marked on Oct. 11, the Church should remember that Blessed John XXIII wanted the Second Vatican Council to be a new Pentecost: a moment to re-experience the freshness of the Gospel and the burning desire to share the Good News that animated the first Christians. Blessed John Paul II, a man of the Council, called the Church to a similar encounter with the fire of the Holy Spirit: he led the Church through the Pentecostal experience of the Great Jubilee of 2000 so that we might come to know ourselves again as a Church in mission, a Church for mission. By inviting us into friendship with Jesus Christ, who is always our contemporary, Benedict XVI, another man of the Council, has given that mission a personal and holy face: the face of the Lord, who reveals to us both the countenance of the Merciful Father and the truth about our humanity.

The Second Vatican Council, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have invited us to Galilee, that we might go out from there to the ends of the earth, bringing the Gospel of God’s passionate love for humanity to a world yearning for truth. Cardinal Dolan’s address to the college of cardinals was an extended and moving reminder that everyone in the Church must ask for the grace and strength to accept that invitation to Galilee: to be the witnesses to Christ that all of us were baptized to be.

In one of a slew of diamond jubilee books, author Robert Hardman reports that Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is awed by the Queen’s “gravitas.” One hopes it’s catching, even as one hopes that people understand why, as one of Her Majesty’s friends puts it, “she is never, you know, not the Queen.” It’s not a matter of Victorian formality and still less of arrogance. Rather, it’s that the Queen thinks of her unique position as a vocation—a responsibility for which she was consecrated at her coronation on June 2, 1953.

The character of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was forged in the fires of World War II, when she learned the meaning of duty from her father, King George VI, and her mother, later the Queen Mother Elizabeth, whose name she bears. (Something of the steel in the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon may be grasped in her response to the suggestion that the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, be evacuated to Canada to escape the Nazi Blitz and a possible German invasion: “The children won’t go without me. I won’t go without the King. And the King will never leave.”) The teenage Princess Elizabeth played her part in Britain’s finest hour, doing the occasional radio broadcast and joining the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she was trained as a driver and mechanic. The quiet stoicism and sense of composure she learned in those days have been powerful assets these past 60 years, even if they weren’t appreciated by the media lynch-mob in the immediate aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Whatever one’s theological opinion of the “sacring” of British monarchs, it’s quite clear from the pictures of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation that this was a young woman—by then a wife and mother—who thought of herself as being anointed, blessed and crowned for a task to which she must sacrifice her own life, for the sake of her people. Yes, Queen Elizabeth II is enormously wealthy and yes, she has lived a life in which she has been spared much of the drudgery that afflicts other mortals. But anyone who does not think that Elizabeth II has made sacrifices in living out her monarchical vocation doesn’t know much about how public life works these days—or how this remarkable woman understands herself.

Queen Elizabeth’s sense of duty is not generic; it is specifically Christian. That is clear from her annual Christmas broadcasts, the one time each year she speaks to her people in something resembling her own voice. (The annual Throne Speech in Parliament is written entirely by her government.) The 2011 Christmas address was particularly memorable. In it, the Queen talked simply, movingly and profoundly about the meaning of the birth of Jesus for humanity, and about the Christian virtues of forgiveness, compassion and magnanimity. I watched the address and thought, perhaps uncharitably, that there had been few better Christmas homilies preached that day between Land’s End and the Pentland Firth. And it “worked” because it came from the heart—a heart formed by Christian conviction.

Elizabeth II is said to be “low Church” in her Anglican sensibility, but that is of considerably less importance than the fact that she is a genuine Christian who is not afraid to bear witness to the truth of Christ as she has been given to understand it. The future is never certain, but on the present form sheet it seems unlikely that this admirable facet of Queen Elizabeth’s way of exercising her role as sovereign will be replicated in successor generations. Britain, and the world, will be poorer for that.

Still, and on the same form sheet, we may wish for many more years of her company. So on this diamond jubilee, I say, with heartfelt respect, “God Save the Queen.”