The most obvious is that Catholicism has barely begun to digest the teaching of Vatican II on the nature of the Church, the universal call to holiness, and the reform of the episcopate, the priesthood, consecrated life, and the lay vocation in the world. Until the dramatic change in Catholic self-understanding that Vatican II mandated is fully internalized and implemented—until the Church understands itself as a mission, not as an institution that has a mission (as one among many things it does)—there seems little sense in convening Vatican III.

One might also argue that another ecumenical council would be a distraction from the evangelical mission to which Vatican II called the Church, and especially the Church’s bishops. As it is, bishops spend far too much of their time in meetings. Would the preaching of the Gospel, which, according to Vatican II, is the first responsibility of bishops, be advanced by gathering the entire world episcopate into a global mega-meeting for three or four months of the year, over a period of years?

Then there’s the question of resources. Any Vatican III would cost vast sums of money: would such an expenditure be the best use of the Church’s resources? (As Father John O’Malley reports in “What Happened at Vatican II?,” one of the reasons Pope Paul VI was determined to conclude Vatican II in December 1965 was that the Council was simply costing too much.)

These are all good reasons why a general council would be a bad idea for the foreseeable future. But there’s another issue here, one that raises an intriguing question about any future council, no matter when it’s convened: Where could Vatican III (or Lateran VI, or Trent II, or Lyons III, or whatever-the-future-council-is called) possibly be held?

Vatican I (1869-70) met in one transept of St. Peter’s, because there were only 737 bishops attending. Some 2,800 bishops participated in the four sessions of Vatican II, which met in the fall months of 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965, although at any one session there were between 2,000 and 2,500 bishops present—and they filled the entire, vast nave of St. Peter’s, seated on bleachers built high above the basilica’s marble floor. Add the ecumenical observers, the Council periti (advisers), and other functionaries with access to the Council aula (as the reconfigured basilica was called), and St. Peter’s was packed full.

But today? At the end of 2009, the last year for which complete Church statistics are available, there were 5,065 Catholic bishops in the world. A general or “ecumenical” council is, by definition, one in which all bishops have the right to participate (Canon 339). Where would this throng of over 5,000 bishops, literally twice the size of the episcopate that attended the most jam-packed session of Vatican II, meet? It certainly couldn’t meet at St. Peter’s, or at any of the other Roman basilicas. Indeed, is there a Catholic church in the world that could readily accommodate more than 5,000 bishops, their advisors, the ecumenical observers, and all the others who would rightly claim at least some place in a council hall?

One wag to whom I mentioned this conundrum spoke of a future council as “Metroplex I,” with the Council Fathers, the observers, the advisers, the translators, and all the rest of the apparatus meeting in Cowboys Stadium, graciously donated for the occasion by Jerry Jones. Bad jokes aside, however, the fact that the world episcopate has doubled in number over the past 50 years raises important questions for the future. How can this large a body function as the episcopal “college” of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church? Is it possible to imagine a “virtual council,” or some other technological mechanism that would allow the world episcopate to meet as a whole?

There’s far more, literally, to any future council than typically meets the eye.

On the Solemnity of the Epiphany, I heard a sermon—a rather well-delivered one at that—about the Magi as religious “seekers.” The same note, I’ll wager, was struck from pulpits and ambos across the country, perhaps across the world.

But isn’t there something a bit askew here?

Isn’t the point of Matthew’s tale of the “wise men from the East” (Matthew 2:1) that they were finders, not just seekers? Moreover, isn’t the further point that what was found was “he who has been born king of the Jews,” to whom they, gentiles from afar, wished to offer gifts? Don’t we lose the evangelical thrust of this charming story of seers, stars and caravans, “gold and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11), when we focus on the seeking, not the finding, which was the first moment of messianic encounter with the gentile world (meaning most-of-us)?

I don’t want to overstate the indictment. All believers are “seekers,” in that we obey the prophet’s injunction to “seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isaiah 55:6). Still, the point is not about the seeking, but about the finding. More than two millennia after they trekked across the Levant following a star, the Magi are of interest—indeed, compelling interest—because of who awaited them at the end of their search: a Jewish child who would become the redeemer, not only of his own people, but of all people. If the Magi had wandered about Central Asia and the Middle East for decade after decade, they would be of little interest, save perhaps as chroniclers of ancient cultures. No, the point is that the Magi were religious finders, not just religious seekers. And what they found was the fulfillment of their search.

There’s another problem with our contemporary emphasis on religious “seeking:” it tends to miss the fundamental dynamic of biblical religion and to confuse faith in the God of the Bible with “spirituality.” Go through the “spirituality” section of an online bookstore or browse the “spirituality” stacks of an old-fashioned book shop, and you’ll find a lot about the human quest for God. That is not what biblical religion is about, however. Biblical religion is about God’s coming into history in search of us, and our learning to take the same path into the future that God is taking.

Abraham, whom the Roman Canon calls “our father in faith,” was not some generic spiritual seeker. Abraham, or Abram (as he then as), was a unique individual to whom God spoke disturbing and challenging words: Abram was to go on a journey to another land, led there by God, who was now entering history in a new and saving way. In that promised land, God would make of Abram, who would be re-named Abraham, a “great nation and … a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). Abram-become-Abraham was to follow God’s path through history. God has the salvific initiative; God comes in search of us. We are not seekers without a compass. Nor are we just finders; we are those who have been found.

The same dynamic pervades the Gospels. There, Jesus does not appear as a homely sage who attracts disciples because he does better cures than the local medical people and tells interesting moral stories. No, Jesus says, bluntly, “Follow me” (Matthew 4:19; Mark 1:17). In John’s account, two disciples of the Baptist ask Jesus, “Where are you staying?” To which Jesus replies, “Come and see” (John 1:38-39). The initiative in salvation history is always a divine initiative. God leads; we follow. God comes into history in search of us; we learn, often slowly and with difficulty, to follow the divine lead.

In the terms in which it presents itself today, the notion of the Christian life as a matter of spiritual “seeking” usually has more to do with our culture of self-absorption than with biblical religion. In the Bible, God’s revelation is discerned in history, not outside of it inside our heads. Seeking, in the sense of deepening our friendship with Jesus, is good: but let’s first understand that we have been found.

Thus the Psalmist:

“They sacrificed their sons and daughters to the demons/they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood./Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the harlot in their doings./Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage/….they were rebellious in their purposes, and were brought low because of their iniquity” [Psalm 106.38-40, 43].

And the prophet Ezekiel, delivering the word of the Lord:

“And you took yours sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. Were your harlotries so small a matter that you slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering by fire to them?…Behold, therefore, I stretched out my hand against you, and diminished your allotted portion, and delivered you to the greed of your enemies…” [Ezekiel 16.20-21, 27].

Thirty-nine years after Roe v. Wade created an unrestricted abortion license in the United States, and during the week when hundreds of thousands of Americans pray and march for life, all Americans ought to ponder these words – and the kind of country to which Roe v. Wade led.

It was supposed to be a country in which women were liberated; it became a country in which women were ever more the victims of predatory and sexually irresponsible men, left alone with their “rights” to find a technological “fix” to the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy. It was supposed to become a more humane country; it became a country in which morally coarsened pundits can describe as “extreme” and “weird” the faith-filled response of the Santorum family to the loss of a newborn shortly after birth. It was supposed to be a country of greater equality; it became a country in which the fantasies of those who believed that America was for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants only, with emphasis on “white,” were realized beyond the wildest imaginings of the most crazed racists and eugenicists of the 1920s.

These hard truths have too often been hidden, especially where abortion is widely prevalent. Thus it is to the immense credit of the New York-based Chiaroscuro Foundation that it has compelled the New York City Department of Health to itemize separately abortion and pregnancy statistics in its annual reports. The 2010 numbers, just released, would make both the Psalmist and Ezekiel blanch:

Of the 208,541 pregnancies in New York City in 2010, 83,750 were terminated by abortion: four in ten. Among non-Hispanic blacks, there were 38,574 abortions and 26,635 live births: thus for every 1,000 African-American babies born, 1,448 were aborted. Those numbers were even more chilling among non-Hispanic black teenagers: for every 1,000 Africa-American babies born to teenagers, 2,630 were aborted. The overall teenage abortion rate was 63% in a city where 16% of all pregnancies were ten pregnancies.

New York City is not America, of course. And there is encouragement on various fronts in the battle for life. The national abortion rate is down over the past several decades. Science has vindicated the pro-life position. The pro-life/pro-choice opinion balance has tilted, if slightly, in favor of the pro-life cause. Younger people are more likely to be pro-life than aging baby-boomers. Legislated regulation of the abortion industry has driven abortuaries out of business in many places.

Yet the fact remains that America is a country in which almost one in four pregnancies ends in the willful, violent death of the unborn child. And this slaughter of the innocents has been going on, often in higher percentages, for almost four decades.

As the Psalmist and Ezekiel might have told us, feeding the demons inevitably leads to a terrible hardening of sensibilities. The warnings from ancient Israel about where that hardening leads are worth pondering in this election year, and indeed in every year.

There are as many reasons for “converting” as there are converts. Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic with, by his own admission, “little emotion but clear conviction”: this was the truth; one ought to adhere to it. Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that his journey into the Catholic Church began when, as an unbelieving Harvard undergraduate detached from his family’s staunch Presbyterianism, he noticed a leaf shimmering with raindrops while taking a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.; such beauty could not be accidental, he thought—there must be a Creator. Thomas Merton found Catholicism aesthetically, as well as intellectually, attractive: once the former Columbia free-thinker and dabbler in communism and Hinduism found his way into a Trappist monastery and became a priest, he explained the Mass to his unconverted friend, poet Robert Lax, by analogy to a ballet. Until his death in 2007, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger insisted that his conversion to Catholicism was not a rejection of, but a fulfillment of, the Judaism into which he was born; the cardinal could often be found at Holocaust memorial services reciting the names of the martyrs, including “Gisèle Lustiger, ma maman” (“my mother”).

Two of the great nineteenth-century converts were geniuses of the English language: theologian John Henry Newman and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This tradition of literary converts continued in the twentieth century, and included Waugh, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell, Ronald Knox, and Walker Percy. Their heritage lives today at Our Savior’s Church on Park Avenue in New York, where convert author, wit, raconteur and amateur pugilist George William Rutler presides as pastor.

In early American Catholicism, the fifth archbishop of Baltimore (and de facto primate of the United States), Samuel Eccleston, was a convert from Anglicanism, as was the first native-born American saint and the precursor of the Catholic school system, Elizabeth Ann Seton. Mother Seton’s portrait in the offices of the archbishop of New York is somewhat incongruous, as the young widow Seton, with her children, was run out of New York by her unforgiving Anglican in-laws when she became a Catholic. On his deathbed, another great nineteenth-century convert, Henry Edward Manning of England, who might have become the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury but became the Catholic archbishop of Westminster instead, took his long-deceased wife’s prayer book from beneath his pillow and gave it to a friend, saying that it had been his spiritual inspiration throughout his life.

If there is a thread running through these diverse personalities, it may be this: that men and women of intellect, culture and accomplishment have found in Catholicism what Blessed John Paul II called the “symphony of truth.” That rich and complex symphony, and the harmonies it offers, is an attractive, compelling and persuasive alternative to the fragmentation of modern and post-modern intellectual and cultural life, where little fits together and much is cacophony. Catholicism, however, is not an accidental assembly of random truth-claims; the creed is not an arbitrary catalogue of propositions and neither is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It all fits together, and in proposing that symphonic harmony, Catholicism helps fit all the aspects of our lives together, as it orders our loves and loyalties in the right direction.

You don’t have to be an intellectual to appreciate this “symphony of truth,” however. For Catholicism is, first of all, an encounter with a person, Jesus Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). And to meet that person is to meet the truth that makes all the other truths of our lives make sense. Indeed, the embrace of Catholic truth in full, as lives like Blessed John Henry Newman’s demonstrate, opens one up to the broadest possible range of intellectual encounters.

Viewed from outside, Catholicism can seem closed and unwelcoming. As Evelyn Waugh noted, though, it all seems so much more spacious and open from the inside. The Gothic, with its soaring vaults and buttresses and its luminous stained glass, is not a classic Catholic architectural form by accident. The full beauty of the light, however, washes over you when you come in.

Note to Celebrants (not “Presiders”): If you’ve fallen into the bad habit of concluding Mass by some variant of “May almighty God bless us all, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” please cease and desist. You were not ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament to invoke, generically, the divine blessing, which anyone can (and should) do before and after meals; you were given the power to confer the divine blessing by being configured to Christ in Holy Orders. Catholics who embrace the truth of Catholic faith do not enjoy clericalism. But they do not find comfort, much less evangelical leadership, from priests who imagine they can avoid clericalism by unwittingly denying the truth of their own sacramental vocation and its distinctiveness.

Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist: The same admonition applies to you, but in a different way – you must not offer a “blessing,” in any form, to pre-first-Communion children who join their parents in the Communion procession. Eucharistic ministers are not junior-grade clergy or petty officers; no one outside of those in Holy Orders should “bless” in a liturgical context. Again, this is not a matter of prissiness, and still less one of clericalism; it is a matter of doctrinal and theological precision – which, if lost, can damage the celebration of the sacred liturgy. Extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist are vastly over-used in U.S. parishes, a practice that risks of signaling that the Mass is a matter of the self-worshipping community celebrating and feeding itself. But the problem of the ordinary use of what is supposed, after all, to be “extraordinary” can be addressed another time. For now, pastors must make it clear that no one blesses children during the communion procession except bishops, priests, and deacons, i.e., those in Holy Orders.

Music Directors and Pastors: As a general rule, sing all the verses of a processional or recessional hymn. Good hymns have a textual integrity that is lost when we sing hymn-excerpts rather than hymns. It doesn’t take that much more time to sing all six verses of “For All the Saints” or all four verses of “Crown Him with Many Crowns;” cutting such great texts by two-thirds or one-half inevitably sends the signal that music in the liturgy is filler – and there is no room for filler in the sacred liturgy.

The Congregation: Sacred space is different from other space; the inside of the church is different from the narthex (not “gathering space”). Thus we should all break the bad habit of commencing the post-Mass conversation immediately after the conclusion of the recessional hymn or organ postlude. Wait until you leave the interior of the church before beginning to chat with the neighbors. If there is a choral postlude, chatting over it is an insult to the choir, which has worked hard to prepare something beautiful for God; if there is only an organ postlude (with or without a recessional hymn), chatting over it is an insult to the organist. Thirty seconds of silence after Mass are no bad thing.

And while we’re on the subject of the congregation, might we all reconsider our vesture at Sunday Mass? Dressing in one’s “Sunday best” was not an affectation; it was an acknowledgment of our baptismal dignity. Let’s reclaim that dignity and its expression in our “Sunday best.”

He also spent more consecutive time at the center of national and international affairs than any other American of his time: longer than either of the Roosevelts, longer than Henry Stimson, longer than anyone. For 18 years — from the moment in November 1942 when he took command of the Allied Expeditionary Force whose invasion of North Africa began the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich, until Jan. 20, 1961, when he handed the burden of the presidency to John F. Kennedy — Dwight David Eisenhower was in the cockpit of history. And it made a great difference that he was there.

He was supreme commander of the greatest political-military coalition in history, holding it together despite great centrifugal forces (both political and personal) until that coalition won what Eisenhower memorably called its “crusade in Europe” and the “Thousand-Year Reich” was no more. He led an Ivy League university; he helped forge NATO into one of the instruments that prevented another totalitarian power from dominating Europe; he helped keep the Republican party from drifting into the irrelevance of isolationism. Despite the criticisms of the nation’s high-cultural and journalistic tastemakers, he was a successful (and crafty) president, one of the few two-term chief executives who left the Oval Office a highly popular man. Americans, now and in the future, ought to know that this country can produce men of such accomplishment.

No one will learn any of this, however, from the Eisenhower Memorial that will soon be built in the heart of monumental Washington: unless, that is, Congress moves quickly to force a reconsideration of a historical and aesthetic travesty.

The present Eisenhower Memorial design, by postmodernist Frank Gehry, has virtually nothing to do with the Dwight David Eisenhower of history. Plans call for Ike to be memorialized in sculpture as a barefoot farmboy on the Great Plains: not the great wartime leader; not the soldier-diplomat; not the chief executive of the United States who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. The Gehry conceit seems both obvious and entirely in tune with the postmodern deconstruction of history: There are no great men; there are no great virtues; there is no great striving; nor is there great accomplishment or great service to others. No one, visiting the Eisenhower Memorial as designed by Frank Gehry, would have the slightest reason to grasp the truth of the man himself, as Stephen Ambrose once described him:

As a soldier, he was, as George C. Marshall said at the end of the war, everything that the U.S. Army hoped for in its finest products – professionally competent, well versed in the history of war, decisive, well disciplined, courageous, dedicated, and popular with his men, his subordinates, and his superiors. His leadership qualities also included a high degree of intelligence, integrity, commitment to basic principles, dignity, organizational genius, tremendous energy, and diplomatic ability. As a man, he was good-looking, considerate of and concerned about others, loyal to friends and family, given to terrible rages (which he learned to control), ambitious, thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism, stubborn and inflexible about his habits, an avid sportsman and sports fan, modest (but never falsely so), almost embarrassingly unsophisticated in his musical, artistic, and literary tastes, intensely curious about people and places, often refreshingly naïve, fun-loving – in short, a wonderful man to know or be around. Nearly everyone who knew him liked him immensely, many – including some of the most powerful men in the world – to the point of adulation.

None of this is conveyed by the sculpture of a barefoot boy on the plains. None of it is conveyed by the other elements in the Gehry design: 80-foot-tall, nondescript cylindrical posts (they can’t even be properly described as pillars) holding up perforated metal “tapestries,” creating what Gehry himself once called a “theater for cars.” But what does a “theater for cars,” or any other kind of postmodernist knock-off of a Fifties drive-in, have to do with creating a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander who planned the invasion of Normandy, the president who ended the Korean War and who proposed “Open Skies” as a means to lower the temperature of the Cold War?

Nothing. And that, one is forced to conclude, is the idea: Visitors will be asked to admire a barefoot boy, one of many from the Kansas plains, not the unique and historic figure the barefoot boy became. No wonder that Eisenhower’s grandchildren now oppose the design of his memorial.

It is not only history and aesthetics that are travestied in this fiasco. The Gehry design was chosen in a closed competition, which itself suggests that the fix was in for Frank Gehry from the beginning. Having seen his design for a new wing of the Corcoran Gallery of Art go unrealized, Gehry and his acolytes at the General Services Administration now seem determined to get a Gehry into monumental Washington, even if, in the process, they distort history with another postmodernist confection that speaks to no one outside their small, gnostic sect. Yet if the National Capital Planning Commission gives a favorable review to the Gehry design in February, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission may well seek to break ground immediately in order to create a fait accompli.

Congress will have a lot on its plate in the first weeks of 2012. But it should move quickly to stop the current Eisenhower Memorial process and order an inquiry into precisely how and why a design that says nothing about the great achievements of the man being memorialized was approved. And when the answer becomes clear – that this was a closed, opaque process unbefitting a democracy intent on honoring one of those who helped save democracy in an hour of peril – Congress should order the present design scrapped in favor of an open process of design competition and selection, like those that produced the World War II and Vietnam Veterans Memorials. Moreover, Congress should ensure that that process is not dominated by those determined to impose a postmodernist architectural vocabulary, irrespective of its distortion of history, on monumental Washington. Meanwhile, Congress would do well to put a hold on the funding for the Eisenhower Commission that was hastily approved as part of an end-of-the-year omnibus spending bill.

The memory of Dwight David Eisenhower deserves better than the travesty that has, to date, steamrollered through the federal bureaucracy. So does the country Eisenhower served so well, and the city where he lived as both soldier and statesman.

Thirty years ago, however, the season took on a more somber tone. For on the night of Dec. 12-13, 1981, the Polish state, through the Polish army, invaded Polish society and imposed martial law throughout the country. There was no provision for martial law in Poland’s communist legal code, so what the Jaruzelski regime declared was, technically, a “state of war.” It was a fitting phrase, if unintentionally ironic.

On Christmas Eve, John Paul II placed a lighted candle in the window of the papal apartment, a gesture of solidarity with an international initiative begun in Switzerland by two clergyman, to protest the communist attempt to crush the Solidarity movement. The papal World Day of Peace Message for Jan. 1, 1982, condemned “the false peace of totalitarian regimes” and at the Angelus that day, the Pope asked everyone to pray for Poland, for what was at stake there was of great importance, “not only for a single country, but for the history of man.”

With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, it now seems clear that the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 was not an act of strength but one of weakness, by a regime so incapable of commanding the allegiance of those in whose name it claimed to rule that it could only compel obedience by violence. It took some time for this to become clear in Poland, a country frequently burdened by crushed hopes; John Paul’s second pastoral pilgrimage to his homeland, in June 1983, did a lot to raise the spirits of his countrymen—who rallied their energies such that, by 1987, the Pope could spend his third pilgrimage home laying the cultural and moral foundations for a post-communist Poland, which was born two years later in the Revolution of 1989.

Two days after the imposition of the “state of war,” President Ronald Reagan hosted a lunch at the White House for the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. As I report in The End and the Beginning, it was Cardinal Casaroli who, over the course of a 90-minute discussion, took the Realpolitik view: however unfortunate martial law might be, there were likely reasons of state that compelled General Wojciech Jaruzelski, concerned about a possible Soviet invasion to crush Solidarity beneath Red Army tank treads, to behave as he did. And it was Ronald Reagan who, speaking in the tones of John Paul II, was the voice of moral outrage over this latest usurpation of Polish liberties. As the historical record now makes clear, John Paul and Reagan had it right, and the veteran Vatican diplomat had it wrong: there was no invasion threat in December 1981 (although there had been one in December 1980); the Jaruzelski regime was a hollow, if brutal, shell; the power of moral conviction, aroused, could be an effective antidote to communist tyranny, forging hitherto unimagined and effective tools of resistance; there was nothing permanent about the post-Yalta division of Europe.

The lessons, 30 years later? Solidarity’s triumph ought not be universalized as a one-size-fits-all model for coping with tyrants. Still, John Paul II’s instinct for reading history through cultural lenses has much to commend it. Politics and economics are important. What drives history over the long haul, however, is culture: what men and women cherish, honor, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives, and their children’s lives, on.

The truest realism, therefore, is one shaped by truths and ideals, not only by calculations of power. If you doubt that, ask General Jaruzelski.

Posit an all-powerful and infinite God, and most of us wouldn’t have too much trouble with the idea that such a God could do anything, including coming into the finite world he created. The real question is why such a God would want to do such a thing: to submit his divinity to the limits of our humanity, to dwindle into infancy and then to go farther — to die as a tortured criminal at the hands of his own creatures. Here is the “scandal” of Christianity. For the answer faith gives to the question of why is salvific love: a love so great that it required, not an argument, but a demonstration.

Eastern Christian theology helps us understand the full dimensions of the why of the Incarnation through its concept of theosis, or divinization: God becomes man so that we might become like God — so that we can live comfortably with God forever. Here, then, is the admirabile commercium: God “exchanges” his divinity for our humanity, thus enabling us to “exchange” our weakness for his divine glory — the glory of which the angels sing to the shepherds of Bethlehem. The years St. Paul spent in the desert, pondering just how the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, which had been revealed to him on the road to Damascus, fulfilled God’s election of Israel, led the Apostle to the Gentiles to be the first to formulate this “exchange:” “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” [2 Corinthians 8.9].

The Fathers of the Church took up the theme and developed the idea that, in the “exchange,” men and women were empowered to become godlike. Thus St. Gregory Nazianzen: “Let us seek to be like Christ, because Christ also became like us: to become gods through him since he himself, through us, became a man. He took the worst upon himself to make us a gift of the best.” If the language of “becoming gods” strikes our ears as odd, that may be because we have not quite plumbed the radical depths of the divine love: for in the Incarnation, “God so loved the world” [John 3.16] that he doubled-down on the divine humility, dwindling himself into infancy so that we could share, really and truly, in the divine life.

The indictment of Christianity that began in the eighteenth century and metastasized in the nineteenth was that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus kept humanity infantile, such that only by throwing the God of the Bible over the side could humanity ever achieve maturity and liberation. This was, of course, a complete inversion of the truth: the Christian faith, proclaimed by the Second Letter of Peter, is that God, by the Incarnation, has made us “partakers of the divine nature” [2 Peter 1.4]. And in doing so, the divine humility, manifest as love, brings us into the fullness of human maturation and the fullness of true freedom. Thus Pope St. Leo the Great, in the Christmas homily the Church reads in the Office of Readings for Christmas Day, could admonish his Roman congregation in 440: “Realize, O Christian, your dignity. Once made a partaker in the divine nature, do not return to your former baseness by a life unworthy of that dignity.”

Christmas faith inspires righteous living, not by fear, but by love: the love that expresses itself in history in the humility of the Incarnation and the Holy Birth; the love that speaks of the glory of God, “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” [Luke 2.12].

Thus in the summer of 1967 I met Father George Pell of Ballarat, who, with the oils of ordination still wet on his forehead, spent several months at my parish before embarking on doctoral studies at Oxford. If anyone had told Pell or me that, thirty-eight years later, he would be electing the successor to a pope whose biographer I had become, I think we both would have thought the prognosticator a little mad.

I recently spent several days with the cardinal archbishop of Sydney on his home turf, where I was giving a series of lectures in support of Campion College, a new Aussie adventure in Catholic liberal arts education of which Cardinal Pell has been a strong supporter. Seeing my old friend up close and personal, in venues ranging from solemn high Mass in his beautifully restored cathedral to a wildlife preserve featuring all the strange and wondrous fauna of Australia (the cardinal, inspecting a particularly ungainly wombat: “I wonder what the Creator had in mind here?”) gave me an opportunity to ponder just how great Cardinal Pell’s accomplishment has been.

Pell, who is more a Melbournian than a Sydneysider (although he has been metropolitan archbishop of both great sees), sometimes makes reference to his great Melbourne predecessor, Daniel Mannix, archbishop of the capital of Victoria for forty-six years and a leading figure in Australian public life for decades. Well, if Mannix set the twentieth century pattern for Catholic prelates Down Under, George Pell will be regarded by historians as the man who set the pattern for the twenty-first century. In doing so, he saved Catholicism in Australia and set it on course toward a vibrant future, evangelically and publicly.

When Pell became archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, Catholic Lite was the order of the day throughout the country, with the usual results: goofball liturgy (one bishop celebrated Mass made up as a clown); dumbed-down catechesis; a collapse in religious vocations and seminary applications; the Church bureaucracy joined at the hip to the hard left in Australian public life. Reversing this drift toward theological and moral incoherence and public irrelevance was going to be very hard work. Then Pell caught a break: when his seminary faculty threatened to resign en masse because he insisted that the seminarians attend daily Mass, Pell called their bluff, accepted their resignations, filled the seminary with new faculty — and never looked back.

Religious education was reformed; new and vibrant orders of religious women were brought into the archdiocese; a John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family was launched; orthodoxy, no longer optional, became interesting again. Transferred to Sydney in 2001, Pell set about reinvigorating his new archdiocese by seeking, and getting, World Youth Day 2008. Its effects are still rippling through the Sydney metropolitan area — visible, for example, in the 300+ young people I spoke with at a Theology-on-Tap evening in Parramatta (whose bishop, Anthony Fisher, OP, is a Pell protégé).

And while doing all this at home, Cardinal Pell has become a major figure on the international Catholic scene. He helped create Vox Clara as a check on English-language liturgical translations. And in recent years he has become a thoughtful critic of environmental radicalism, in which he detects a new paganism filling the piety-gap in post-Christian societies.

All of this has not been without cost, as the cardinal is regularly vilified by his opponents. But the former Australian Rules football star is a battler, who knows the truth of “no pain, no gain.”

Australia and the entire world Church owe George Pell a large debt of gratitude.

Václav Havel had a complicated relationship with Christianity and the Catholic Church, but I cannot get out of my mind the image of Blessed John Paul II showing the former president of the Czech Republic the ropes around the Throne of Grace. It must have been a moving reunion.