Assessing Weigel's assessment

by Dennis Coday

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Yesterday, I pointed readers toward George Weigel's assessment of Caritas in Veritate. You many recall that Weigel said the encyclical "resembles a duck-billed platypus" meaning that it combined the pope’s thought with "passages that reflect [the Pontifical Council for] Justice and Peace ideas and approaches that Benedict evidently believed he had to try and accommodate."

Michael Sean Winters, who blogs for NCR Today and for America's blog, In All Things, takes on Weigel today over at America:

Weigel’s essay resembles nothing so much as the Soviet Union’s remakes of movies during its de-Stalinization period. During Stalin’s long reign, cinematic treatments of the Revolution always showed Stalin at Lenin’s side, even when the historical record had him hundreds of miles away. So, during de-Stalinization, rather than re-make the entire movie, the censors would have a soldier enter stage right and in front to obscure the image of Stalin behind. I go too far: Weigel’s effort is actually clumsier than the Soviet re-makes.

Read the full blog entry here.

Assessing Weigel's assessment

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