Ideas are not intellectuals’ toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call “the real world”.

The failure of Lateran V was the prelude to the Reformation, which shattered the unity of the Christian West and set in motion the dynamics that eventually led to the European wars of religion. Failures of reform carry a high cost.

We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.

Poland was a reminder to the world that there is more to history and power than brute force; the human spirit can bend the course of history in nobler directions. Culture drives history, over the long haul.

If moral relativism was legally absolutized in the name of tolerance, basic rights were also relativized and the door was open to totalitarianism.

Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses – or with a new set of ideological filters.

Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible – and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto.

Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have lethal consequences.

Be the Church – that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God’s passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes...