Blessed John Paul’s biographer thinks Pope Francis embodies Church's future

March 18, 2013 - George Weigel, the biographer of Blessed John Paul II, believes that Pope Francis embodies the type of Catholicism that is needed for the Church to thrive in the modern cultural context. “I think Pope Francis embodies the Church's turn into the Evangelical Catholicism of the future in a profound way,” Weigel told Catholic News Agency. According to the Catholic author and scholar, if the new Pope “can reform the Curia and turn it into a more effective instrument of the New Evangelization, while concurrently being the Church's principal evangelist, he will have done precisely what the Church needs in these first decades of the new millennium,” he said. In his latest book, ““Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church,” Weigel asserts that the Church was and is at “a hinge moment” in its history, a time when “a new mode of being Catholic was being born, and that this was not dissimilar from other such transition points in Catholic history.” Some of the areas he addresses are: the episcopate, the priesthood, consecrated life, the liturgy, the lay vocation, the intellectual sphere, the Church’s public policy advocacy, and the papacy. He looks at the numerous vocations, institutions and apostolates in the Church and offers his ideas for how to carry out an Evangelical Catholic reform.