It always fascinates me when people can step back and look at the present with what one might say are ‘timeless eyes’. A good friend of mine stumbled across a great article recently from Newsweek by George Weigel. He’s always a ‘cracking good read’, to abuse a well-loved phrase of this blog. (Check out Letters to a Young Catholic, his whopping two-inch biography on JPII, Courage to Be Catholic and many more…ok, enough with the Weigel plug…)

Anyway…so this article, How Benedict XVI Will Make History, is really worth a read. He discusses the distinct modern form of power of Popes…that of moral persuasion. He challenges the idea that “religious and moral conviction is irrelevant to shaping the flow of contemporary history.” In particular, he explores how the Holy Father sees decades beyond his own Papacy in reshaping the dialogue with Islam.

At the risk of fobbing readers off to something else two weeks in a row (see last week’s post)…this article really is too good to miss. And don’t miss the part where he says JPII had a ‘pyrotechnic personality’…nice one!