This is a collection of essays about special places and personalities in Catholicism. There are essays on Flannery O'Connor, Newman, Waugh and Chesterton, and essays about Warsaw, Krakow and the Polish Catholics who resisted Hitler and then Stalin and Russian Marxist orthodoxy.

Weigel is a good writer, witty, engaging, passionate. His project is to support young Americans to embrace orthodox Catholicism in a secular age. He makes several powerful arguments. Catholicism is countercultural, and almost post-modern in its rejection of the failures of the systems of philosophy and ideology devised by Western European and American thinkers in the past three centuries. Catholicism is not a fringe spiritualistic cult. It started as an apocalyptic Jewish sect but over the following centuries evolved a rich and sophisticated tradition that puts Catholics firmly within the reality-based community while supporting a spiritual life. He offers several stories about the Pope and insights into the Pope's approach to the leadership of the world church - as might be expected of the author of a biography of the current pope.

He puts forward some of the basic elements of modern Catholic theology, frequently referring to writings of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthazar, whose work has become fundamental in rethinking Catholic orthodoxy. He answers some of the popular stereotypes about Catholicism - that it is a religion of morbid self-denial and obscure rituals practiced to avoid offending a vengeful deity. He tried to explain the Catholic attitude towards joyful living in the real world, and the appreciation of rituals and religious art to help see the real beauty of the world.

Unfortunately he also skirts some of the problems of his American Catholic neo-orthodoxy. Weigel, like Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus, is a Catholic polemicist who usually supports the social conservative agenda of the Republican Party, and a defender of American and global capitalism. He is dismissive of liberation theology and the movement to empower women in the Church on the basis that these are artificial intrusions of an alien philosophy in the Church rather than a genuine movement for Christian humanism. He is at best indifferent to economic, environmental and equality issues. He also seems, not unlike the liberal Catholics that he criticizes on other issues, to avoid the Church's teaching on those issues.

I think he raises good issues and does a good job. It is a spirited and forceful presentation of the orthodox socially conservative version of American Catholicism.