Best known for his magisterial biography of Pope John Paul II, George Weigel firmly established himself as a Catholic public intellectual in 1987 with Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace. There Weigel argued that the purpose of Just War thinking is not to avoid war at all costs, but to work for the establishment and protection of a just order, which sometimes requires violent conflict. Not long after the book was written, the Soviet Union fell, opening up the possibility of such an order to large swathes of the globe. Moreover, under the pontificate of John Paul II, the Catholic Church seemed ready to provide the world with a moral compass and to undertake its conversion.
Thirty years after Tranquillitas Ordinis, much has changed. Weigel's most recent book, which collects his essays from 2007 to 2017, is entitled The Fragility of Order. The essays attest to the ways in which, at the global, national, and ecclesiastical levels, Weigel has seen the order that he thought secure become undermined in unexpected ways. “Order is not self-maintaining,” he writes, but “an achievement, and it must be attained over and over again.”
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