In Evangelical Catholicism, George Weigel lays out an agenda for the Catholic Church for the new millennium. The book is not just for Catholics since it addresses a general spiritual crisis. Western culture has reached an inflection point along the curve predicted by Nietzsche. After generations of chipping away at its Judeo-Christian inheritance, the West now openly embraces what Weigel calls a “debonair nihilism.” Our elites are not simply agnostic but “Christophobic.” Moral norms, once universally accepted, now have to explain themselves. Ideas such as truth, goodness, and beauty are dismissed with a dry little smile. The result is a vacuum with consequences that Nietzsche understood but our sunny nihilists in the academy and media do not. Weigel argues that the modern Church has fashioned a Christian humanism that is a potent antidote to the negations of postmodernity, one that can engage even the non-believer.

If it is going to be a creative force in modern culture, the Catholic Church has to make internal changes. More precisely, it has to recover its deepest evangelical identity. Weigel’s book lays out an agenda for what he calls “deep” Catholic reform. It touches everything from the liturgy to moral theology to the way bishops are chosen. It involves going beyond the sterile ecclesial debates between “liberal” and “conservative” that have been such a distraction since the Sixties. It is a call for Catholics (and all Christians, for that matter) to recover the sense of the Church as mission rather