Scholar sees bleak future for Europe

The Boston Globe reports:

What could bring out 600 people, including a cardinal, on a beautiful fall night in the middle of the week? At St. Paul Church in Cambridge Wednesday, the draw was a leading Catholic intellectual with a pessimistic prognosis for the future of Europe and maybe the United States.

George Weigel may not be as famous as actor George Clooney, but as a senior fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, a syndicated columnist, and a prolific author who wrote a popular biography of Pope John Paul II, he commands attention among the intelligentsia. (He's among the thinkers cited in a new book, ``The Theocons," on conservative Catholic intellectuals worried that secularism is rotting public morality.)

Weigel's talk, the first lecture this season sponsored by St. Paul's lay Committee on Spiritual and Public Concerns, was elaborately planned and regimented, down to the restroom guides available during the speech. The speaker was introduced by Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, who called Weigel a friend and a man ``whose love for the church and passion for democracy . . . shines in all of his works."

Childless Europe.