This book is subtitled ‘The art of mentoring’, for Weigel recognises that to guide and influence a young mind requires a kind of imaginative tact - an ‘art’ in fact. His purpose is to show the intellectual and cultural riches of faith, which together form part of ‘His-story’, the true history of mankind.

Author of the acclaimed biography of John Paul II, he brings both knowledge and enthusiasm to this task, never patronising his readers but always gently prompting and pushing them to look at and think more clearly about what they believe.

His method is to take us on a series of journeys to significant places – by no means a conventional pilgrimage – and through the personalities we meet on the way, to point out why they matter in the wider frame of things.

These quirky journeys include the Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street, to introduce the massive sanity of GK Chesterton; the Birmingham Oratory, which leads to a discussion of JH Newman’s contribution to theology, in particular his ‘illative sense’ from The Grammar of Assent; the North American College cemetery at Campo Verano, Rome, where Weigel tells the moving story of Frank Parater, who died as a seminarian and whose cause is now under investigation; Castle Howard, Yorkshire, so that he can analyse Charles Ryder’s change of heart in Brideshead Revisited; and Chartres Cathedral, a demonstration of the collective genius of an epoch.

For Weigel, the enemy today is ‘debonair nihilism’, with its tendency towards gnosticism. He gives a memorable anecdote of the Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor encountering the novelist Mary McCarthy at a dinner party and retorting, in response to the latter’s belief that the Host is only a ‘pretty good symbol’, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’

For Weigel is at pains to emphasise that, contrary to critics who accuse Catholicism of otherworldliness, what matters is the ‘grittiness’ of faith, the sense that ‘all this is for real’. He counters a frivolous stance vigorously with his description of the ‘sacramental imagination’, encouraging the reader ‘never to settle for less than the greatness of soul that God has made it possible for you to live.’

He has dedicated this book to his students from his annual seminars in Liechtenstein and Krakow and one senses from reading it his wish to demonstrate to them Chesterton’s idea of the ‘adventure’ of orthodoxy, not merely – as I was taught – the correct catechetical questions and answers.

He confesses to a liberal, spirit-of-Vatican-II phase in his own youth which makes him the more eager to impart a living faith to all those young minds that have instinctively repudiated ‘Catholic Lite’ and the stance of scepticism and materialism, but who are still in quest of the ‘real world’ offered by the Church and the Christian story.

Life should be about vocation, not career, he tells them, and it is their task to ensure that the 21st century is different from the colossal slaughter of human life in the 20th. Our destiny, declares the author, is not emptiness or oblivion, the cul-de-sac of a deconstructed universe; it is the discovery of objective truth, enshrined in a world of transcendental beauty.

Though addressed to ‘young’ Catholics, I would submit that these Letters are for all who are young in heart, whatever their age; and perhaps also for those whose palates have been surfeited by the counterfeit intellectual stimulus of an a la carte menu.

© 2004 Francis Phillips

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk