Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. Weigel is the author of the best-selling Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, published in 1999 to international acclaim. He is also the author of Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism (2007), Letters to a Young Catholic (2005), The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (2005), and The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church (2002). He has written fifteen other books, including most recently The End and the Beginning: John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010). Weigel is a contributor to Newsweek and also Vatican analyst for NBC News.

John Allen, Jr. is the prize-winning associate editor of The Boston Globe and the senior Vatican analyst for CNN. He is the author of six best-selling books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs, and writes frequently on the Church for major national and international publications.

The Tablet has called Allen “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs in the English language,” and papal biographer George Weigel has called him “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever.” Veteran religion writer Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek described Allen as “the journalist other reporters—and not a few cardinals—look to for the inside story on how all the pope’s men direct the world’s largest church.”

Two of Allen’s most recent books are The Catholic Church: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) and The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution (2013).