Authored by Thomas Farnan via OneLeggedParrot.com
Earlier this month in The National Catholic Register, Pope John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel, called Russia, “a modern Moloch, the bloodthirsty Canaanite god against whom the prophets of ancient Israel railed” – in a breathless criticism of President Trump’s Ukrainian peace efforts.
On February 12, 2025, he penned a rant syndicated by The Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver. Titled Russia’s Sacrilegious War on Ukraine, the piece advocated continued war in Ukraine until Russia loses:
There is no happy or just solution to Putin’s aggression that does not end with Putin losing. How that happens is subject to debate. But Putin must lose, both for Ukraine’s sake and for Russia’s…. for America’s sake, and for the world’s.
Weigel has served on the board of the CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with Victoria Nuland. His advocacy helped save the organization in 1993, when it was almost (and should have been) shut down at the end of the Cold War.
The Trump administration has suspended funding for NED, and Elon Musk called it an “evil organization [that] needs to be dissolved.” Arguably, more than any other Washington entity, NED is responsible for inciting civil unrest around the world to serve the purposes of corrupt people.
For over a decade, Weigel has acted as a reliable mouthpiece for NED in its efforts to cause war in Ukraine. Mostly, he has provided a Catholic pretext for awful stuff, based on a tangential association with a long-dead pope.
Whatever its initial intentions – and they were chiefly benevolent – by 2025 NED had become the driving force in a Frankenstein foreign policy that that took its initial design to its rational conclusion: chaos and death.
The details of the Ukraine conflict are rarely covered in the Western media, but they are available to piece together from open sources. In 2010, Ukraine elevated Viktor Yanukovych to president in a democratic election. As reported at the time:
A total of 3,779 observers, including 650 from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, were dispatched to monitor the election. Ukraine’s presidential election, the fifth since the country regained its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, was democratic and “organized in a transparent manner,” the OSCE said today in an e-mailed statement.
In 2013, Yanukovych would make the mistake of not signing an association agreement with the European Union and, instead, entertaining a regional economic alliance with Russia. John McCain and other prominent American politicians flew to Kiev to rally support for the EU.
Yanukovych tried to pass a law that prohibited Americans from meddling Ukraine. Weigel then got involved and wrote on January 16, 2014:
Following recent Russian precedents, one of the new laws “against extremism” also attempts to cut civil-society activists and their organizations off from their Western allies… the intent is clear enough: Any Ukrainian civil-society organization that accepts funds for civil-society or pro-democracy work from, say, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (full disclosure: I serve on the NED board)…. will be considered a “foreign agent.” It must identify itself as “as a civil association performing the functions of a foreign agent.” It must submit monthly financial and program reports to the state, and it must now pay income taxes.
Weigel called Yanukovych’s proposed measures Stalinist and anti-democratic. If you are looking for a moment when Washington lost all self-awareness and turned full-Orwellian, that might be it. The piece was unironically titled Gutting Democracy in Ukraine.
A week later, in a January 22, 2014 article published in the Kyiv Post, Weigel called Yanukovych’s government a “dictatorship,” a “thugocracy,” and its leaders “bandits,” even opining – in perfect Newspeak – that insurrectionists seeking to topple the democratically elected government were a “democracy movement.”
An American, he advocated for the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected leaders in favor of “competent technocrats.”
There followed a successful coup that replaced the democratically elected Ukraine government with a Western puppet. President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he had “brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.” The word “brokered” suggests that the Obama administration successfully replaced a government half a world away at the behest of Washington’s smart people.
A recorded phone call was leaked in which the American ambassador worked with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to choose the replacement government before the coup occurred.
The new U.S. backed government proceeded to use Nazi extremists to persecute ethnic Russians who had sided with Yanukovych. A civil war ensued. Readers are encouraged to watch the PBS Frontline documentary produced in 2014, previously linked, for more detail on these events.
Weigel did not raise a voice against the persecution of citizens by the government he helped to install on behalf of the Obama administration. For anyone looking beyond his religious branding, that was true to form.
In the 1980s, Weigel was a bit player in the field of international politics, peddling what little influence he had on matters like arms control. He fell in with some bad people, eventually winding up with Allen Weinstein, who founded NED.
The previously referenced Washington Post piece from 1991 identifying NED as a CIA cutout includes this paragraph about how democracy movements worked in the 1980s:
Allen Weinstein is just one of many overt operatives who helped prepare the way for the political miracles of the past two years by sponsoring exchanges and other contacts with liberal reformers from the East. It’s worth naming a few more of them, to show the breadth of this movement for democracy: William Miller of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations; financier George Soros of the Soros Foundation; John Mroz of the Center for East-West Security Studies; John Baker of the Atlantic Council; and Harriett Crosby of the Institute for Soviet-American Relations. This has truly been a revolution by committee.
As a Catholic, the moment Ukraine’s new government started persecuting people, Weigel should have said, “I’m out.” Instead, he and his Washington-insider friends doubled down in spectacular fashion.
In September 2015, Vladimir Putin made a speech at the UN in New York harshly critical of NATO expansion on Russia’s borders, citing “the bloc thinking of the times of the Cold War” that was having devastating effects in places like Ukraine. He said:
Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle “If you are not with us, you are against us.”
The Republican Party’s then vanity candidate who had just declared his intention to run for president, Donald Trump, gave Putin’s speech a stellar review. He would appear on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX the next day and say, “I will tell you that I think in terms of leadership, [Putin] is getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well. They did not look good together.”
Trump spent the next few months distinguishing himself from all other Republican candidates by praising Putin, even daring to question the Russian president’s role in poisoning political opponents: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that?”
Trump’s Russian heterodoxy uttered in 2015 is what made him, for the first time, a viable candidate – go back and see his polls rise after every such contrarian statement. Ordinary people appreciated the candidate who would defy Washington’s bipartisan warmongering.
Then powerful politicians from both sides of the political aisle – with no evidence – projected that Putin was responsible for Trump’s success. George Weigel supported the lie, writing in July 2017, “[Russia’s] purpose is to undermine and demoralize us, destabilizing Western societies by throwing election results into question, creating suspicions about Western intelligence services, and generally mucking things up.”
The absurd details of the Russia hoax are covered in Trump v. Atlanticism: Understanding Russiagate, for all who need a primer. As the previous quote demonstrates, the Pope’s biographer was firmly on the side of the intelligence services.
The diplomatic rift caused by Russiagate contributed mightily to the current war in Ukraine. Was any of it true? No. Even the Columbia Journalism Review has reported that the whole thing was a fabrication.
Since 2014, Weigel has used the worst calumny to advocate for division among Christians in Ukraine. The slander was so extreme that in 2015 priests of the Russian Orthodox Church sent Weigel a letter imploring him to stop the name calling. The introduction to An Open Letter to George Weigel states the problem succinctly:
A very unpleasant rhetoric is being propounded by some Catholic writers against the Russian Orthodox Church as supposedly something of an agent of President Putin, who, according to the same rhetoric, is a monster beyond all description. It is blown so largely out of proportion that it could even be ignored by sober people, if there weren’t such overt pressure (one could say, bullying) being applied not only to force other Catholics to think the same way….
The letter provides an insightful historical accounting of Russia’s “Symphonia – Not ‘Separation’ – of Church and State” which, as the writers point out, “is obviously antithetical to the neo-Jeffersonian principle of strict ‘separation’ of church and state, now political dogma in virtually all Western countries imbued with the notion of secular liberal democracy.”
With that, the priests laid bare the fundamental theological problem with Weigel’s advocacy. He champions not Catholicism but neo-Jeffersonian dogmas as moral absolutes – a trite jingoistic view that is the philosophical basis of neoconservatism.
Undeterred by the thoughtful letter, Weigel spent over a decade casting Vladimir Putin as Hitler. It never occurred to him that formulating policy based on bad historical analogy is illogical and can work great harm. He has done little to reconcile the Catholic Church’s condemnation of liberation theology with his support for arming factions in far-away conflicts against perceived despots.
There is an undeniable religious reawakening in Russia that makes attacks by the Pope’s biographer especially indefensible. Putin has been critical of the West’s spiritual decay, comparing it to communism. In Putin’s words:
We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress…. The demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family, and even gender – they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal. The advocates of so-called “social progress” believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness…. [these] prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs. And not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today…. Well, if someone likes this, let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism.
Putin speaks of his own baptism, his beliefs, and the positive role of Christianity in Russian history. He put the girl rock band, Pussy Riot, in prison for desecrating an altar. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church works in close cooperation with the government.
In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on the advocacy of the homosexual lifestyle in the presence of children, strictly limited advertisements for abortions, and prohibited elective abortions later than 12 weeks after conception. The Sochi Olympics closing ceremonies in 2014 featured a tribute to Russian writers, including communism’s most eloquent Christian critic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose books are required reading in Russian schools.
A Russian-made documentary, The Holy Archipelago, directed by Sergei Debizhev – about the revival of the Catholic faith in Russia focusing on the famous Solovki Monastery – was named Best Film at 2023’a Great Lakes Christian Film Festival.
Putin’s Christianity-sourced populism is anathema to godless factions in the West. President Obama personally boycotted the Sochi Olympics and sent in his place a delegation of gay athletes, to protest Russia’s laws against LGBT advocacy.
In 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn issued the following criticism of the West in his “Men Have Forgotten God” speech at Buckingham Palace, upon his acceptance of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion:
[O]ur godless age has discovered the perfect anesthetic – trade! Such is the pathetic pinnacle of contemporary wisdom.
Today’s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!”
Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth.
As Solzhenitsyn scoffed, “Trade!” The unvarnished truth is that the Ukraine war started in 2014 when the democratically elected government was toppled because it chose the wrong trading partner – Russia and not the EU. Catholic thought leaders like Weigel have been all-in on the blasphemy.
Today, tens of thousands of Ukrainians are dead. Putin and Russia are winning the war, and America has lost much of what was left of its diplomatic clout to conduct real foreign policy.
While Russia has been pinned down in what even Secretary of State Marco Rubio is calling a proxy war, NATO sponsored jihadists have taken over Syria and are killing Christians. Putin’s Russia had acted as the protector of the minority Christian communities in Syria but could not give full support this time because of the Ukraine War.
The slaughter of Christians as a direct result of the godless neoconservatism advocated by people like Weigel certainly seems like a pattern at this point. As I wrote in USAID, Soft Power, And How Solzhenitsyn Predicted this Crisis, “Ancient Christianity has been expelled from every place in the Middle East where American soft power has meddled.”
Ordinary Americans voted for a rapprochement with Russia in 2016. President Trump was investigated and impeached for even trying to pursue it. Instead, at the behest of institutions like Weigel’s National Endowment for Democracy, America acted on behalf of godless “Trade!” to fan the flames of war.
In his second term, President Trump neutralized NED and, a month later, negotiated a ceasefire in the Ukraine war. He cannot, unfortunately, restore the lives that have been lost or fix the damage done to American prestige by the coup in Kyiv in 2014.
Footnote 1: Weigel’s writing is replete with anecdotal citation to Russian atrocities in conducting war. His readers should be careful. Atrocities occur on both sides of war and are often not the result of national policy, but individual failure. A primary reason to avoid war is the moral quandaries it causes for people handed weapons and told to kill or be killed. And, too, atrocities are sometimes fabricated as a casus belli.
On the latter point, the think tank Weigel runs in Washington D.C. has on its website an article penned by its founder titled, The Essential CIA. The article speaks favorably of “massive deception” to achieve foreign policy objectives, quoting Churchill: “In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
The events in Kyiv may provide a prime example. Ukraine’s democratically elected government was toppled in 2014 after snipers fired into a crowd of protesters. Weigel immediately connected the attack to Yanukovych in the Kyiv Post, calling it murder, and comparing it to the Holodomor, Stalin’s Soviet backed famine in Ukraine.
Subsequent investigation reveals that the event should not be connected to Yanukovych’s government but was possibly a false flag attack by those advocating for the coup. Given recent revelations about USAID’s funding of media operations in Ukraine, it is fair to question the source of the story.
Mostly, what makes Weigel’s citation to atrocity particularly out of place is his failure to ever address alleged war crimes committed by the Ukraine regime, except with absolute dismissiveness. A true moral leader would criticize the sin regardless of his political alignment for or against the sinner.
Footnote 2: The title of this essay may seem to denigrate St. John Paul II. It is not meant to. The book Weigel wrote is not an official biography. Whatever St. John Paul II’s beliefs were about American soft power, George Weigel, and the National Endowment for Democracy, he kept them to himself. Likely, if presented the facts recounted above, he would have wagged his finger and chastised Weigel, because he disagreed to the point of visible anger with those who incite wars in the name of Catholicism.
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