George Weigel Headlines April 1 Event Honoring Archbishop Naumann
Benedictine College to Honor Pro-Life and Pro-Family Legacy of the Archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann, D.D. has served as the leader of Kansas City in Kansas for just over 20 years, where he has been a leader locally, nationally and internationally.
A special event will be held on Tuesday, April 1, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, in Shawnee, Kansas, in recognition of his legacy of the preservation of and support for life, marriage and family values.
George Weigel, biographer of Pope St. John Paul II and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) in Washington, D.C. will deliver a lecture at the event, and Benedictine College will present Naumann with the Transforming Culture in America Award.
The event, sponsored by Benedictine College and its Center for Family Life and in association with J.P. De Gance and his Communio program, is free and open to the public.
Weigel is a longtime friend of Archbishop Naumann and is a noted Catholic theologian, one of America’s leading intellectuals and NBC’s network analyst on the Vatican. He will speak on “The Family as the Vital Cell of Society: The Genius of St. John Paul II.”
“The Benedictine Center for Family Life is inspired and motivated by the grand vision of St. John Paul II for the family as God’s way of shaping a culture of love,” said Tory Baucum, director of Benedictine’s Center for Family Life. “Archbishop Naumann was consecrated to his apostolic office by Pope John Paul II, and he has made the Pope’s vision of the family his own.”
Learn more about the Center for Family Life.
Archbishop Naumann has always been very active within the Church on issues of marriage and life. He served as Chairman of the Kansas Catholic Conference and was a member of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee (CCB) on Marriage and Family Life. He was also chosen by his brother bishops to lead the U.S. CCB’s Committee of Pro-Life Activities.
The pro-life cause has long been of importance to Archbishop Naumann. While serving as archdiocesan pro-life coordinator in St. Louis, the archdiocese established a Project Rachel ministry for women recovering from abortion, as well as the Lifeline Coalition. He was a founding board member of the Vitae Foundation, which promotes effective pro-life messaging. He is also a regular participant in the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, supports a variety of pro-life organizations, and regularly participates in pro-life rosaries in front of abortion clinics.
“The pro-life issue has been, and remains, one of the paramount moral issues that the Church tries to give some guidance on to our own people, as well as society at large,” Archbishop Naumann told the Catholic World Report in 2017.
His friend, George Weigel, is perhaps best known for his widely translated and internationally acclaimed two-volume biography of Pope St. John Paul II: the New York Times bestseller, Witness to Hope (1999), and its sequel, The End and the Beginning (2010). In 2017, Weigel published a memoir of the experiences that led to his work as a papal biographer: Lessons in Hope — My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II. He is the author or editor of more than 30 other books, many of which have been translated into other languages. His essays, op-ed columns, and reviews appear regularly in major opinion journals and newspapers across the United States. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is also Senior Vatican Analyst for NBC News. His weekly column, “The Catholic Difference,” is syndicated to 91 newspapers and magazines in five countries.
