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Letter to a Priest book cover
Letter to a Priest
1951
First Published
4.01
Average Rating
96
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Simone Weil, the renowned French philosopher and political activist, originally wrote this letter to a priest in the autumn of 1942 while waiting in New York to join the Free French movement. The most accessable discussion that exists of her complicated ideas on religion and her lifelong spiritual struggle, Letter to a Priest outlines thirty-five key questions about Catholicism, its dogma and institutions, all of which had preoccupied Weil for years. Each point reveals Weil's simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion toward the Church as she contemplated its presence in her own life. In her letter, Weil asks the priest to reply categorically to each point she raises and to indicate whether her opinions will allow her to be received into the Church. Written just a year before she died at the age of thirty-four, it is believed that Weil never received a reply to this letter.

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Author

Simone Weil
Simone Weil
Author · 31 books
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".
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