His Holiness
Bernstein, Carl & Politi, Marco
BOOKS IN REVIEW The Most Modern of Men His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi Doubleday / $27.50 /582 pages REVIEWED BY William McGurn I...
...Not only had he quoted the pope," write Bernstein and Politi, "in the religious cadences of his rhetoric, Ronald Reagan had begun to sound like the pope...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Most Modern of Men His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi Doubleday / $27.50 /582 pages REVIEWED BY William McGurn I have met John Paul twice in my life...
...But the failure to grasp John Paul's priorities—however much one might disagree with them—ultimately is to fail as biography, especially in a work that purports to be a "definitive portrait...
...Looking at the hunched figure before us, his hand shaking from Parkinson's, I understood how he might look forward to that day with relief...
...But the real Achilles heel is the insistence of the authors on taking the pope's politics more seriously than his theology...
...Like the Politburo chieftains who couldn't see how the pope's insistence on truth was shifting the terms of debate, the authors' insistence on viewing everything through a political lens means missing the larger story...
...Although Polish state television had been under strict instruction not to allow its cameras to pan the crowd, the electricity generated by the pope's presence was not to be denied...
...He still had the look of a boxer, to be sure, but one who had gone more rounds than a human body was meant to endure...
...Clearly there was something special between this pope and this president—even apart from a shared belief that they had been spared by Providence in the assassination attempts against them to play some role in the liberation of Eastern Europe...
...For example, the idea that the blessing extended to Bill Casey during the latter's trip to Rome implied a Vatican imprimatur on CIA operations, is laughable...
...In the coming days, the meaning of the insistent clanging of those bells would become nearer to millions of people...
...Nor is it a surprise that Bernstein and Politi, given their positions within that Kultur, would find this the most dubious part of his enterprise...
...At the outset of their work Bernstein and Politi recall the church bells that rang across Poland upon his landing in Warsaw: As the pope knelt to kiss the ground at Okecie Airport and hugged two little girls who came to pay him homage with big bouquets of white and red carnations (the colors of Poland) and white and yellow lilies (the colors of the Vatican), the sound of those bells was lapping across the frontiers of East Germany, crossing the border of Czecho- slovakia, hurdling the barriers of Ukraine and Byelorussia in the Soviet Union and of Catholic Lithuania...
...In the decade since I had last seen him up close, Mikhail Gorbachev had come WILLIAM MCGURN is senior editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review...
...In front of an image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the pope attacked a society that would eliminate the truth of God and, by extension, the truth of man...
...The first time was back in August 1987 at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, when a friend in the diplomatic corps squeezed me into an audience the pope was giving to a congressional delegation led by Charles Rangel of New York...
...as Castro has just demonstrated, popes are in the business of blessings...
...Later still they talk of "both powers pursu[ing] their individual goals down parallel tracks," which hardly sounds like an alliance at all...
...Wojciech Jaruzelski, summoned by his Kremlin bosses, was dressed down by the Soviet minister for defense and the head of the KGB for letting Solidarity and the church get out of hand...
...and the United States had backed down, in the face of the pope's almost solitary campaign against it, on plans to use the U.N...
...Jaruzelski himself quotes Brezhnev's constant kvetching about all the building permits he, Jaruzelski, had allowed to be issued for churches: "'The church, after all, was our enemy,' Brezhnev said...
...The Bush people never understood what that place [the Vatican] was about," a former diplomat once confided to me...
...Again, one does not have to agree with the pope to recognize that having routed Communism he might have some harsh things to say about the Kultur of the West...
...Apart from those who have reason to suspect they might appear in its index, most Catholics tend to treat a book like His Holiness with indifference, operating on the assumption that it is directed not at them but to a general audience to whom the Roman church remains a bit of exotica...
...They are not the same thing...
...The portrait that thus emerges —"the angry pope," as the chapter head calls it—is drawn almost entirely by his enemies, from the late Peter Hebblewaithe, an ex-priest and reporter for Britain's leading Catholic paper, the Tablet, to dissenting U.S...
...John Paul chose his words carefully...
...By any criteria, however, the story of Karol Wojtyla is an extraordinary one...
...conference chief, Nafis Sadik...
...By treating only politics as real and the rest as marginal, Bernstein and Politi miss the compelling irony of John Paul: the radical political implications that flow from an apolitical emphasis on the Gospel (especially within totalitarian societies...
...But Bernstein and Politi overplay what is already a good hand here by using the American I The American Spectator • January 1997 67 card to proclaim a "Holy Alliance" between Rome and Reagan to do precisely what Brezhnev feared...
...the Berlin Wall had been breached...
...It was something never appreciated by Reagan's more pinstriped Republican successors, whose failure to grasp the passion of religious and ethnic feelings helps explain the muddled44 As Catholics, these men 'intuitively' understood what the pope was up to and how it might work to America's advantage...
...traditional in theology but radical in implementation...
...Archbishop Rembert Weakland and former Planned Parenthood chief Faye Wattleton, a seemingly unlikely associate for a papal biography yet one who is thanked by name in the authors' acknowledgments...
...68 January 1997 • The American Spectator...
...sooner or later it would gag in our throats, it would suffocate us.'" So far so good...
...1 bole...
...For those familiar with the Woodstein canon, His Holiness hews close to formula: a titillating thesis, delivered in dramatic form with an emphasis on quantity of research (interviews with "more than three hundred individuals") meant to compensate for the obvious problem of not having had a one-on-one interview with the subject himself...
...Not an outright miracle perhaps, but certainly not in the realm of the ordinary...
...In between his worries that it might turn out to be a one-way trip, Jaruzelski realized "if at that time I were a Russian general looking at the map of Europe and the world, I would be for intervention...
...The Soviets had a case...
...Gradually we settled and hushed...
...Up we went on the long steps of the Scala Regia, past the Swiss Guards, past the statue of Constantine visible from the portico of St...
...None of this prevents the authors from divining exactly what was on the pope's mind at any given time, all delivered with an aura of infallibility any bishop of Rome might envy...
...As the authors point out early on, the significance of these men was not any coordinated plan of action but that, as Catholics, they "intuitively" understood what the pope was up to and how it might work to the advantage of the United States...
...He doesn't like women," explains Sadik...
...The account of the pope's opposition to the 1994 Cairo conference on population, for example, is drawn exclusively from a reconstruction offered by the head of the U.N...
...The other was that in his presence even Congressman Rangel exuded a genuine humility...
...To ears not attuned to the nuances of church relations, it might sound like pious hyper-•4 He still had the look of a boxer, but one who had gone more rounds than a human body was meant to endure...
...In the scheme of things this might be thought a minor failing, especially given the vivid chronicle of the pope's role in the events leading up to the revolutions of 1989...
...Conference on Population and Development in Cairo to establish a worldwide right to abortion...
...Listening to this message on Warsaw's Victory Square, Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state, realized that "Wojtyla had abruptly canceled the whole Eastern policy— Ostpolitik — promoted by the Vatican for the past twenty years...
...From the vantage point of today, when we know how the story ended, it is difficult to capture what it meant in 1979 for a Slavic pope to be received in triumph in his native land: Jimmy Carter was still president...
...Looking at the eyes peering out at us from that magnificent Polish face, I thought of the special tour my family had had the previous day of the Scavi, the special excavations underneath the altar of St...
...The book's prescience varies considerably according to its three broad topics: a first part that deals with the pope's early life, which is interesting, if largely lifted from previously published Polish materials...
...At the appointed hour we made our way to the entrance to the papal apartments...
...And if that seems just a tad incongruous, he would acquire as co-author an Italian newsman with almost mirror credentials: Marco Politi, a longtime papal watcher for the left-leaning daily La Repubblica...
...and the Soviets would invade Afghanistan that December...
...Two things remain fixed in my mind from that encounter...
...But the Soviets recognized from the outset that any compromise would prove the death knell for socialism...
...liberal in culture but hidebound in morals...
...at one point, the authors rightly compare Reagan's now-famous Notre Dame speech—where he dismissed Communism as "a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written" — to similar statements the pope had been making at the time...
...Doubtless they would be mortified to learn that John Paul thought Reagan far more sophisticated than Bush, and said as much to Gorbachev...
...In the end, treating the pope on their terms rather than his means presenting him not as a coherent whole but as a mass of contradictions: heroic in Poland but reactionary in Chile...
...Yet it was not the church triumphant we saw in this pope...
...From their offices, Polish First Secretary Edward Gierek and other members of the Politburo watched the spectacle on TV...
...And of course it all overlooks one salient point: John Paul began his campaign for Eastern Europe in 1978 upon his election as pope, more than two years before Reagan entered the White House...
...The result is, if not the "definitive portrait" the dust jacket claims, a work that hits a surprising number of high notes...
...Up to a point, Lord Copper...
...Had I not been asked to review this book, I doubt I would have read it...
...Peter's, on the spot where the Apostle's bones are thought to rest...
...and a final part dealing with the post-collapse redeployment of the pope's legions against what he has called a "cul66 January 1997 • The American Spectator ture of death," where the treatment is about what one might expect...
...It reminds me of a warning once passed on by the cardinal of Paris, Archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger: "Do not confuse a modern man with an American liberal...
...Jaruzelski believed that the nature of Polish society demanded some limited rapprochement between church and state...
...The first was how small the pope was, almost petite and yet unequivocally muscular, like a Korean boxer...
...And when John Paul finally entered, I was again startled by his appearance...
...It is telling, for example, that in James Baker's memoirs, John Paul isn't mentioned...
...Certainly there was a synergy between the two leaders...
...And in an age where the Madonna of Titian has been superseded by the Madonna of MTV, Chastity is the lesbian daughter of Cher, and Jesus Christ a superstar, it is only fitting that John Paul would attract as his Boswell a corresponding star in his own field, Carl Bernstein...
...The next time most of you see these," he told us, "will be as the TV cameras follow John Paul's mortal remains to their final resting place...
...Nowhere is the book stronger than in the first pages, where the two men reconstruct John Paul's first trip to Poland as pope...
...N of that Bernstein and Politi are without their own howlers...
...Without doubt there was a mutuality of interests at work, and the extraordinary number of Catholics within the Reagan administration ranks (invariably described as "devout," itself invariably meant as an antonym for "progressive") is striking, from Bill Casey at the CIA to Richard Allen, the first national security chief, Vernon Walters, ambassador-at-large, and Reagan himself, born of an Irish-Catholic father...
...and so on, right on down the line...
...The evidence they give for a real alliance, however, is thin...
...Still, Bernstein and Politi are not entirely off base...
...Toward the end, the fresh-faced American seminarian guiding us pointed to the murals on the ceilings surrounding the crypt...
...American hostages had been seized in Iran...
...Though the authors more than demonstrate the Soviets' primitive understanding of the church (apparently they believed that the CIA had helped fix Wojtyla's election as pope), Politburo minutes and the personal reminiscences of Jaruzelski and Gierek suggest that they had a far better appreciation than Jaruzelski of where John Paul was taking them...
...The more the authors explain, the more it looks like Holy Alliance was simply a handy catch-phrase to help them sell books...
...a second part which chronicles John Paul's challenge to, and ultimate triumph over, the established Communist order of Eastern Europe—which borders on the epic...
...But with Solzhenitsyn, John Paul believed "the refusal to lie was the most powerful means of provoking a crisis in any totalitarian state," and upon this rock he would build his church...
...any doubts on this score ought to have been resolved by the recent elections where the only support Daniel Ortega might point to came from Jimmy Carter...
...Ditto for the book's treatment of Latin America divided between a "church of the people" (liberation theology) aligned with the Sandinistas and a church of the establishment...
...My second encounter came in March, when I was back in Rome for a Vatican conference on economics featuring Nobel laureate Gary Becker...
...Over the next few hundred pages, Bernstein and Politi chronicle John Paul's pivotal role in the events that ultimately turned the Brezhnev Doctrine on its head...
...Particularly vivid is their account of a secret 1981 rendezvous in a railway carriage at the border city of Brest-Litovsk where Gen...
...Of the hundreds of source notes, for example, the only direct quotations from John Paul that Politi provides are obviously back-of-the-plane asides delivered to a group of reporters in the course of one of his trips...
...For the many millions around the world who each Sunday reaffirm their faith in "one holy, Catholic and apostolic church," the idea of trying to render into words the power of a pope like John Paul is an exercise doomed to fall flat...
...Lech Walesa had moved from outlaw union leader to president of a new Polish republic...
...cap in hand to these gates...
...Thus Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life"), probably the greatest encyclical of John Paul's papacy and capstone of his thought, is reduced to an ethereal policy platform on abortion and euthanasia...
...response to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia...
...Peter's, until presently we were led to a reception room featuring walls covered with Flemish tapestries and a thronish-looking chair...
...To them it was just the Catholic vote...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
