Witness to Hope

...Authorized Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II George Weigel Cliff Street Books—HarperCollins 992 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan T here are several reasons why George Weigel's new biography of John Paul II is far and away the best papal biography to date...

...Addressing the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization in 1992, for example, John Paul II argued that it was the "duty" of nations to engage in "humanitarian intervention," prompting a skeptical Weigel to observe that the Pope's speech "raised more questions than it answered" and "may have inadvertently contributed to the kind of policy paralysis that...led to ...avoidable calamities...

...But if Weigel is generally strongly supportive of the Pope, he does not hesitate to express occasional disagreement with papal pronouncements...

...communist regimes committed violent acts and maintained an enormous apparatus of repression on principle...

...Second, he's had regular access not only to high-ranking Church dignitaries, but to the Holy Father himself...

...I asked...

...First, Weigel is much smarter than previous biographers...

...In the case of Pope Leo the Great (440-461), the barbarians in question were Atilla and his I Ions...

...Similarly, Weigel argues that "the Vatican's performance in the Gulf War crisis between August 1990 and March 1991 did not meet the high standards set in the previous twelve years of the pontificate...

...of humanity and its destiny, create new tyrannies and compound human suffering...

...In December 1995, Weigel, who has been a close student of John Paul II for the past twenty years, and was in Rome to mark his twentieth wedding anniversary, was invited by the Holy Father for dinner...

...communist regimes were criminal enterprises by their very nature...

...To deal with these criminal regimes, John Paul II developed a strategy that Weigel calls "cultural resistance...

...In it, I summarized an incident that much impressed me in Tad Szulc's biography...

...Readers unaware of these and other errors in earlier studies may not recognize the degree to which Witness to Hope is a major work of investigative journalism—the product of Weigel's painstaking efforts to check out the assertions of previous biographers with the original sources...

...Batory, en route to New York...

...For the most important thing to know about John Paul II is that he is a man of God —a Christian radical and a mystic—and that everything he does in the public arena reflects his understanding of God's will...

...Religious differences notwithstanding, I think I can safely say "Amen" to that...

...How do you know...

...By contrast, Weigel demonstrates how the Pope's faith in God logically leadshim to affirm the transcendent dignity of man, and how his belief in human dignity logically leads him to oppose both Communism and abortion, the empire of lies and the "culture of death...

...88 December 1999/ January z000 • The American Spectator...

...In his view, strengthening Polish culture was the way to defeat Communism, and he was "far more interested in meeting and getting to know...

...That Weigel gained the access he requested, and that this helped him avoid the errors of previous biographers, is something that I can attest to from personal experience...

...Despite these criticisms, Weigel believes that John Paul II's relentless opposition to anything that detracts from human dignity will lead to his being remembered as one of the great Popes: If the Church of the future knows John Paul II as "John Paul the Great," it will be for this reason: at another moment of peril, when barbarisms of various sorts threatened civilization, a heroic figure was called from the Church to meet the barbarian threat and propose an alternative...

...Thus, when he was archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla made no effort to be a "player" in Polish politics by mingling with the Communist bigwigs...

...With a heavy heart, I excised Szulc's lovely but spurious account of papal philosemitism from my manuscript...

...In the case of Gregory the Great (590-64, the barbarians were the Loin-bards...

...He had begun to exorcise the fear, the anomie, and sense of hopelessness that had previously kept the 'we' of society from coalescing...

...When he became Pope, Wojtyla's strategy of cultural resistance helped give the Polish people the self-confidence to form the popular resistance movement known as Solidarity, and that, in turn, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire...

...Poland's leading philosophers, poets, and musicians than in spending time making useless banter with comThe American Spectator • December 1999/January 2000 87 munist leaders, no matter how exalted...

...By giving his people an experience of their individual dignity and collective authority," Weigel writes of the Pope's epochal 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, "John Paul II had already won a major victory from which there could be no retreat...

...Under a communist regime, terror was a routine way to maintain order, which could give communist regimes an air of invincibility...

...what Wyszynski actually said was that Wojtyla was "a poet" — not an insignificant difference...

...The child was Jewish, and had been raised by the woman on her own after his real mother perished in the Holocaust...

...Over roast chicken and a good wine," he recounts, "the Pope made it clear that he would be grateful if I would take on the task" of writing his biography...

...Later on in that same draft, I tried to explain why Poland's formidable Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski was initially unimpressed with Wojtyla...

...Because I spoke to the Pope about it, and he doesn't recall any such incident...

...and Definitive the access I needed to people and materials that I needed in order to tell the story adequately...

...Indeed, one gets the impression that if Weigel were asked for a bumper-sticker summary of the Pope's political philosophy, he'd come up with something like, "It's the culture, stupid...

...It was also agreed that officials of the Holy See would be informed of the Holy Father's interest in this work, and that I would have JOSEPH SHATrAN's new book, Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, has just been published by the Heritage Foundation...

...They have generally drawn a sharp distinction between the Pope's "reactionary" religious and social views, and his "progressive" support for human rights, leaving it to perplexed readers to figure out how John Paul II possibly could have acquired such a schizophrenic personality...

...Considering that earlier biographers include leftists like Tad Szulc, Carl Bernstein, and the late Jonathan Kwitny, that's not as great a compliment as it might seem...

...For one thing, Weigel is very knowledgeable about Communism, and unlike most journalists —but very much like the Pope himself—his view of Marxist-Leninist regimes is anything but "evenhanded...

...Explaining how the Church's Ostpolitik—its policy toward the Soviet bloc—changed after Karol Wojtyla became Pope, Weigel writes: Pope John Paul II knew the Church situation behind the iron curtain as only a native of east central Europe, familiar with the local languages and culture, could...

...I thought this incident wonderfully illustrated the Pope's broadmindedness, but Weigel assured me that it had never taken place...

...In the case of John Paul II, the barbarism threatening civilization has been a set of ideas whose consequences include barbarous politics—defective humanisms that, in the name...

...But Weigel's account is not your standard, politically correct kind of journalism...

...And fourth, he demonstrates—in a manner no previous biographer has—how the Pope's political, economic, and social views all form parts of a consistent whole, a coherent philosophy inspired by faith in God...

...This would appear to be a rather obvious point, yet it seems to have escaped most of his biographers...

...Shortly thereafter, young Hiller was aboard the S.S...

...Drawing on Jonathan Kwitny's account, I quoted Wyszynski as confiding to Bishop Ernest Primeau that Wojtyla was "an opportunist...

...Weigel is especially scathing in his treatment of Catholic critics of the Pope, but my belief in the Eleventh Commandment—"Thou shalt not interfere in other peoples' religious quarrels" — prevents me from discussing this aspect of his book in any detail...

...Primeau denied it...

...According to Szulc, when Karol Wojtyla (the future John Paul II) was a young priest in the rural Polish parish of Niegowic, he was asked by a woman parishioner to baptize a six-year-old boy named Hiller...

...Third, he has a very good understanding of the Communist beast that John Paul II helped to slay, and of the way in which he did it...

...But Weigel did secure the Pope's agreement "that he would make himself available to me on a regular basis...

...John Paul knew there was something radically different about communist regimes, a point that did not seem fully appreciated by the Vatican diplomats who conceived and executed Paul VI's Ostpolitik...

...T he Pope's role in the downfall of Communism is a crucial part of Karol Wojtyla's story, but it is not the whole story, and from the Pope's point of view, not even the main part of the story...

...Learning that the boy had a grandmother in the United States, Wojtyla decided that it would be "disloyal" to baptize him into the Catholic faith...

...Once again, George set me straight, informing me that he had contacted Bishop Primeau (Wyszynski died in 1981) and asked him whether the late Cardinal had indeed called Wojtyla an opportunist...

...Some job offers are hard to refuse, and this was one of them...

...That, of course, settled the matter...

...The "rule of law" in a communist regime was a fiction...

...Last summer, Weigel was kind enough to critique a draft of the chapter in my book about the heroes of the Cold War that deals with the Pope...

...All states commit criminal acts sometimes...

...The basic idea was that by reminding people of their cultural heritage —and particularly its religious component—Communist efforts to terrorize society into submission could be thwarted...