The Role of Rome

...The Soviet collapse that should be his spectacular denouement is simply another brief section in his final chapter, "Perestroika.' He can't work up a good gee whiz...

...Because it is a survey??what we jour-nalists would call (not necessarily deridingly) "a clip job"??the insights come from the writer's style rather than from any original spadework...

...Writing about his Church, Weigel could never be mistaken for an impartial observer either...

...Weigel is gee whiz all the way...

...Nevertheless, this is damed important stuff, as Weigel recognizes...

...Communist governments are always "regimes...

...what was once thought to be God's heaven is now mapped by astronomers with space telescopes and chronicled by physicists with carbon dating equipment...

...economy to build a global military machine, John Paul II saw the chink in the breastplate of the beast's armor and went for it...

...Credit for overthrowing the Soviets has been claimed by any number of politicians, military strategists and economic theorists...

...A long-time history professor at Cambridge University, Chadwick writes with a charm and humor that is surprising, since his book is a historical survey...

...It seems the government wanted to exploit the large audience and grand video backdrop to spread some State propaganda putting the Church in its place...

...Nowhere in either of these volumes will you find the subterranean history of the Vatican's dealings with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, or more than a brief mention by Chadwick that the Vatican was involved in any kind of banking scandals...

...Weigel devotes many paragraphs to the genius of the measure, and declares that it "had a decisive impact on the subsequent history of the Church's approach to politics...

...He quotes high-ranking Church officials from Eastern and Western Europe who have insiders' knowledge...

...Throughout its history till then, the Church had repressed other people's freedom of religion...

...And style is the source of both the book's strength and its weakness...

...The Church has even got around, a little late, to, in effect, pardoning Galileo...

...Learning this??we aren't told how??the Pope arranged to drag the ceremony out four hours despite inevitable tediousness, cleverly foiling the Polish government's plans...

...Nor is he subtle...

...Most of the missing money seems to have been stolen by corrupt businessmen, but the Vatican's role has never been laid out...

...When Deep Throat told Bob Woodward, "Follow the money," it sounded almost laughably prosaic, at least to investigative reporter types...

...He probably could tell great tales if he wanted to...

...That is not a failing one could fairly ascribe to George Weigel in his book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism...

...you begin to wonder if somewhere, somehow, there isn't something good to be said about bank robbery...

...He sees the government upheavals of 1989 as the final revolution in human history, trumping Marx'??a "revolution of conscience and the revitalization of the human spirit" in which morality and religious values triumph...

...He quotes his best sources admiringly, as friends, as if it would be disrespectful to press them for details they don't choose to volunteer...

...According to Weigel's source, a "senior Vatican official," this long format was to accommodate both the installation and an added commentary by Polish government officials...

...Take the 1965 vote of the Second Vatican Council to support freedom of religion, a decision that turned out to be even more momentous than it seemed at the time...

...the other is entitled The Reformation...

...As Chadwick puts it succinctly, "It was Catholic dogma that there cannot be liberty to teach error...

...While Ronald Reagan pursued the beast by fueling wars among Third Worlders and sapping the competitive energy of the U.S...

...Weigel does quite well showing the pressure that the Church's human rights stance brought on the Kremlin...

...But it is advice these two authors could have used...

...Whatever the case, the religious component of the dagger that rent the heart of the Soviet system??a component I suspect was preeminent??merits much more explication than it has so far received...

...But mostly, instead of plumbing his sources for stories that haven't been told, Weigel quotes passage after passage from other writers who have already told their stories at length: Timothy Garten Ash, Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik and the like...

...Cynically, the governments tried to repress the churches in every conceivable way without overtly admitting what they were doing...

...The doctrine was somewhat akin to that of, say, Stalin...

...indefatigably, the Church leaders made what compromises they had to in order to stay in business and chip away at the system...

...Now the shoe was on the other foot, and the same Church that had condemned Galileo (not to mention a lot of less famous folk) stood up as a champion of human rights...

...Others say religion remains a driving force in most people's lives, and have reproached what they see as efforts by an intellectual and media elite to devalue it...

...He also misses a good story: Chadwick lists the current John Paul II, then bishop of Krakow, as a critical supporter of the human rights movement at Vatican II...

...If you want to read a fascinating, in-the-trenches account of how the Church helped overthrow the government of Poland, you will find more of it in the two books of anthropologist Janine Wedel (The Private Poland, Facts on File, 1986, and The Unplanned Society, Columbia University Press, 1991...

...This is a telling judgment...

...The one a novice would logically read first, because it provides an orderly background for the shocking events of the late 1980s, is The Christian Church in the Cold War by Owen Chadwick...

...What happened to the Soviet empire does not necessarily prove the existence of God, or the need for religion in the Scientific Age...

...Weigel and Chadwick further neglect to prepare readers for the battles currently being waged over how much power the Church will have in the new Europe...

...now working on a biography of Pope John Paul II Some say the relevance of religion is declining...

...Who was contesting it...

...Weigel, unfortunately, isn't a particularly graceful writer himself...

...Chadwick, in contrast, is willing to play with the full deck...

...Weigel apparently thinks intramural fighting is unseemly and avoids talking about it...

...Literally billions of dollars disappeared from large Italian banks that were heavily involved with the Vatican, while bags of cash were transported from Rome to Solidarity units in Poland...

...Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and Afghanistan are not in Chadwick's index, even though they are largely very religious countries...

...Nowhere does he treat it or try to explain it as such...

...They are "brutish and cruel: the dictatorship of thugs...

...For example, when John Paul II was planning his installation in 1978, he learned that Polish State Television was allotting four hours to the event...

...But from what I have seen in Eastern Europe and West and Central Asia over many years??especially in the course of making two PBS documentaries in Poland in 1988??a lot of the credit, maybe the bulk of it, belongs in Rome, and to a real if much lesser extent, Mecca...

...But he is at heart a cheerleader, not a reporter, and therefore has not written the book he might have...

...His idea of the Cold War does not encompass most of the places President Reagan fought it...

...255 pp...

...Chadwick gives not only a concise catalogue of events but a feel for how churches and European Communist governments struggled in this half-century...

...for example, the debate over abortion laws in Poland, where at least some women think that not all the institutions of Communism were bad, or of the Church good...

...Weigel is a seminary graduate, the author or editor of 12 books, and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington...

...But reading this page after page is like listening to an FBI official lecture for two hours on the evils of bank robbery...

...Why would anybody have trouble passing such an innocuous measure as support for freedom of religion...

...Reviewed by Jonathan Kwitny Author, "Acceptable Risks...

...Their leaders are, collectively, "aging masters of the Kremlin,' or, as individuals, "a notorious lecher and drunkard...

...This was a good switch, not a bad switch...

...Two recent books help toward that end, both valuable, neither wholly satisfying...

...And so on...

...Still, The Final Revolution includes a few great bits...

...Perhaps it merely proves that the Communists erred in allowing religious institutions to continue with any independence, or that those institutions, whether through virtue or corruption, had attained such power they could not be swept away as easily as were tsars, kings and a democratically-elected official or two...

...He is, of course, essentially correct...

...But he focuses on a simple message, neatly summed up at the end of Chadwick's book: Western Europe has long had "the easy sense that freedom and human rights are independent of religions," while Eastern Europe now has "the painfully gained experience that the religious conscience is an ultimate safeguard of human freedom...

...People Weigel calls "good guys" triumph over people he calls "bad guys...

...Yet amazingly little attention has been paid by persons of either view to the pivotal role religion has just played in the premier political event of our times: the destruction of the Soviet empire and of what came to be called the Communist system...

...The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism By George Weigel Oxford...

...But when he says Vatican II "confirmed" the Catholic position in defense of human rights, rather than that it established the position in the face of some unhappy history, he isn't playing fair...

...At the same time Chadwick, for all his erudition, is so aloof and intellectual, he seems unaware that the juiciest and most politically significant news story of our time happened on his beat...

...The second chapter, "The Attack upon Christianity in Eastern Europe," 27 pages, consists of "The Secular Rites," "Monks and Nuns," "The State Control of the Churches," and "The Christian Cooperators...

...For example, the first chapter, "The Beginnings of the Cold War," is 16 pages and has six sections: "The Russian Conquests," "Reconstruction," and so forth...

...Chadwick can be fun to read, in the way that William F. Buckley Jr., William Safire and Alexander Cock burn are, despite the fact that the material is neatly laid out textbook fashion, with each chapter divided into brief sections...

...These passages are used merely to reiterate and bolster points Weigel has asserted, and they are not distinguished by particularly good prose...

...Any uninitiated reader is left to wonder: What's the big deal...

...That is Chadwick's chosen turf...

...Two hundred pages of that kind of stuff would have had me glued...

...It is number seven in the Penguin History of the Church, of which he is general editor, and the second in the series he has authored...

...He has tantalizingly good sources...