An Odd Brief for the Pope

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...Nor was the United States of any help after the implosion of the Communist empire between 1989 and 1991: "Instead of extending unconditional help to the new post-communist Poland, the United States and other Western countries used their leverage to push for—even impose—their own policies...

...B&An Odd Brief for the Pope Jonathan Kwitny's "Man of the Century" By James Nuechterlein Of the many possible reasons for writing a biography of Pope John Paul II, that of launching an attack on American foreign policy would not come first—or ever—to most people's minds...

...But he is in fact the deeply spiritual shepherd of the Catholic church...

...The fundamental problem with Man of the Century—oddly enough, given its title—is that it underestimates its subject...

...Indeed, the Reagan administration, concerned only with developing massive military superiority over the Soviet Union, evinced no interest in the burgeoning underground people's movement in Eastern Europe...

...Kwitny, a longtime investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal and PBS, is an indefatigable researcher, and he has tracked down and interviewed everyone he could from the pope's past, especially from his early years in Poland...

...He thrashes about in evident confusion for a few paragraphs and then finally dismisses the teaching— which he seems to think peculiar to John Paul II—as "an oxymoron...

...But Kwitny is simply and demon-strably wrong to insist on a straight line in John Paul's views stretching unbroken from his youthful writings to the pathbreaking Centesimus Annus in 1991...

...And Kwitny's insistence that the Reagan administration was antipathetic to the Solidarity movement is so counterintuitive—how could so fervent an anti-Communist as Ronald Reagan not rejoice in Solidarity's successes?— that it will take far more than Kwit-ny's partial and ambiguous evidence to establish it...

...But that is precisely what Jonathan Kwit-ny has done in this most improbable book...

...Yet it was that movement—quietly nurtured by Wojtyla both before and after his ascent to the Holy See in 1978—that was undermining communism from within...

...Kwitny prints extracts from an early manuscript of Karol Wojtyla's, Catholic Social Ethics, first distributed in 1953 when the future pope was 33...

...Kwitny appears to sense his limitations here, for his animadversions on moral and theological matters are for the most part far more restrained than his political judgments...

...John Paul II, according to Kwitny, has always been a man of this collec-tivist, neo-pacifist center...

...This view makes the Vicar of Christ an essentially political actor whose clerical duties are an afterthought to his real work...

...That is the more so because Kwitny's secondary theme is that the pope's social-democratic instincts again placed him entirely at odds with the reactionaries in control of American politics during most of his papacy...

...Kwitny is a near-obsessive critic of the Reagan and Bush administrations, and he emphasizes throughout Man of the Century the pope's own distancing from those presidents' foreign and domestic policies...

...John Paul II's early views on these issues reflected the tradition of Catholic social thought dating from Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, a tradition that was both anti-socialist and strongly opposed to an unregulated and purely individualistic capitalism...

...In addressing, for example, the pope's eloquent reminder in Veri-tatis Splendor (1993) of the classic Christian teaching that freedom, rightly understood, must always be oriented to truth, he is utterly at a loss...

...Little wonder, Kwitny suggests, that voters in Eastern Europe have in recent years been restoring former Communists to power...

...Washington had nothing to do with the collapse of communism, he repeatedly asserts...

...And John Paul's hopes for a renewed post-Communist Eastern Europe were further undercut by the reactionary and self-aggrandizing behavior of much of the Catholic hierarchy...

...One needn't be a Catholic to write an adequate biography of a pope, but one must at least have a feel for Christian doctrine that Kwitny, on the evidence of this book, does not...

...If the pope does not come off, in Kwitny's hands, as quite the monster of reaction that Catholic liberals make him out to be, he remains inadequately sympathetic to modern developments in morality and doctrine, a man, in the end, sadly out of step with his times...

...However unsavory their pasts, the ex-Communists seem preferable "to law-of-the-jun-gle capitalists or Catholic theocrats...

...indeed, its blundering throughout the Cold War was counterproductive...

...Thus, according to Kwitny, "Not only did the White House deny aid to a desperate Solidarity" after the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981, it even "tried to help John Paul's opponents destroy Solidarity...

...Such views undoubtedly placed him at some variance with Republican-party platforms circa 1980-1992...

...In addressing John Paul II's impact on the Roman Catholic church, he attempts to be evenhanded, though he can never entirely hide his sympathy for Catholic progressives and dissenters...

...He is not so much custodian of the sacred mysteries as protagonist of a (non-Communist) social gospel...

...In the end, John Paul II did not ascend the throne of Peter in order to end the Cold War, dismantle communism, and establish Catholic social teaching as a third way between capitalism and socialism...

...Indeed, the sections on Karol Wojtyla's pre-papacy years are easily the book's most informative...

...The lesson to be learned from this poorly written and haphazardly organized volume is that when you start out with bad reasons for writing a book, you will likely wind up with a product to match...

...He begins with a car-toonish view of international relations during John Paul II's reign that depicts equally pernicious adversaries—the United States and the Soviet Union—both determined to impose their evil systems on the world: oppressive capitalism versus tyrannical communism...

...They trace Wojtyla's development from an intelligent, vigorous, and romantic youth who contemplated a life in the theater to his rapid rise in the church as parish priest, professor, bishop, archbishop, and cardinal...

...He has a general sympathy for his subject, but little real understanding...

...Throughout Eastern Europe, the United States advanced its program of "unfettered capitalism," again in opposition to the pope's own preferred social-democratic policies...

...What is one to make of all this...

...There is simply too much evidence to the contrary...

...Kwitny is relentless in elaboration of his thesis...

...Much the same mixed verdict applies to Kwitny's claims of a chasm between the pope and the Reagan and Bush administrations on matters of political economy...

...More generally, the pope did frequently distance himself from Reagan/Bush policies in international affairs on neo-pacifist grounds—as in, to cite perhaps the most notable example, the 1991 Gulf War...

...The closer the book gets to the present, though, the more it is deformed by the author's biases—and, judging by the footnotes, the more potential informants, perhaps warned off by suspicions of those biases, refused requests for interviews...

...Kwitny never entirely forgets that the pope is a Catholic, but his preoccupation with geopolitical concerns gives his biography a decidedly odd James Nuechterlein is editor of First Things...

...Too many files remain closed to the author, and too many key actors denied him interviews, for the reader to accept his dogmatic conclusions...

...Instead, communism fell mainly because of a "nonviolent mass movement"—manifested notably in the Solidarity movement in Poland—that was inspired and led by a churchman fundamentally at odds with American foreign policy...

...But without for a moment denying the pope's wisdom, courage, and influence, it is as foolishly exaggerated to attribute the end of communism entirely to John Paul II as it is to deny Ronald Reagan (or even Mikhail Gorbachev) any hand in it...

...The rise of Solidarity is a magnificent story, but it is hardly the central element in the collapse of the Soviet empire...

...He became persuaded, Kwitny tells us in the preface to Man of the Century, "that the story of the Cold War is widely misperceived...

...That manuscript, in Kwitny's view, endorses positions similar to those of liberation theologians, positions from which, he doggedly insists, Wojtyla has never departed...

...The organization and focus of Kwitny's book suggest that John Paul II is a predominantly political figure...

...Between these adversaries stands the third force of a Marxist-informed but non-Communist social democracy, represented in Eastern Europe by Solidarity and like-minded movements, and in Latin America by the proponents of "liberation theology...

...It is probably just as well that Kwitny does not put his primary focus on religious matters, for when he does address theological issues, he is tone-deaf...

...There was never any such alliance, Kwitny argues...

...The latter document is strikingly different in tone and emphasis from the earlier ones, and if it does not qualify the pope for membership on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, it even less makes him the implacable enemy of market economics that Kwitny takes him to be...

...Kwitny's efforts to reconcile that analysis with John Paul's repeated criticisms of liberation theology are exquisitely tortuous...

...He attacks with particular vehemence the notion of an anti-Communist "holy alliance" between John Paul II and President Reagan first reported by Carl Bernstein in a Time magazine cover story in 1992 and further developed in the book Bernstein wrote with Italian journalist Marco Politi in 1996, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time...

...Man of the Century is not entirely without merit...

...Kwitny is hardly the first to dispute the idea of a "holy alliance" between the Vatican and the White House: The critical response to the Bernstein/Politi book made clear that the notion of such an alliance was, at best, wildly overblown...