The Man of Our Age

...To be central in all three is unique...

...But he is in fact the first modern pope, and he stands as an astonishing figure: the man of our age—a radical thinker who has used the throne of one of the oldest institutions on earth to try to anchor modernity in truth, liberty, and respect for human dignity...

...But he has at the same time vehemently rejected "reactionary" attempts to undo Vatican II and return the Church to its nineteenth-century disdain for modernity...

...He grounds that hope and trust on his faith that man "is not alone" but lives with the abiding presence of God...

...He has clearly intended that project to be, as Weigel says, "accessible to everyone no matter what his or her religious disposition...

...Never believing it was enough simply to lament a falling away of faith or to assume that the formulations of the past were unproblem-atically adequate, Wojtyla sought from the beginning to discover a metaphysical foundation for modern humanism and democracy...

...The insistence on the truth was needed to strengthen and deepen the natural desire for liberty...

...Sapieha duly issued the invitation, and the two men sat alone at his formal table—to be served black bread made from acorns, jam made from beets, and ersatz coffee...

...He merely insisted on calling "good and evil by name...

...As a Polish bishop, Karol Wojtyla played a major part in that council, and as pope, John Paul II has continued to view Vatican II as fundamental...

...His early philosophical work, Person and Act, was an attempt to put an Aristotelian-Thomistic "philosophy of being" together with a "psychology of consciousness" derived from such thinkers as Max Scheler—to work out, in other words, the relation "between the objective truth of things-as-they-are and the subjective and personal experience of that truth...

...But now what I want to do is to live without being a liar...

...the categories of good and evil were needed to ground the contrast between freedom and oppression...

...In the end, however, one returns to what is most simple and most evident about John Paul II: his courage— physical, moral, and intellectual...

...The hundreds of pages devoted to John Paul's papacy are mostly gripping and compelling, thanks (as Weigel would be the first to say) to the narrative power and thematic clarity of the papacy they cover...

...After just a decade more, the Iron Curtain collapsed...

...George Weigel's Witness to Hope is a remarkably good read...

...But what makes John Paul II an extraordinary historical figure is his central role in three often distinct realms: in politics, religion, and ideas...

...No political leader did more than John Paul II to bring an end to the Cold War...

...It's not merely that the author is a gifted expositor of political, religious, and philosophical issues...

...Weigel reports the reaction of one twenty-five-year-old Polish physics student, for whom the pope's visit seemed to make the whole "artificial world" of the Communists collapse: "We might have to live and die under communism...

...Witness to Hope invites us to admire human excellence—and to reflect on the question of whether or not such excellence depends on a faith, like John Paul II's, that man is not, in the fundamental sense, alone...

...And few thinkers have confronted the crisis of modern humanism more directly than the pope...

...The first third of the book, covering the years before Wojtyla became pope, is a tale of a remarkable man doing important work under dramatic circumstances...

...in the life of the world, the life of the Church, and the life of the mind...

...The pope's argument cuts through the stale debate between liberationists and traditionalists, and makes a distinctive contribution not merely to Catholic thought, but to thought simply...

...A particularly striking example is John Paul II's teaching on men and women, sex and marriage...

...And that is a sign of the third aspect of John Paul II's achievement: his intellectual significance...

...Since Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II, no one has repeated Stalin's mocking question about how many army divisions the pope has...

...One thing that emerges from Weigel's account is just how impressive a man the pope is—a remarkable combination of deep piety and intellectual curiosity, of moral courage and human kindness...

...The result is a man whose vision and actions have confounded journalistic attempts to label him liberal or conservative...

...with which he began his papal ministry was the message he transmitted to his countrymen and millions of others throughout the world...

...John Paul II demands that we "learn not to be afraid," that we "rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust...

...Weigel argues that John Paul II's papacy is the most consequential in centuries...

...But the fact that his most recent encyclical, the 1998 Fides et Ratio, concerns the relation of faith and reason is proof that he has sustained the project through his entire life...

...He argued that the distinct roles of men and women are consistent with their equal dignity, and that marriage, with "the self-giving love of sexual communion," can be the experience "that begins to make God comprehensible to human beings...

...Western liberalism, with its technological might and its ability to spread a kind of skepticism that helps undermine totalitarianism, played an important part in winning the Cold War...

...This part of the narrative is, perforce, somewhat less dramatic...

...What makes this new book a thorough success—proof that an old-fashioned, vivid, and complete biography of a public figure is still possible—is Weigel's ability to tell a story well...

...as a result, the endless procession of papal visits and encyclicals occasionally becomes an obstacle to the book's narrative power and thematic clarity...

...But only occasionally...

...Wojtyla's effort to tie together freedom and truth, and indeed to argue the identity of the truth and the good, is a deep and difficult project...

...But, as Karol Wojtyla declared in his first address after his election as John Paul II in 1978: Be not afraid...

...A major player on the world stage and the administrative leader of the world's largest organized religion has set himself the profound philosophical task of defending, for believers and non-believers alike, the intelligibility of the world against the radical skepticism and moral relativism of the age...

...He has also written, in his new biography of Pope John Paul II, a very weighty book—992 pages long—dealing with weighty matters: society and politics in Poland, the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, the foreign policy of the Holy See, the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and much more...

...Living through the most unfortunate decades in Polish history, the future pope was astonishingly fortunate in his mentors and associates...

...One learns about Poland between the World Wars, about life under the Nazis and the Communists, about Wojtyla's religious and intellectual struggles, and about the men and women with whom he worked, almost all of them unknown in the West...

...To be a figure in any one of these is an accomplishment reserved to few...

...Here he has been a true radical, "for whom change means returning to the Church's roots which he believes are expressions of Christ's will...

...Weigel properly sets himself to cover the pope's public life in a comprehensive way...

...Weigel makes the case that John Paul II's political impact came about precisely because he did not primarily seek to be political, or to think or speak politically...

...An early American magazine story, relating John Paul II's extensive, televised travels and the huge crowds gathering in locations around the world for his visits, dubbed him the first "postmodern pope...

...Throughout his pontificate, the pope has sternly rejected "progressive" attempts to use Vatican II to water down the Church's distinctive teachings...

...One meets, for instance, the "uncrowned King of Poland" during World War II, Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha, who has remained Wojtyla's model of religious and moral leadership for more than half a century...

...any reader of Weigel's previous work would expect that sort of clear and intelligent analysis...

...Early on, Wojtyla came to the view that the crisis of the modern world was first of all a crisis of ideas...

...But of course Wojtyla did become pope on October 16, 1978, the first non-Italian pontiff in 455 years, the first from eastern Europe ever...

...extraordinary times, he has a terrific story to tell...

...Weigel convincingly argues that this marked a decisive moment, the beginning of the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...

...The message "Be not afraid...

...Decades later, John Paul proposed "one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries," as he addressed the challenges of the sexual revolution and feminism...

...You have to stop for a moment to recognize just how significant this is...

...That, and the fact that with John Paul II, an extraordinary man living in William Kristol is editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard...

...He has done this by seeking above all to secure and build on the legacy of Vatican II, "the council at which the Catholic Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, came to grips with modernity...

...Weigel tells the story of how the Nazi governor of Poland, Hans Frank, looking for some sliver of legitimacy, forced Sapieha to invite him to the archbishop's palace...

...Weigel devotes two-thirds of his study to the most recent twenty years of his life...

...But Weigel argues convincingly that the liberal assault on communism could not have succeeded without the accompanying Christian assault...

...Even the liberal intellectual Adam Michnik was struck by the pope's ability, in June 1979, to appeal to the consciences of both believers and non-believers...

...No religious figure has had more impact in this century than John Paul II has had on the Roman Catholic Church...

...As Weigel points out, Wojtyla's first book was on the ethics of married life, and it raised "more than one clerical eyebrow by its celebration of human sexuality as a gift of God for the sanctification of husband and wife...

...The pope helped bring down the evil empire not because of some grand strategic insight (though he was certainly capable of canny political strategy), but because he launched an authentic and deep challenge to the lies that made Communist rule possible...

...One of the more revelatory aspects of Witness to Hope, to those of us who are not Catholic, is the demonstration of how bold and radical John Paul II has been in his efforts to reshape the Church to be a more effective teacher and evangelizer...

...Faith is, of course, at the center of John Paul II's being, and the revital-ization of Christian faith has been at the heart of his efforts, first as a priest, then bishop, then pope...

...The creation of Solidarity followed a year and a half later, and the Polish regime never recovered...

...While Frank glared down the table, the archbishop explained that this was the ration available on the food coupons distributed by the Nazis, and he couldn't risk dealing on the black market...

...And if he had not become, at age fifty-eight, the 264th bishop of Rome—if George Weigel had written merely a biography of a man named Karol Wojtyla—it would still be very much worth reading...

...Among the most moving and dramatic parts of Witness to Hope is Weigel's account of John Paul II's first visit to Poland, in June 1979...

...Aristotle claims that courage is the first of the virtues, because it makes possible all the others...