Wojtyla writ large, and long. - Review - book reviews

Commonweal, Oct 22, 1999 by Eamon Duffy

Witness to Hope; The Biography of Pope John Paul II By George Weigel HarperCollins, $35, 992 pp.

No one can write an entirely successful biography of a living pope. Not only does the biographer lack access to fundamental sources such as diaries and private letters, but he is denied the perspective which only time-and death-can bring to any life. If he is a Catholic and sympathetic to his subject, he is further constrained by the glamour of the papal office. A living pope is always the greatest and best of men; but after death, as we used to be told in catechism classes, there comes the judgment.

In this doomed enterprise, nevertheless, George Weigel starts with some formidable advantages. An experienced commentator on religion and public affairs, he is one of America's most intelligent Catholic conservatives. He has a short way with the more brainless forms of left-wing claptrap (evident here, for example, in his discussion of Cuban political rhetoric), a vigorous and well-paced style, and the ability to explain and simplify complex ideas clearly and persuasively- crucial above all in interpreting this philosopher pope. He writes out of a passionate sympathy with his subject, whom he considers to be "the most compelling public figure in the world, the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead....the compleat Christian."

Moreover, he writes, he tells us, at the express invitation of the pope, issued during a "freewheeling conversation...over roast chicken and a good local wine." In preparing this formidable doorstop of a book, therefore, he has had regular access to John Paul II, in person and in writing, and the active cooperation of the Vatican bureaucracy. This is as near to the official view of the pontificate as we are likely to get.

Weigel's account of Papa Wojtyla makes two essential claims. In the first place, he insists, the pope is the best and truest interpreter of the theological vision of Vatican II, authoritative not authoritarian, moving beyond the stereotypes of liberal or conservative to offer a deeply evangelical understanding of the sources of renewal opened up by the council, winnowing with a sure hand the pernicious sixties chaff from the golden grain of genuine conciliar reform. He emphasizes Wojtyla's role in the formulation of the council's pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes), and insists that the pope's reading of the relation of the gospel to modernity is to be preferred to all others.

The second and related claim is that Wojtyla's philosophical humanism, emphasizing the fundamental dignity of human beings as free moral subjects, provides the providential antidote to the emptiness of modern atheism and secularism. The pope's teaching, he believes, provides the basis for a reorientation not only of Catholic moral theology, but of the church's conversation with secular culture, the implications of which will take generations to explore.

These are heady claims, but they are in line with Weigel's generally astral assessment of the stature and impact of his hero. It is hard to blame him. Wojtyla is by any standards a titanic human being, and his Polish career alone, told here in fascinating and moving detail, reads like the stuff of sensational fiction, rather than the sober fact it is: the austere and orphaned childhood; the wartime career as quarry worker and secret seminarian; the remarkable ministry as university chaplain and philosophy professor, conducted in canoes and mountain- climbing shelters as often as in lecture rooms, inspiring and sustaining a generation of young intellectuals, to whom he became (and remains) their own priest and friend Wujek; the cold-warrior bishop, appointed at the virtual insistence of an eager Communist regime, which discovered too late that it had helped promote its most wily and formidable opponent; the daring philosopher-poet, exploring and celebrating the moral meaning of human sexuality; the old-fashioned ascetic, thinly clad in shabby clothes, giving his blankets to the poor, spending whole nights prostrate before the tabernacle, like something from a film on the Cure d'Ars.

Weigel's enterprise runs into trouble, however, once Wojtyla becomes John Paul II. In part this is because of the sheer shapeless density of any papacy, and above all so long and hyperactive a papacy-by Weigel's count almost 90 foreign visits involving more than 3,000 addresses, 134 pastoral visits within Italy, 700 pastoral visits in Rome, 13 encyclicals, 9 apostolic constitutions, 36 apostolic letters, 600 ad limina addresses, 877 general audiences. Weigel does his best to impose some sort of order on this riot of material, and he has an enviable gift of narrative and expository compression. Inexorably, however, the story degenerates into one damn thing after another, and turning the page becomes less and less enticing: It is difficult to imagine anyone other than a reviewer reading the book from cover to cover.