His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time. - book reviews

Cross Currents, Fall, 1998 by Ronald Burke

Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 582pp. $14.95 (paper).

Three recent and well-written books on popes deserve special attention. His Holiness, by Carl Bernstein of Watergate reporting fame, and Marco Politi, who has spent nearly twenty years covering the Vatican for Italian papers, combines excitement, suspense, and poignancy. It tells the heroic story of a young lad from Poland who repeatedly lost loved ones to death, struggled against Nazis and Communists, and became the first non-Italian pope in hundreds of years. Even more amazing, he was one of the most influential people in bringing about the demise of European communism - as Mikhail Gorbachev has himself testified. The story behind this success takes up a major portion of the book. Its suspense is intensified by the claim, first made by Bernstein (Time, Feb. 24, 1992), that the pope and President Reagan had entered upon a "sacred alliance . . . to hasten the dissolution of the communist empire."

The book's poignancy is more complex. John Paul II does epitomize de Gaulle's comment about the loneliness of true leaders. The young Wojtyla became withdrawn at the loss of family, becoming more "mystic and solitary." He worked and prayed harder and harder, kneeling to pray every midnight, developing a special devotion to the Virgin Mary and surprising respect for the controversial mystic, Padre Pio. There are few expressions of play and joy in his life. At one point the reader may think that a budding romance is being introduced, but it ends more quickly than it began. The sadness grows deeper at the conclusion, where the pope is shown as aging, ailing, and frustrated by his inability to alter what he sees as the immorality of the modern, western world. "With even more fury than he aimed at the Soviets (but with far less success)," he is portrayed as an elderly critic with anachronistic biases, struggling against modernity, diversity, and contemporary sexual ethics. But is it the pope's position that produces the reader's sense of poignancy, or is it due to mistaken emphases in the Bernstein-Politi portrayal? By focusing on John Paul II's position on sexuality and abortion, they leave little room for more significant aspects of his papacy, such as his ecumenical outreach to Orthodox and Protestant churches and his ongoing dialogue with Judaism.

Man of the Century, by Jonathan Kwitny, formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and host for the PBS news show The Kwitny Report, denies any secret alliance between Reagan and the pope, offering extensive evidence to contradict Bernstein's claim. The president and John Paul II attacked communism in very different ways. Wojtyla's opposition antedated any meeting with Reagan or William Casey, the "fervent Catholic" who, according to Bernstein, showed the pope "dozens of satellite photos" - with no obvious significance. True, the pope changed Vatican foreign policy from that of his predecessors. Rather than tolerating communism to win communism's tolerance for the church, he gave public expression to stern criticism of communism's disregard for the value of the individual and the sacredness of the individual's work. But this change is in accord with Wojtyla's earlier actions in Poland.

Kwitny reveals the existence and contents of a previously unmentioned book that Karol Wojtyla wrote and self-published in 1953, Catholic Social Ethics, which circulated among young intellectuals in Poland. The book outlines a policy of nonviolence and respect for workers, with criticism of Western capitalism as well as European communism. He argued that the communism that glorified equality and justice in theory had the responsibility to establish it in practice. While priest and prelate in Poland, Wojtyla tried to put his theory into practice, encouraging discussion groups, underground newspapers, covert priests, and people who late established the independent and decisively important labor union, Solidarity. After becoming pope, John Paul II returned to Poland and met with people in ways that inspired the continuing fight against communism.

The shift in Vatican policy may seem entirely compatible with U.S. opposition to communism, but compatibility does not equal conspiracy or alliance. Both Reagan and John Paul II contributed significantly, in their separate ways, to the fall of communism. But Kwitny shows that the Reagan administration and John Paul's Vatican state were critical of each other's ways and that there is no persuasive evidence of their using any shared plan. The pope consistently and publicly criticized the militarism and "Star Wars" policies of the Reagan presidency, which he considered in direct conflict with his emphasis on nonviolence. Similarly, in his support for Solidarity, the pope criticized American capitalism for violating the sacredness of the worker and the work, turning both into simple commodities for purchase and sale. For its part, the U.S. showed its opposition to the pope's commitment to Solidarity by providing it with even less financial support than it received from Canada's labor union. In one of Kwitny's interviews, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland suggested that the Reagan administration refusal to support Solidarity was due to its fear that Solidarity would weaken Poland's communist regime and diminish the chances Poland would eventually repay the billions of dollars owed American banks.