His Master’s Voice

As Christianity careens toward its second millennium, no religious leader has more profoundly shaped the course of world history in the waning decades of the 20th century than Pope John Paul II. By now the litany of his remarkable achievements in the affairs of humankind is as familiar to us as the Agnus Dei is to Catholics. He was a major player in bringing down the Iron Curtain, by emboldening first his native Poland, then Eastern Europe, to throw off the yoke of communism. Building on the groundwork laid by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, he steered a course that forever altered the Roman Catholic Church’s relations with Jews. He is the first pope to apologize, however obliquely, for the sins of commission and omission--things done and left undone--during the Nazi tyranny by the church’s members (which by definition includes its hierarchy). Most profound, he established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. John Paul has spoken out forcefully and eloquently in defense of the poor and the voiceless, particularly those living in the world for whom poverty, disease and lack of access to education are grim facts of day-to-day existence. “I am the voice of the voiceless,” he told a million Mexicans on his first papal trip in 1979.

This is the “political pope” with whom we are familiar: the chief shepherd in white as media event, standing before hundreds of thousands of Poles; the stern father as sound bite, scolding an errant Nicaraguan priest for joining a Marxist government. That papal actions are rife with political and social implications there is no doubt. John Paul’s impact on the temporal world is testimony in itself why many Catholics believe that he will someday be known as Pope John Paul the Great. But were the commentaries and biographies to stop here, they would be missing not just half of his message but virtually all of it.

For beneath the surface of his words and actions John Paul is not a political agitator but an evangelist. Belief in God and belief in the dignity of the human person are fused so completely in his thinking that the usual dichotomies between the secular and the sacred are no longer useful in explaining his words and actions.

Until now biographers who have chronicled this extraordinary life, among them Tad Szulc (“Pope John Paul II: The Biography”) and Jonathan Kwitny (“Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II”), have devoted most of their keen and necessary analysis to what might be called the political pope. John Paul has in large part been viewed through the lens of a culture that in many ways he has set himself against. On the other hand, “The Hidden Pope” by Darcy O’Brien offers an intimate portrait of the pope’s lifelong friendship with Jerzy Kluger, his boyhood pal, a Jew and fellow Pole who later became a back channel in the Vatican’s negotiations with the state of Israel that led to diplomatic relations.

Now comes George Weigel, journalist, theologian, conservative Catholic and senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, with the “inside story.” His nearly 1,000-page book, “Witness to Hope,” opens a window into John Paul’s priestly formation, spirituality and writings that is essential in understanding the underlying religious ethos that has propelled this remarkable pontiff onto the world stage and in the process made him a moral superpower.

“Witness to Hope” is by far the most authoritative and encyclopedic biography to date. Asked by the pope to chronicle his life, Weigel was not only given unparalleled access to the princes and bishops of the church but also spent 20 hours with the pope himself over lunch, dinner and formal interviews. Weigel insists this is not an authorized biography. The pope never asked to review the manuscript before its publication, and as recently as two weeks ago the pope told Weigel that he had read only a fraction of the book.

Indeed, there are moments when Weigel questions papal actions as they played out on the diplomatic and ecumenical stages. He does not, for example, soft-pedal the Vatican’s missteps with Eastern Orthodoxy that frustrated John Paul’s dream of Christian unity at the dawn of the church’s second millennium. But make no mistake: This book is an apologia. Weigel is more than reporter, more than biographer. He is an unabashed advocate, a pleader of the papal cause, a champion of the Holy Father and explicator of papal pronouncements.

To those, for example, who complain that John Paul is an authoritarian, Weigel responds not with a denial but with a defense. “The purpose of authority in the church is not to impede creativity, but to ensure that Christians do not settle for mediocrity,” Weigel writes. “Authority is meant to help the individual Christian hold himself or herself accountable to the one supreme criterion of faith, the living Christ.” In addition, Weigel lets the pope himself answer critics who charge that he wears his authority too severely. “The church proposes; she imposes nothing,” John Paul has said.

Yes, but papal opposition to women priests has been hardly an invitation to dialogue. Indeed, the pope ordered advocates in the church to shut up. They haven’t. Weigel’s treatment of the controversy is exhaustive. But Weigel also offers an authoritative and much needed counterpoint to the too facile characterizations of John Paul as misogynist and prude. There is, he adds, much more to the pope’s view of women than his unbending opposition to their ordination. No English language biography has paid as much attention to the pope’s “Theology of the Body,” which celebrates sexual love--a curious reportorial omission in view of the West’s preoccupation with “pelvic theology”--the church’s opposition to contraception, abortion, women priests and married priests.

On the crisis over a growing shortage of priests, Weigel moves beyond those who have loudly suggested that celibacy is the culprit and offers the pope’s take. It is popular culture, not celibacy, that has thinned the ranks of the priesthood throughout the world from 448,508 in 1970 to 404,750 some 25 years later. Though the sexual revolution, pressures on family life and materialism are undoubted factors, the pope sees a more profound challenge. “An unconscious rationalism had made biblical revelation seem at best, a noble fiction. A closed individualism had made it very difficult for men and women to form binding and enduring relationships; the resulting loneliness was one cause of hedonism and the frantic pursuit of pleasure,” Weigel writes. “A kind of practical atheism had drained life of its mystery. And the distortion of freedom into an assertion of the individual’s will-to-power had uncoupled freedom from truth.”

But there are omissions as well. Weigel skims over the pope’s uneasy relationship with Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, murdered in 1980 by right-wing extremists as he celebrated Mass. In the papal angst over liberation theology in Latin American that at times linked a Marxist political model with the church’s preferential option for the poor, Romero was seen by the Vatican as veering from political neutrality to partisanship in speaking out against the oppression and murder visited upon the people by backers of the right-wing military government. Romero was a reluctant activist radicalized by the oppression he witnessed, an oppression that ultimately claimed his own life. But Romero, now on the road to sainthood, never questioned the church’s teaching and was deeply grieved by his treatment as a pariah by Rome.

It is Weigel’s illumination of the overarching ethos that informs papal words and actions across a broad spectrum of human events--political, economic, social, religious--which makes the book worthwhile. No other popular biographer has ventured as exegete (and apologist) into the intellectual thicket of closely reasoned and finely nuanced papal pronouncements in order to make them more readily understood. Weigel’s treatment of the pope’s conception of Christian humanism is an example.

In John Paul’s Christian humanism, human dignity is inherent because we (and all creation) are created by a loving and sovereign God, the First Cause. Even non-Christian religions, the pope wrote (stirring up much consternation within the Vatican), are reflections of one truth. Though the paths may be different, John Paul believes that, to the extent that they tend toward God, they reflect the deepest aspiration of the human spirit to find its fullest dignity in God.

Ever the Christian pastor, John Paul, of course, takes another step, positing the profound--and to many non-Chistians the audacious--idea that this dignity was uniquely fulfilled in Jesus: Jesus’ life and spirit were so completely infused with God that God in fact became man and dwelt among us. As the ancient creeds say, Jesus was “true God from true God . . . of one Being with the Father.” Ultimate meaning, therefore, is to be found in communion with God. This implies an obligation to ourselves (one might say an enlightened self-interest), as well as to God to search for truth and to do justice. Political and economic systems are constructive only if they guarantee the right to seek truth, including ultimate Truth in which the human person achieves full dignity.

Seen in this light, John Paul’s opposition to communism and his equally adamant condemnation of moral relativism and unbridled capitalism in the West become clear. Both put their ultimate trust and meaning in the possession of the material and in the usefulness of the individual to drive the engines of production. A system that values productivity above all else denies the innate dignity of the human person.

These are not merely the postures of a politician in shepherd’s clothing but the conclusions of a philosopher-priest who measures those political systems against a higher yardstick and finds them both wanting. “If democracies believed themselves so vindicated by the collapse of communism that they could ignore their own moral-cultural foundations, they were in serious danger, not from without, but from within,” Weigel writes. John Paul argues that if “there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and conditions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.”

The same standard is applied to individuals. John Paul wrote in “Redemptor Hominis” in 1979 that “[n]owadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies. In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.”

Again, Weigel writes, “In John Paul’s comprehensive view of the human condition, questions of ‘ought’--moral questions--emerge at every juncture. That conviction put John Paul on a collision course with theorists of democracy for whom democratic politics was by definition value-neutral.”

It is no mean feat to undertake the momentous task of chronicling the life and witness of a man whose presence has helped to change the course of history. To attempt to accurately convey the essence of a man whose thinking is finely reasoned, nuanced and often complex is ambitious. “Witness to History” is a meticulously researched book that is certain to become a benchmark for future inquiries into the life and times of Pope John Paul II.