GEORGE WEIGEL has written a very good book about a very great man.
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.
But, as Karol Wojtyla declared in his first address after his election as John Paul II in 1978: Be not afraid. George Weigel's Witness to Hope is a remarkably good read. It's not merely that the author is a gifted expositor of political, religious, and philosophical issues; any reader of Weigel's previous work would expect that sort of clear and intelligent analysis.
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. That, and the fact that with John Paul II, an extraordinary man living in extraordinary times, he has a terrific story to tell.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Living through the most unfortunate decades in Polish history, the future pope was astonishingly fortunate in his mentors and associates. 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.
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. Weigel devotes two-thirds of his study to the most recent twenty years of his life. This part of the narrative is, perforce, somewhat less dramatic. Weigel properly sets himself to cover the pope's public life in a comprehensive way; 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. 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.
|
