Mary Eberstadt lauds George Weigle's new biography covering the last years of Pope John Paul II. She titles her comprehensive and excellent review, "The Cold War Pope." She writes: (my emphases)
It is now just over ten years since his bestselling first volume, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, chronicled in just under 1,000 pages the story of Karol Wojtyla’s pre-papal life and the first 22 years of what would turn out to be a papacy of almost 27. Now a second volume, The End and the Beginning: The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, both completes the story and delivers something important and new — an irresistible Cold War story of drama and intrigue at the highest (and lowest) levels.
Eberstadt continues:
Based in part on just some of what the author calls the “vast archive” of information recently available from the infamous kgb, Stasi, and Polish secret police files, this volume sheds light on one of the most dramatic historical and political tales to issue from a century bursting with them: namely, “Karol Wojtyla’s forty-year struggle against communism — and communism’s forty-year effort to impede Wojtyla’s work and destroy his reputation.” It is a story for believers and nonbelievers alike, and one reminiscent of the absorbing fictions of John LeCarre, Charles McCarry, and other masters of the Cold War genre. The difference, of course — as The End and the Beginning goes to show — is that the 40-year battle between Wojtyla and the communists was not some idle literary imagining, but rather the realest show on earth.
If you have any interest at all in learning about Pope John Paul II and how he "waged war" against the Communists, read the rest of Eberstadt's review. If you want to read more selected quotes from my blog, click the "continue reading" button below.
In the matter of knowing their enemies, as opposed to most others, the communists were generally right — and this is nowhere more obvious than in the case of John Paul II. While most Western intellectuals looked on the beginnings of Wojtyla’s papacy with bemusement, if indeed with any interest at all, communist kingpins from Moscow to Krakow to East Berlin saw something else: a mortal threat to the regimes they were defending and to the profound lies about human beings on which those regimes were built. By no coincidence Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by then in exile in Vermont, was almost alone in the West in grasping immediately the shattering historical significance of Wojtyla’s election. Upon hearing of it, he “threw out his arms,” Weigel reports from an exclusive family interview, and exclaimed, “It’s a miracle! It’s the first positive event since World War I, and it’s going to change the face of the world!”
More quotes from the review:
In what will come to many readers as one of the most shocking reports in the book, Weigel details how Vatican II itself was similarly infiltrated by a motley band of compromised clergy, hopeful reformist dupes, spies hiding beneath the banner of Polish radio, and more.
Against this backdrop of global ideological warfare, extraordinary faith and courage, and extraordinary perfidy and treachery at the same time, the struggle for and against communist domination played out. On one side stood a world power fabled for having no legions at all, as Stalin once famously sneered; on the other, another world power fabled for having nothing but. Then, in 1978, came the Polish pope. Playwright, actor, poet, philosopher, intellectual; sportsman, linguist, diplomat; a hardball ideological player outside the Catholic world even as he was revered for his pastoral humility within it: One might almost say that if Karol Wojtyla hadn’t been born, history herself would have had to invent him, so perfectly were his outsized gifts and faith a match for the outsized times.
Note the following amazing statistics:
Among various summaries of his activities as pontiff, Weigel reports that this pope went on pilgrimages to 129 different countries, travelling a total of some 750,000 miles; visited 1,022 cities outside Rome and delivered 3,288 prepared addresses; held 1,164 general audiences, attended by 17,665,800 people from around the world, as well as some 1,600 meetings with heads of state, heads of government, and other political figures. There is also his intellectual legacy within the Church itself via a prodigious outpouring of encyclicals, apostolic letters, catacheses, and other documents — including even an international bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), a papal first. Somehow, in between the Cold War, the Masses, the world leaders, and the rest, Weigel summarizes, John Paul II also created “a body of papal teaching with which the Catholic Church — and indeed the entire world of human culture — would be grappling for centuries.”
And what of Pope John Paul II's interior life?
“The interior lives of great men,” Weigel observes, “are often cloaked in mystery,” and far from being an exception, it is his biographer’s belief that John Paul II proves the rule here. In the end, he cites as Wojtyla’s indispensible inner core the Catholic understanding of metanoia, or complete turning to God and losing of self. The paradox of John Paul II’s life, concludes Weigel, is that “all this emptying of self leads to the richest imaginable human experience: a life unembittered by irony or stultified by boredom, a life of both serenity and adventure.”
I love Eberstadt's concluding sentences:
[..] The masters in Moscow and Krakow and East Berlin and other tragic wastelands of modern history did get a few pretty big things right. They knew, or at any rate were forced to learn, that an otherworldly pauper in a Roman collar could do more to bring them down than any worldly prince seeking business as usual. They knew that Christian religious belief and practice were on a permanent collision course with totalitarianism, which is why they persecuted it everywhere they could. They understood, in short, that the chief enemies of the state were those who did not believe the state had the authority to call the ultimate moral and political shots.
It is a remarkable and enduring and deplorable irony that over twenty years after the end of the Cold War itself, many Western intellectuals and pundits and other designated authorities still do not understand any of these things. George Weigel’s biography of the pope whose every move put the lie to all that is far and away the best place for them to start their remedial reading. For the rest of the public, it is a welcome gift to history.
Of biographer Weigle, EBerstadt wrote:
It is figuratively, if not literally, something of a miracle that the towering historical and spiritual figure of Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II, continues to have his legacy secured by that rarest of literary matches: the biographer he deserved.
One of the world’s leading Catholic intellectuals, George Weigel is also among America’s most learned and engaged public intellectuals, period. A senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of some sixteen books and seemingly innumerable articles, columns, blog posts, public addresses, and other contributions, he ranges with authority and conviction over an impressive variety of subjects: religion, just war, American foreign policy, American history, secularism in Europe, religion in Europe, Christian history, jihadism, communism, Mozart, architecture, higher education, Victorian biography, and baseball, to name a few.