Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  I got an advance copy of the book in the spring of 1995, and while I had been more skeptical about what Szulc was likely to produce than some of my Roman friends, I was appalled when I got down to studying it. When reading a book for review, I mark dubious passages or flat-out mistakes with an x in the margin. By the time I finished Pope John Paul II: The Biography, the book looked like a tic-tac-toe game in which I was playing x. And the thought occurred to me, “I can do better than this.”

  The first order of business, though, was to get a comprehensive response to Tad Szulc’s errors, misapprehensions, and distortions into print. So I wrote a five-thousand-word review for Crisis magazine, where it appeared in late May. The review was called “The Biography That Might Have Been,” and I summed up my indictment at the outset: “Szulc exhibits little understanding (and much misunderstanding) of Catholicism: its doctrine, its liturgy, its organizational and legal structure, its twentieth-century history.… Szulc’s ready acceptance of the standard caricature of the Holy Father as socially progressive and theologically reactionary demonstrates a crippling incapacity to discriminate in weighing evidence, a lack of critical distance from the biographer’s own presuppositions, and, indeed, a basic ignorance about key dimensions of the life of Szulc’s subject.” And that was before I got to the factual mistakes (such as the claim that Cardinal Eugène Tisserant presided over Karol Wojtyła’s election as pope, when Tisserant had died six years earlier).

  It was a very tough review. But what was one to do with a book that described John Paul II’s clarion call to courage on October 22, 1978—“Be not afraid!”—as an assertion of authoritarianism? Or with a book that confused Augustine with Aquinas? Or with a book claiming that Aristotle’s prime mover had something to do with the Pelagian controversy?

  Yet for all that confusion, Tad Szulc saved his worst for his analysis of John Paul II’s role in the Revolution of 1989. On close inspection, it struck me that Szulc’s analysis of recent Polish history drew heavily on Mieczysław Rakowski, the last communist prime minister of Poland and one of the most unsavory of Polish political intellectuals—a faux-liberal opportunist whose combination of vanity and ideological shiftiness prompted Leopold Tyrmand to pen the greatest put-down essay in all of anticommunist literature, “The Hair-Styles of Mieczysław Rakowski.” If Rakowski was Szulc’s guide to public matters, a field in which the former New York Times foreign correspondent presumably had some competence, it was little wonder that Szulc would utterly miss John Paul II’s call for a New Evangelization by describing it as a “crusade” aimed at imposing “iron discipline” on wayward theologians.

  Advance copies of the review were widely distributed in the US, Poland, and Rome. Then my wife and I flew to la Città Eterna for our twentieth wedding anniversary.

  On the morning of May 17, Joan and I participated in the Pope’s morning Mass in the papal apartment chapel. Msgr. Dziwsz asked me to be the lector, and I found it hard to keep the tears from my eyes while reading Psalm 122, one of Scripture’s great celebrations of Jerusalem. I knew how much John Paul II wanted to go there on pilgrimage, as I knew his frustrations at the diplomats’ excuses as to why it couldn’t happen just yet. So it was not easy to keep a steady voice when looking up from the lectionary during the antiphon and seeing him looking intently at me, just after I had read, “And now we have set foot/ within your gates, O Jerusalem.” But I made it through without incident, and after the Mass had the pleasure of introducing Joan to John Paul in the papal library. We had a brief talk about our family, and the Pope said he hoped to see us in the United States later that year. When I wished him a happy seventy-fifth birthday, which he would mark three days later, he gave me a wry look and asked me how old I was; when I replied “Forty-four,” he informed me, with a smile and a shrug, that no one my age could possibly know what a birthday meant.

  The weekly General Audience was being held that morning, and while Joan wanted to attend, I thought my time was better spent elsewhere, so she went to St. Peter’s Square while I popped into the Holy See Press Office, the Sala Stampa, to have a chat with Joaquín Navarro-Valls. Joaquín had seen my review of the Szulc book, with which he evidently agreed, so I came straight to the point: “This is ridiculous. We’re almost seventeen years into the pontificate, 2000 is getting closer, and there still isn’t a reliable biography of the Holy Father.” There was no disagreement with my insistence that “something has to be done,” and we spent some time considering who might be better positioned than Szulc to get the job done properly.

  I insisted that it had to be someone who not only knew the outside history (and wouldn’t lean on dubious sources like Rakowski) but was also prepared to take the Pope seriously as a man of ideas—which meant an author who had some familiarity with philosophy and theology. That criterion, it seemed to me, eliminated certain possible candidates. It also had to be someone who understood the Catholic situation from the inside, and in something other than the good progressives versus bad conservatives stereotypes of the post–Vatican II years; and that criterion eliminated other possible candidates. We discussed several names, and I offered reasons why I thought none of them worked. And then I said, “I think I could do this.” We discussed that possibility for a while and agreed to think about it some more.

  Judging from what happened over the Pope’s dinner table six months later, it seems that Navarro’s thinking about it involved some conversation with John Paul II and Stanisław Dziwisz.

  Meeting Joan after the audience ended, we walked back up the Janiculum to the North American College and passed the Jesuit headquarters on the Borgo Santo Spirito. Catholic buildings all over Rome were flying the papal flag in anticipation of the Pope’s birthday. But the flag on the Curia Generalizia seemed off, somehow. On closer inspection, it was flying upside down: the universal distress signal, which seemed an appropriate, if inadvertent, metaphor for many Jesuits’ thinking about John Paul II. I took a picture for the record and then called the senior American at the Jesuit HQ, saying with as flat a voice as I could muster, “I think there’s something wrong with the flag outside your building.”

  A month later, Msgr. Dziwisz sent me the longest letter I had gotten from him to date, a kind of book review of my review of the Szulc biography. He was obviously happy with it and I could only assume John Paul was, too. In the course of dissecting my “excellent review,” Dziwisz, whose anticommunism was gut-level intense, took particular pleasure in my having nailed “the monstrosity of quoting Rakowski as crown witness” and told me that I had gotten the story of John Paul versus the old Casaroli Ostpolitik just right: “You know our Pope.”

  PARSING FREEDOM

  NEW YORK AND BALTIMORE, OCTOBER 1995

  MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MSGR. JAMES HARVEY, HEAD OF THE SECRETARIAT of State’s English section, which helped prepare texts when John Paul II was visiting Anglophone countries, had developed to the point that, in the summer of 1994, he asked me for some thoughts about the Pope’s homily in Baltimore that coming October. I sent him some suggestions but then the trip was deferred until the fall of 1995. In the summer of that year, after Joan and I had returned from Rome, Harvey asked me again if I had any further thoughts on a papal homily in Baltimore, as well as suggestions for what the Pope might say to a meeting of civic and religious leaders at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, my old parish. I drafted some suggestions and sent them off by fax, then the fastest means of communicating by written word between Washington and Rome.

  Things took a more dramatic turn when Msgr. Harvey asked me if I had considered what the Pope might say to the United Nations General Assembly on October 5. I sent suggestions based on my understanding of Centesimus Annus and my analysis of 1989 in The Final Revolution: the drama that had unfolded in Europe since John Paul’s last UN address had been triggered by a revolution of conscience; there were lessons from that experience that applied to all of world politics, especially in terms of recognizing the instinct for freedom built into the human person, which w
as the foundation of any notion of universal human rights; religious freedom was crucial to turning difference into conversation and community; the exercise of liberty must be linked to moral truth.

  In early September, Harvey sent me the draft of what others in the Vatican were proposing for the Pope’s UN address and asked me for an evaluation of it. After reading it I told him it would put the General Assembly to sleep after the third paragraph. I also asked why, with the memory of 1989 still fresh as a paradigm for something good in modern history, the Curia was proposing that the Pope deliver a dull academic lecture on international law when he had a chance to do something special from what the world imagined to be its premier pulpit, with the world’s eyes riveted on him.

  By mid-September, the two dueling drafts—the one reflecting my suggestions to Harvey and the one being pushed by the curial mandarins—had been presented to the Pope, and Harvey reported that John Paul liked ours, found it “stimulating,” and joked of me, en passant, “He knows the Pope’s mind better than the Pope.” That was classic John Paul II raillery, but I may have developed a way of presenting John Paul’s thought that he found accurate and helpful in an English-speaking context.

  In any event, it seemed that the draft Harvey worked up with my suggestions was going to prevail, while being amplified by concerns the Pope had expressed about his defending the “rights of nations.” Then a colleague of Harvey’s in the English section, Father J. Michael Miller, a Canadian Basilian who had been privy to what was afoot, called and asked, “Why are we avoiding the J-word?”—meaning Jesus. I said that I thought confessional reticence was de rigueur in texts like the one being developed. But after discussing it briefly, Mike and I agreed that that needn’t be the case and made some suggestions that eventually became the peroration of the Pope’s address, in which he called himself a “witness to hope” and confessed that, “as a Christian, my hope and trust are centered on Jesus Christ,” because of whose “radiant humanity… nothing genuinely human fails to touch the hearts of Christians.”

  Having agreed to provide television commentary on the papal visit to the UN for the Faith and Values Channel, I went to New York on October 4. Meeting Harvey that night at the Waldorf, where the papal party was staying, he introduced me to Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re, the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State and thus the de facto papal chief of staff. Re was aware of my contributions to what was going to happen the next day and thanked me “for [my] collaboration.” After dinner, Harvey asked me to come to his room briefly, where he presented me with a booklet of the papal UN address; John Paul II had autographed it with a personal dedication and asked that it be given to me.

  After doing more television in New York the next two days, I took the train back to Washington in anticipation of meeting John Paul in Baltimore on the last day of his US visit, October 8. The Pope specifically asked to meet Joan and the children, so Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore arranged for the five of us to come to the archbishop’s residence downtown that Sunday afternoon, where John Paul would greet various people before going out to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. We decided to watch the papal Mass at Camden Yards at my parents’ home, an extraordinary experience because no one but Joan knew of my involvement in the preparation of the visit and the papal addresses in New York and Baltimore. I was sufficiently nervous that I decided to watch the homily of the Camden Yards Mass on the small television set in my parents’ bedroom—where I almost had a stroke. The homily was crafted around the Mass texts for the day, but when it came time for the choir to sing the responsorial psalm, I found to my horror than someone involved in the Baltimore liturgical preparations had substituted another psalm in place of the one prescribed for that day in the lectionary, to which the homily made reference. Happily, no one seemed to notice, and the paper I grew up reading, the Baltimore Sun, printed the entire text of the homily in its Monday edition; it’s been framed in my study ever since.

  While bringing the family into the archbishop’s house, I ran into Msgr. Dziwisz and Joaquín Navarro-Valls having lunch on an outdoor patio while the Pope rested upstairs in the house. (Or was supposed to be resting; Cardinal Keeler told me later that John Paul spent most of his time in the residence chapel, praying.) Both Dziwisz and Navarro thanked me for my help and promised that we’d get together in Rome on my next trip. Joan and I, with our children Gwyneth, Monica, and Stephen, were then seated along the perimeter of one of the house’s first-floor parlors, which the Pope would walk through, a room at a time, greeting Keeler’s guests.

  By that point, John Paul II was using a cane all the time in private. On spotting us, he grinned, turned the cane into something like G. K. Chesterton’s sword-stick, and, like a man practicing his fencing moves, gave Stephen, then just short of eight years old, a gentle poke in the tummy before drawing him into a big embrace—which everyone else got, too. John Paul and I talked briefly about how the trip had gone thus far; he thanked me for my suggestions and said that we’d meet in Rome soon.

  And so we did, eight weeks and three days later, over a dinner of consequence.

  THE WITNESS, FROM INSIDE

  On the evening of March 7, 1996, John Paul II mused about other biographers and their attempts to tell the story of his life: “They try to understand me from the outside, but I can only be understood from inside.”

  There was neither anger nor hostility in the remark; the Pope’s comment was wistful, almost sad. Which was quite in character, I learned. Throughout the quarter-century of his papacy, he never played the demagogue and never lost the pastor’s touch: that passion for the care of souls. John Paul II wanted to be understood, not for his own sake, but so that others could experience what he had experienced as the power of God working through him. Thus at Castel Gandolfo in 1994, he said over lunch, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “Like Peter, the pope is a weak man; but the Holy Spirit works through him.”

  How to probe into that rich interior life, and then relate it to his teaching and his action in the Church and the world, was the challenge involved in preparing his biography.

  Hiking through the Polish mountains with his lay friends, Karol Wojtyła would be full of conversation, joking and singing throughout the day. But as the sun began to set, he would drift to the end of the line of hikers by himself. No one resented this; everyone understood that the man they called “Wujek,” their “uncle” who was both pastor and friend, needed to spend time with God. It was the time that made the rest of the hours of his day possible.

  Getting “inside” that rich interior life was going to be interesting and not without its challenges, for it meant probing into areas that others writing about him had never explored and that he might, reasonably enough, be reluctant to discuss. In September 1996, over dinner at Castel Gandolfo, I told him that I knew he had a sense of privacy, which I respected. But, I said, I was going to spend the next several years systematically trying to violate his sense of privacy. If I went too far, he would let me know and I would understand. He nodded and that was the end of the matter.

  As it happened, there were no questions I asked that he did not answer. Moreover, it was John Paul who pushed me to explore areas of his life that might otherwise have gotten biographical short shrift, such as the friendships he formed with university students in the early years of his priesthood: I couldn’t understand him, he insisted, unless I understood his friends and their mutual friendship. Over time, of course, I learned that there were aspects of John Paul’s interior life that I couldn’t describe because he couldn’t: they took place, like all mystical experiences, in a dimension before words, or beyond words, or however one describes the ineffable experience of contemplative communion with the Thrice Holy God.

  He could also joke about this “getting inside” business. After one of our dinner conversations in the papal apartment—John Paul always insisted that we meet over a meal, so he could relax and focus on our conversation—he walked me out through the chapel, where two of t
he household sisters were setting up for the next morning’s Mass. They were the soul of discretion, but John Paul II, whose mischievous streak had not been extinguished by a decade and a half in the papacy, stopped, pointed to one of the sisters, and said, in an audible stage whisper, “You should talk to her; she knows a lot!” The poor sister looked horrified, the Pope laughed, I winked at the sister; then we went into the main part of the chapel to pray together.

  The conversations with John Paul II that began when I presented him with The Final Revolution in November 1992 continued for the next twelve years. Those encounters also took me into conversation with many others who could help me understand Karol Wojtyła’s multitiered and richly textured personality “from inside.” Here, I want to revisit the conversations and adventures that led to Witness to Hope, the first volume of my John Paul II biography. Those adventures put me in mind of a scene toward the end of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. There, the dying Gus McCrae says to Woodrow Call, his oldest friend and fellow veteran of the Texas Rangers, “By God, Woodrow, it’s been quite a party, ain’t it?” I hope no one will be offended if I say that that’s exactly how I feel about the three and a half years that led to the publication of Witness to Hope.

  THE MANDATUM SCRIBENDI

  WASHINGTON, JANUARY 1996

  ON RETURNING TO WASHINGTON AFTER THE CONSEQUENTIAL cena papale of December 6, 1995, I wrote Msgr. Dziwisz, thanking him and John Paul II for dinner and asking if I might have a written indication of the Holy Father’s will in the matter of my writing his biography. In late January, a plain grey envelope with a Vatican postmark arrived at my EPPC office. There was no reason to think it anything special, as correspondence from the Pope or Dziwisz normally came through the Vatican embassy in Washington. So I opened the envelope, not knowing what to expect or from whom—and found the letter that unlocked the door to the next three and a half years.