In 1991, George Weigel arrived in Prague to research The Final Revolution, a book that told the story of Pope John Paul II’s influence on the collapse of communism. That book would show that Weigel understood John Paul from the inside, as the pope thought he needed to be understood, and would pave the way for Weigel’s later role as papal biographer with his international bestseller Witness to Hope and its sequel The End and the Beginning. But such a future was unforeseen in 1991 when, as the guest of honor at the Prague seminary, Weigel was presented with “a platter of carp heads—not the whole fish, just the heads—from which dull, piscine eyes stared out at me. It was, I deduced, a local delicacy, and these good men were trying in their straitened circumstances to be generous.” Over the coming days, therefore, the bar down the street became Weigel’s “evening refectory” and he recalls losing “a fair amount of weight on what I came to call the ‘Prague seminary diet.’ ”
Stories like this abound in Weigel’s latest book, Lessons in Hope. It is a sort of dual biography, an account of the actions of divine providence that formed John Paul II into a history-shaping spiritual leader and Weigel into his most authoritative interpreter in the English-speaking world; as John Paul remarked to now-cardinal James Harvey, Weigel “knows the Pope’s mind better than the Pope.”
Lessons in Hope offers an intimate understanding of John Paul II in action. The pope was an excellent listener who could also make the crowds he addressed feel he was speaking to each member personally. He was intellectually curious, hosting annual summer seminars at which scholars in the sciences and humanities would brief him on recent developments in their fields. He worked tirelessly for ecumenism and to strengthen relations between Catholics and Jews. And he had a great sense of humor. Weigel recounts a story of when John Paul began to use a cane. He noticed a group of bishops watch him slowly move to the dais of the room for their meeting, turned toward them, and said “ ‘Eppur’ si muove’ (And yet it moves)—the words Galileo muttered to his inquisitors on his way out of his trial, still insisting, sotto voce, that the Earth was not stationary but revolved around the sun.”
John Paul II was neither a liberal nor a conservative, at least as those terms are nowadays used in American politics. He did not become captive to progressive elites, nor did he seek their approval—nor did he relish standing alone contra mundum. Rather, he sought to affirm the good and the true in the liberal, democratic world order and worked to make it obedient to Christ. In John Paul’s mind, as Richard John Neuhaus once described it to Weigel, the biblical understanding of human dignity undergirds the concept of human rights that stands at the center of world politics. Religious freedom, in turn, is central to human rights.
The idea of the human person made in the image and likeness of God, made free and made for love, formed the core of John Paul’s thought, which put him in direct conflict with the Communist regimes of Poland and the Soviet Union. In treating that conflict, Weigel returns again and again to the failure of the Ostpolitik of John Paul’s predecessors. Their attempts to moderate the church’s message and negotiate with the Soviets led to more intense persecution. By contrast, John Paul realized that the way to fight deadly lies is not by negotiating a détente but by proclaiming the truth forcefully and unabashedly. The transformation that began with his nine-day visit to Poland in 1979 concluded a decade later with the peaceful end of communism there.
John Paul’s convictions—and his vocational discernment—were profoundly formed by his participation in “the great experience of my contemporaries,” as he told Weigel: “humiliation at the hands of evil.” He also knew great private suffering. A friend noted “an odd regularity to his life. Whenever he has a big religious experience, someone dies or is stricken,” from his mother dying while he prepared for first communion through a bishop friend suffering a stroke before his election as pope. John Paul was able to interpret these experiences through robust theology and philosophy and produce powerful reflections on suffering. In a similar way, his great capacity for friendship—which he maintained with numerous Polish couples after he had been elected pope—and his pastoral experience as a chaplain allowed him to write Theology of the Body, his great treatment of human sexuality. And his time as a manual laborer under the Nazi occupation inspired his encyclical on work, Laborem Exercens.
Weigel’s astute analysis of the pope’s life and thought is sprinkled throughout with anecdotes from their interviews and encounters. He describes his amusement as he watched on TV a Bob Dylan performance in Bologna for a large audience that included John Paul; after the music, the pope, riffing on Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” delivered a “wonderful impromptu talk about the Holy Spirit blowing in the wind of the last decade of the twentieth century. . . . The man, I said to myself later that night, has game.” A few days later, when Weigel and John Paul met for a lunch appointment, the pope “said grace, sat down, fixed me with that look across the table, and began the proceedings by asking, ‘Who eez Bob DEE-lahn?’ ” (Weigel’s reply: “Holy Father, think of him as someone whose songs always sound better when someone else sings them.”)
The clarity and joy with which John Paul lived, along with the intellectual and pastoral riches of his words, attracted millions to him. “How can young people join a group of permanently confused people who don’t know where they’re going?” the Nigerian cardinal Francis Arinze asked Weigel. “The Holy Father is just the opposite.” Frequent short visits to his chapel throughout the course of the day fueled his life, which was, as Weigel argues, marked above all by hope: John Paul’s “rock-solid confidence in God’s guidance of his life . . . made him the freest man in the world.” Those who desire to have such freedom and clarity, especially in our days of ecclesiastical and political confusion, would do well to read this book.
Nathaniel Peters is executive director of the Morningside Institute and a lecturer at Columbia University.
