AUTHOR REVIVES PAPAL CONTROVERSY.

Byline: Peter Steinfels The New York Times

Marco Politi, a professional pope-watcher, was in New York for about 48 hours this past week. He had come from traveling with the pope in Hungary and was heading back to travel with the pope in France. He was in New York for the publication of a book about, you guessed it, the pope.

Politi is the Vatican reporter for La Repubblica, a Rome newspaper, and before that for Il Messaggero - 15 years on the beat, more than a quarter of his life. He is also the other man responsible for the new biography, ``His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time,'' being published by Doubleday on Monday.

His co-author is much better known - Carl Bernstein, who, with Bob Woodward, wrote the Watergate classic, ``All the President's Men.'' There are rumors, however, that Politi is responsible for much of the biography, with Bernstein concentrating on the long chapter that expands a 1992 Time magazine cover story asserting that Pope John Paul II formed a close working alliance with the CIA to bring down the communist government in Poland.

At dinner Tuesday evening, Politi said only that his collaboration had been ``very stimulating'' and the book ``a blend of two personalities, two cultures and two styles enriching each other.''

What about the book's dramatic assertions that will undoubtedly draw fire similar to comments in 1992, when a papal spokesman called Bernstein's scenarios ``bizarre''? Politi said he considered them ``more sober-minded and well-grounded'' than the magazine version.

That is not the view of Jonathan Kwitny, who considers the latest Bernstein account, no less than the article in Time, ``a complete fabrication and concoction'' that ``almost makes the pope sound like a puppet of Reagan.''

A reporter for 17 years at The Wall Street Journal, then the host for four years of ``The Kwitny Report,'' a Public Broadcasting Service series, Kwitny has his own biography of the pope coming out in the spring from Henry Holt & Co.

That makes him less than a disinterested participant in this debate - as he well knows. But he is so emphatic in his promise to rebut Bernstein chapter and verse, right down to tracing ``where the money came from and didn't come from'' to sustain the Polish Solidarity movement, that one wishes these two guys a level playing field to battle it out, rather than having their arguments slip by one another a half year or so apart.

Tuesday evening's conversation with Politi did not focus on these issues, however, but on the pope's legacy to the church and what would come next.

News that the pope will undergo surgery to remove a chronically inflamed appendix has set off renewed speculation about his health, questions about how the church could operate in the case of an incapacitating illness and even suggestions that he should retire.

The complexity of adding up the pluses and minuses of his papacy has been underlined by his latest visit to France, where many Roman Catholics and leading officials once rushed to embrace him but are now keeping their distance.

``The sunset era has already begun,'' Politi said. A moment comes, a Vatican official recently told him, when you feel that a papacy is ending, and once you feel that, the impression never goes away - everything becomes provisory.

``There is stagnation in the curia,'' the high-level papal bureaucracy, Politi said. ``The offices are not producing anything.''

But if nothing is happening at the Vatican, he believes a lot is happening elsewhere. Although Politi covered the election of John Paul II in 1979, his research for the pope's biography has taught him how little the journalists knew and how much spadework for the election had already been done among the cardinals before they cast their first vote.

``That process is now well under way,'' Politi said, if not of promoting particular candidates, then of defining the issues on which a choice would turn.

The very first issue is ``power-sharing,'' he said. The second is the possibility of change in some of the church's teachings on sexual morality. The third is change in the curia.

Middle-of-the-road cardinals and even some very conservative ones are ready for a change, Politi said. They, too, he said, are troubled by the traditional interpretations of church teachings that would, for example, allow penitent murderers to receive communion but bar divorced Catholics who may have been happily remarried for 20 years.

But Politi believes that the church faces deeper problems than the ones that often divide conservatives and progressives. He spoke of ``a crisis of the loss of the sacred,'' calling it ``epochal'' and noting that it was no less of a challenge to churches that have none of Catholicism's strictness on sexual matters.

But that, too, he said, is ``why even very moderate prelates want a share in decision making.'' They do not pretend to have the answers to such a crisis, he said, but ``they want to be part of this search and not just wait on Rome.''

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Photo

Photo: Pope John Paul II kisses a child after delivering alecture on morality for French Catholics at a gathering of families at Sainte Anne d'Auray.

Associated Press