His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time.

I was prepared not to like this book. The reviews have been mixed-to-negative (some brutally so), and the American co-author's remarks in a television interview I happened to see did not inspire confidence. But then I read the book. It is on balance a good book, occasional lapses notwithstanding.

The authors' main lapse is their choice of the subtitle. That alone has given reviewers disposed not to like the book a ready excuse to trash it. But His Holiness is not primarily about the so-called hidden alliance between John Paul II and the Reagan administration with regard to U.S. and Vatican policies toward Poland and Central America. Nor is it simply an extension of Carl Bernstein's 1992 Time cover-story on the matter, although that section of the book is clearly of his making.

The first 150 pages provide a balanced and generally sympathetic biography of Karol Woytyla before his election to the papacy in 1978. So positive is the portrayal, in fact, that one of my friends - more alienated from this pope than most - was convinced after reading this section that the whole book was going to be a whitewash of John Paul II. Although there is little or nothing in these early pages not previously known through other sources, one completes them with a deeper appreciation for the struggles and challenges that have shaped this remarkable pope's personality and views. The death of his mother, when he was only eight, the death from scarlet fever of his physician-brother, whom he idolized, when Karol was only twelve, and then the death of his father found the future pope, at age twenty, with no family left. These events, as well as the periods of Nazi and Communist occupation, were to mark him for life - as were his youthful association with Jews, actors and actresses, Polish Catholic intellectuals, and various clergy and spiritual mentors.

There is also much in this early period about Karol Woytyla's deepening sense of Polish destiny, bordering on messianism - something that also serves, in large part, to define his pontificate. I may have missed it, but the authors do not seem to have picked up on a flaw in the pope's vision that other Poles, like Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, have noted. Poland and Catholicism may seem synonymous today (as they do in the pope's mind), but they have not always been so. Its present borders were created not by the finger of God or the benevolence of the Black Madonna but by the hands of Stalin and Hitler in 1939. Until then, nearly a third of Polish citizens were non-Catholic, and of those one-third were Jews. Moreover, the pope's seemingly unshakable conviction that the spiritual rebirth of Europe will somehow occur through the instrumentality of the Polish nation collides now against the reality of a post-Communist Poland which shows itself as resistant to authoritarian bishops and clergy as it was to authoritarian party secretaries and assorted Soviet-era bureaucrats. The authors' report of the pope's fourth, and least satisfying, visit to his homeland in part 8 ("The Angry Pope") is especially powerful - and poignant.

The book serves as a reminder of some of the pope's principal accomplishments during his eighteen years as bishop of Rome: his role in the collapse of the Soviet empire (although the pope himself is quick to acknowledge that he didn't cause it; he only helped to accelerate it); his unstinting support of the labor movement, in Poland and elsewhere; his prophetic denunciations of social injustice and oppression in various parts of the globe; his acknowledgment of the sins of the church as it approaches a new millennium; his remarkable openness to non-Christian religions, symbolized in his convening of a controversial interfaith conference at Assisi in 1986 to pray for world peace; and his invitation to non-Catholic Christians, in his excellent 1995 encyclical Ut unum sint, to critique and then to help improve the exercise of the papal ministry.

But this book is no puff-piece. In the sure hands of a respected Vaticanologist, Marco Politi of La Repubblica, it also contains many other reminders that this pontificate has a less inclusive and less irenic side - one more akin to the pontificates of Boniface VIII and Innocent III in the Middle Ages and of Pius IX in the nineteenth century, than of John XXIII or even of Paul VI in the twentieth. John Paul II's skepticism of democracy (with its emphasis on freedom of expression and the right to criticize those in authority) has been present as a consistent thread throughout his life. Among his favorite virtues are patience in the face of suffering, obedience to one's superiors, loyalty to the institutional church and to every one of its teachings (particularly with regard to human sexuality and reproduction), disciplines (particularly with regard to clerical celibacy and women's ordination), and devotions (particularly Marian). These have become, in turn, the criteria for most of his appointments to the hierarchy, for the punitive actions taken against bishops like Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, theologians like Hans Kung, Leonardo Boff, Edward Schillebeeckx, Jacques Pohier, and Charles Curran, and religious orders such as the Jesuits, as well as for rewards bestowed on favored groups like Opus Dei through the stunningly hasty beatification of its founder.

The reader cannot fail to note the discrepancy between the pope's strong, prophetic words of protest against Communist authoritarianism and state-imposed censorship, on the one hand, and his implicit acceptance of similar methods in dealing with theological dissent and disciplinary deviation within the church's own ranks, as well as his use of communism's very own rhetoric in his denunciations of the moral depravity of the West. Some readers may be surprised by his description of loyalty oaths that go against one's "conscience and convictions" as "the most painful blow inflicted to human dignity." Finally, the report of the pope's meeting with Nafis Sadik, undersecretary of the UN Conference, on Population and Development, prior to the Cairo conference, is particularly searing. If this report is essentially accurate, the meeting may help to explain the politically intransigent posture the Vatican adopted in Cairo, where it forged an alliance with some of the world's most extreme Muslim fundamentalist nations.

But one can only touch herein the surface of this long and comprehensive book. As noted above, there are occasional - and perhaps inevitable - lapses in it: for example, Vatican II did not "enthrone" the bishops as successors of the apostles (page 96), nor did it make a "definition" of Mary as the Mother of the Church (page 97); Gustavo Gutierrez, the leading theologian of liberation theology, is a diocesan priest, not a Jesuit (page 208); Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh is a bishop, not an archbishop (page 406), but Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee is an archbishop (page 510, although it's correct on page 406); and the reference to "perfidious Jews" was removed by John XXIII from the Good Friday, not the Holy Saturday, liturgy (page 443).

Recognizing that the definitive work on John Paul II has not yet been written, one misses Peter Hebblethwaite more keenly than ever.

The Reverend Richard P. McBrien, the editor of the HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.