Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II.

Jonathan Kwitny, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. xii+754pp. $30.

Three recent and well-written books on popes deserve special attention. His Holiness, by Carl Bernstein of Watergate reporting fame, and Marco Politi, who has spent nearly twenty years covering the Vatican for Italian papers, combines excitement, suspense, and poignancy. It tells the heroic story of a young lad from Poland who repeatedly lost loved ones to death, struggled against Nazis and Communists, and became the first non-Italian pope in hundreds of years. Even more amazing, he was one of the most influential people in bringing about the demise of European communism - as Mikhail Gorbachev has himself testified. The story behind this success takes up a major portion of the book. Its suspense is intensified by the claim, first made by Bernstein (Time, Feb. 24, 1992), that the pope and President Reagan had entered upon a "sacred alliance . . . to hasten the dissolution of the communist empire."

The book's poignancy is more complex. John Paul II does epitomize de Gaulle's comment about the loneliness of true leaders. The young Wojtyla became withdrawn at the loss of family, becoming more "mystic and solitary." He worked and prayed harder and harder, kneeling to pray every midnight, developing a special devotion to the Virgin Mary and surprising respect for the controversial mystic, Padre Pio. There are few expressions of play and joy in his life. At one point the reader may think that a budding romance is being introduced, but it ends more quickly than it began. The sadness grows deeper at the conclusion, where the pope is shown as aging, ailing, and frustrated by his inability to alter what he sees as the immorality of the modern, western world. "With even more fury than he aimed at the Soviets (but with far less success)," he is portrayed as an elderly critic with anachronistic biases, struggling against modernity, diversity, and contemporary sexual ethics. But is it the pope's position that produces the reader's sense of poignancy, or is it due to mistaken emphases in the Bernstein-Politi portrayal? By focusing on John Paul II's position on sexuality and abortion, they leave little room for more significant aspects of his papacy, such as his ecumenical outreach to Orthodox and Protestant churches and his ongoing dialogue with Judaism.

Man of the Century, by Jonathan Kwitny, formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and host for the PBS news show The Kwitny Report, denies any secret alliance between Reagan and the pope, offering extensive evidence to contradict Bernstein's claim. The president and John Paul II attacked communism in very different ways. Wojtyla's opposition antedated any meeting with Reagan or William Casey, the "fervent Catholic" who, according to Bernstein, showed the pope "dozens of satellite photos" - with no obvious significance. True, the pope changed Vatican foreign policy from that of his predecessors. Rather than tolerating communism to win communism's tolerance for the church, he gave public expression to stern criticism of communism's disregard for the value of the individual and the sacredness of the individual's work. But this change is in accord with Wojtyla's earlier actions in Poland.

Kwitny reveals the existence and contents of a previously unmentioned book that Karol Wojtyla wrote and self-published in 1953, Catholic Social Ethics, which circulated among young intellectuals in Poland. The book outlines a policy of nonviolence and respect for workers, with criticism of Western capitalism as well as European communism. He argued that the communism that glorified equality and justice in theory had the responsibility to establish it in practice. While priest and prelate in Poland, Wojtyla tried to put his theory into practice, encouraging discussion groups, underground newspapers, covert priests, and people who late established the independent and decisively important labor union, Solidarity. After becoming pope, John Paul II returned to Poland and met with people in ways that inspired the continuing fight against communism.

The shift in Vatican policy may seem entirely compatible with U.S. opposition to communism, but compatibility does not equal conspiracy or alliance. Both Reagan and John Paul II contributed significantly, in their separate ways, to the fall of communism. But Kwitny shows that the Reagan administration and John Paul's Vatican state were critical of each other's ways and that there is no persuasive evidence of their using any shared plan. The pope consistently and publicly criticized the militarism and "Star Wars" policies of the Reagan presidency, which he considered in direct conflict with his emphasis on nonviolence. Similarly, in his support for Solidarity, the pope criticized American capitalism for violating the sacredness of the worker and the work, turning both into simple commodities for purchase and sale. For its part, the U.S. showed its opposition to the pope's commitment to Solidarity by providing it with even less financial support than it received from Canada's labor union. In one of Kwitny's interviews, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland suggested that the Reagan administration refusal to support Solidarity was due to its fear that Solidarity would weaken Poland's communist regime and diminish the chances Poland would eventually repay the billions of dollars owed American banks.

Kwitny is also convincing in dealing with other controversies. He compiles evidence that the attempted assassination of the pope was not supported by the Soviets, and shows how much of the money donated to Solidarity came from thieves who were stealing it from the Vatican in the infamous Banco Ambrosiano swindle. More significantly, he provides now documentation one close connection and secret meetings between Wojtyla and the "Committee for the Defense of Workers" (KOR), the illegal organization that became Solidarity.

Though neither a Catholic nor a trained theologian, Kwitny also takes some steps to show the positive influence of John Paul II in acknowledging past church mistakes that alienated scientists, non-Roman Catholic Christians, Jews, and adherents of other world religions. Although he avoids categorizing the pope as a misogynist, he criticizes John Paul II for insensitivity to the concerns of contemporary women, for cracking down on dissent, and for his lack of concern regarding church finances and clerical anguish over celibacy. He does not, however, explore deeply enough such inconsistencies as calling priests in Poland to stand up for justice while telling priests in Latin American to dissociate themselves from politics. Overall, Man of the Century is a well-supported portrait of John Paul II as one of the century's great proponents of nonviolence and responsible freedom.

Neither Bernstein/Politi nor Kwitny seems to be the definitive study of its subject, but both books are provocative in the stories they tell, especially in regard to the fall of the Soviet empire. Such accounts are put into a larger perspective by a popular history of the papacy by Eamon Duffy, a Roman Catholic professor of church history at Magdalen College, Cambridge. Written in conjunction with a British TV mini-series on the papacy, the book takes on the whole history of the papacy from its beginnings to the present. The book far surpasses the quality of texts for coffee table display, including more than 150 visual images (photographs, paintings, sculptures, maps, etc.). Its credentials as an academic work might seem threatened by the danger of bowing too low to the papacy, ignoring its greatest crimes, or of tuning history into expose, and overlooking the remarkable influence of the institution on the West.

Duffy avoids both these dangers, and his book is amazing for conciseness and accuracy. He is extraordinarily gifted in providing contextualization; he attempts to look at all of Western history through the lens of the papacy, explaining clearly and briefly the political, social, and economic backdrop to particulars papal era as they are discussed. With subtlety and wit, he offers criticism and correction to the papacy, but never so harshly as to interrupt his story. Saints and Sinners reveals the holiness, brutality, spiritual leadership, political power, great art, and open corruption that has characterized the papacy over the centuries. Duffy includes stories of the pope called "the terrible," the one who kept an elephant (who genuflected), and the last pope to have a Secretary of War, while also offering tales of the greatness and holiness that have occasionally graced the enduring office.

Duffy's story does lose some of its excitement after history strips the papacy of its capacity for military, political, and economic excess. But he does address the overall question facing all popes (including John Paul II) since the French Revolution and the loss of papal lands: how to address the modern world. After seeing how the papacy has influenced so many empires in its two thousand years of history, one is struck by both the difficulties and importance of the Vatican's struggle to deal with the changes brought by democracy and the modern world.

RONALD BURKE