Papal bull: John Cornwell on a biography of John Paul II.

UNIVERSAL FATHER: A LIFE OF JOHN PAUL II 

BY GARRY O'CONNOR 

NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY, 436 PAGES. $25.

Karol Wojtyla's first love was the theater. At school he acted in and directed ten plays; his early university courses included studies in Polish drama. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, he was a crucial figure in a drama society that met in secret. As Garry O'Connor points out in Universal Father, by the age of twenty Wojtyla had written three plays centered on David, Job, and Jeremiah, "three of the most tested and exposed biblical figures," and "mingled these with Polish warriors and priests." O'Connor is known for his biographies of stage actors and his writings on theater. At first this might seem a strange background for a papal biographer, but O'Connor makes great use of his knowledge of theater, and his book offers an intelligent appreciation of Wojtyla's early orientation.

What is intriguing, however, is O'Connor's view of the future pope's choice of the priesthood as diverging markedly from his earlier life as a dramatist, actor, and director. In Wojtyla, the man of the stage and the man who would become prelate and pope are like two fierce flames conjoined. For this pope was uniquely, and without precedent, a theatrical one: a brilliant manager of public appearances and the media, a master of the minimalist gesture. And therein lies a contradiction: John Paul II's unique ability to project the Christian message was inextricably tied to his tendency to seek and steal the limelight. At first sight, it may seem impossible to do one without the other, but future commentators on his papacy will be disputing the question for decades to come.

In any number of ways, John Paul II will be remembered as a very great pope, and future biographies (many now in preparation) are unlikely to dissent from that point of view. The idea that the pontificate has been great in every respect has been challenged, however. In fact, disagreement on this point has largely defined the polarization in the Catholic Church between conservatives and progressives for many years, and this polarization is only likely to increase with his death.

O'Connor is not, as far as I can tell, a typical conservative but rather one of those admirers of John Paul II driven by personal sentiment and popular Catholic loyalty. He writes from the heart. Not much wrong with that, one would think, particularly when the author's book is a sustained personal testimony to faith. But surely a biographer should speak from both the head and the heart, and from an objective as well as a subjective viewpoint. Those who wish to believe that their pope is ultimately responsible for the good and positive things in the Catholic Church must also be prepared to assign to him at least a measure of responsibility for the things that have gone wrong as well. O'Connor follows papal biographer George Weigel in listing John Paul II's many superlatives: the most traveled pontiff, the most prolific papal writer, the youngest pope in four hundred years, the longest-lived pope in the last century, etc. But surely any fair evaluation of John Paul II's tenure--that is to say, any biography that aims to be more than mere hagiography--must also acknowledge the huge defections of the faithful, the inept handling of the pedophile-priest crisis, the extraordinary campaign in Africa against the use of condoms, the unresolved problems of Catholics who have remarried without an annulment, and the inexorable weakening of the diocesan church in favor of increased centralization. The very title of O'Connor's book--Universal Father--acknowledges, without irony, the most fundamental problem of John Paul II's papacy. The Catholic Church, as the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s recognized, beats with two pulses: the local, represented by the parishes and dioceses and bishops, and the universal, uniquely represented by the pope, as bishop of Rome. In the view of many faithful Catholics, including lay people, priests, and bishops, John Paul II systematically, over the course of his twenty-six years as pope, created an imbalance between the church's center, in Rome, and its periphery, where the bishops are father. It is difficult in a period when Catholics have largely enjoyed freedom of worship to assess just how enfeebled the church has become at the local level. But the inept handling of the sexual abuse crisis, with supine bishops hiding the problem away and looking to Rome for solutions, reveals at least one consequence of the centralizing process.

Nevertheless, as on the issue of a local church versus a universal one, it is a healthy thing for dialogue and debate to continue between progressives and conservatives on the question of John Paul II's legacy. The Catholic Church, after all, is a conversation between peoples of varying cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints, as well as a dialogue between the past and the present. The pluralist dynamic of this conversation is what makes the church alive and relevant. What is deplorable, though, is the tendency to exclude certain Catholics from the conversation by crude accusations, falsehoods, and name-calling. And this is precisely what O'Connor does at the heart of his heartfelt book.

O'Connor describes a disparate group of eminent and faithful Catholic writers, who have done enormous service to the church, as Judases. Yes, Judases. He cites David Willey, the BBC's veteran correspondent in Rome (author of the very fine papal biography God's Politician: Pope Jolm Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the New World Order and a constant supporter of the pope); John Wilkins, for more than twenty years editor of The Tablet, the world's foremost international Catholic weekly; Jack Dominion, one of London's leading psychotherapists and a distinguished Catholic writer; and Margaret Hebblethwaite, who works among the poor in Paraguay and is a prolific author of works of spirituality. I myself am also cited as a Judas, despite the fact that I have in two recent books emphasized the late pope's greatness. Having selectively, and in one case wholly inaccurately, cited the above authors, O'Connor alleges they all claim that the pope should be "answerable" to them. I myself cannot recall any of these authors ever making such a claim. (O'Connor accuses me of writing that the pope had a "mystical" sense of entitlement to longevity, when he knows all too well that the pope himself claimed that the 1981 attempt on his life had been thwarted by the direct intervention of the Virgin Mary. It was in this sense that I was appealing to the mystical element in the pope's thinking. That conviction on his part gave his papacy its special sense of purpose: He was saved for a reason.)

O'Connor likens Wilkens and the others to the Judas of the Dorothy Sayers radioplay cycle "The Man Born to Be King." In Sayers's dramatization, it is Judas who feels betrayed by Christ rather than Christ by Judas: "The noblest dreams I ever dreamed, the holiest prayer my heart could utter, all my hopes, all my ideals, seem incarnate in him. Yet he has lowered himself to the measure of little minds, eating the applause of the ignorant ... Why could he not listen to me?" O'Connor then writes: "All critics of the Pope unite in this theme, that he eats the 'applause of the ignorant.'" All critics?

What unites the above writers is in fact their insistence that John Paul II consumed not the applause of the ignorant but the authority of his bishops. In truth, none of these writers is foolish enough to think that the church is a democracy. All, however, stop short of comparing John Paul II with Jesus Christ the Son of God--which is precisely the implication O'Connor is making.

By denigrating others who have tackled the subject of John Paul II's papacy, O'Connor's biography loses much. The life of a plaster saint rather than a human being, it will satisfy those Catholics who believe that John Paul II set the agenda for Catholicism for the next century and beyond, leaving nothing for future popes, bishops, or laity to do except follow his lead. But for those Catholics who believe that this pope failed to support some of the key decisions of the great reforming council of the '60s--not least collegiality, i.e., the sharing of authority between the pope and bishops--Universal Father comes across as simply another attempt to silence dissent within the church by means of outrageous denunciation.

John Cornwell is the author of The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II (Doubleday, 2004) and Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII(Viking, 1999).