The Final Revolution.

THE FINAL REVOLUTION

George Weigel 

Oxford University Press, $25, 255 pp.

How does the church in Eastern Europe react to fervent new nationalisms, to those who collaborated with the once-hated Communist regimes? How did the church perform in the political tragedy that stole fruitful lives from so many people during the cold-war years? What role did the church play in the 1988-89 revolutions?

For the answers, one must look to the past forty years of oppression and pain. George Weigel's The Final Revolution, and Owen Chadwick's The Christian Church in the Cold War, try to do this.

Weigel's book, well-written and well-argued, presents an accurate and moving picture of the church behind the Iron Curtain from 1948-89. He has entered into the pain and staying power of the people and their churches. His thesis is persuasive and cogent: "It is impossible to understand both the why of the revolution...and its how...without taking considerable account of the Catholic church and preeminently of its supreme pastor... John Paul II."

Weigel evaluates and rejects four alternative theories for the fall of the Communist regimes: Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization of the Soviet Union; Ronald Reagan's hardline policies; the Helsinki Act; the weight of economic and historical pressures. To make his case, Weigel describes a watershed event in Poland: Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski's nine-year novena of religious instruction for the Polish people. Ending in 1966, the millennium of Polish Christianity, it was a success, and enabled Poles to overcome their fear of the regime. As pope, John Paul II carried on the traditions of Wyszynski.

Heroically, Pope John Paul II called the church, particularly in Poland, not to have fear. He was the first pope not to take the Yalta Agreements as a given. A Slav, he entered the Polish political scene as no Italian pope could have. Using his astute political sense, he set the stage for the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, and encouraged church activism. His courageous 1979 pilgrimage to Poland allowed all of Eastern Europe to realize that something different from communism was possible. His continued support of Solidarity and the church in their resistance gave courage to everyone.

Weigel suggests that the pope's actions created a dormno effect moving through the rest of Eastern Europe, ending with the complete collapse of the Communist regimes. He has made me a believer in the strength of Pope John Paul in changing the history of the twentieth century. However, my experiences in Czechoslovakia, over twenty-eight years, lead me to conclude that the impact of the pope in the rest of the Iron Curtain countries, while important, was not as significant as it was in Poland.

Poland was unique because of its century-long history of political dissent. This was not true in East Germany, nor was it true in Czechoslovakia, especially the Czech Republic, which lived in an uneasy truce with the Hapsburgs until 1918. Moreover, neither East Germany, Czechoslovakia, nor Hungary (in spite of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty's long stay in the American embassy in Budapest) had a cardinal of the stature of Wyszynski, who, backed by popular support, consistently stood up against the Communist regime.

It is true that Czechs and Slovaks gained courage after seeing fellow Slavs in Poland take on the system. However, without Mikhail Gorbachev's actions in liberalizing the Soviet Union the Polish revolution itself would not have taken place. Perhaps Gorbachev was forced to acquiesce in Poland because of disastrous economic and political problems at home (what Weigel calls the economic and Reagan theses). But in East Germany, we must remember, the revolution followed Gorbachev's indication that an overthrow of Erich Honecker would not result in a Soviet invasion. Whatever one's assessment of Gorbachev's motives, these events seemed to have occurred independent of any action by John Paul II.

True, there was a strange confluence of events that followed Karol Wojtyla's being made pope. His election and subsequent activities, together with Gorbachev's being at the helm of the Soviet government in the mid-1980s, were both major catalysts for change in the East. Weigel captures the spirit of the society in which the churches lived, the cynicism of the regimes, and the despair of the people. He shows the bankruptcy of the system against which Pope John Paul II pitted his considerable political and spiritual strength. The official deceit and meanness of the regimes were systematic, and Weigel, in a feat I would never have imagined possible for someone who had not actually lived it, effectively depicts a corrupt Eastern European society.

The dilemma of complicity is also examined. How, as a new society evolves, do we measure degrees of guilt in complicity and compliance with the old regime? How much cooperation and collaboration was too much? Almost no one was totally clean. The answers are not easy.

Weigel is also keen to discuss the bankruptcy of the Western Left in its understanding and criticism of the Communist system. The Left, Weigel argues, would not let itself believe in the human horror of the system behind the Iron Curtain. It did not believe that Marxism, as practiced in Eastern Europe, was as vicious as any rightist totalitarian system. Intellectuals in the East saw this inconsistency among Western liberals and scorned them for it; one reason, perhaps, why Catholics I knew in Czechoslovakia seemed much more at peace with the American political Right than Left.

To highlight this point, Weigel quotes a letter from Father Vaclav Maly to the theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, asking him how he could participate in a Prague colloquium on human fights while so many of his own coreligionists, including Maly himself, were deprived of their fights to worship and enter society as full citizens. Independently, the then Jesuit provincial in Prague asked me how the Society of Jesus could allow Father Daniel Berrigan to come to a "freedom" conference in Prague when over a hundred of his Jesuit brothers were unable to function legally in the country in which he was speaking.