Weigel's latest book places the new Pope Benedict in the context of his great predecessor, John Paul II.

God's Choice Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church WRITTEN BY George Weigel PUBLISHED BY Harper Collins, New York, 2004, ISBN: 0066213312, Hardcover, pp. 320, $36.95 CAD

As Weigel shows, Pope John Paul's accomplishments can only be described in superlatives. On his pilgrimages, he was seen by more people than any other person in the history of the world. He named more saints and cardinals than any other pope had done. His magnetic appeal to the young convinced many of them to strive to establish the culture of life which he advocated so insistently. In his comments to Newsweek magazine, Billy Graham called John Paul II "unquestionably the most influential voice for morality and peace in the world over the last 100 years."

Yet there were also dissenting voices, some of them almost incomprehensible in the virulence of their attacks. Psychologist, former priest, and commentator Eugene Kennedy described John Paul to the Boston Globe in enigmatic terms: "This was a papacy characterized by irony ... he helped free the peoples of Europe from communism, but as a master figure in the Church, he invested his own Church with authoritarianism." James Carroll, another former priest who is a regular Boston Globe columnist, told ABC News that John Paul had "faithfully tried to preserve his medieval, absolutist notion of pope-centered Catholicism with everything going out from the Vatican." Author Thomas Cahill speculated that in time John Paul might be credited with destroying his Church. And Tablet columnist Clifford Longley declared that the reign of Karol Wojtyla was magnificent, "but was it Christianity? It is too early to say."

In contrast to the mealy-mouthed minimizers of John Paul's importance, Weigel shows that Karol Wojtyla had been the outstanding figure of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For an extraordinary number of the earth's inhabitants, the drama of his life seemed to embody the aspiration of our times. John Paul's philosopher friend Father Jozef Tischner had once described Solidarity as a "huge forest planted by awakened consciences." The pope had planted a forest of consciences all over the world. An astonishingly large number of people would thank him for doing so.

On his death, the Italian government, fearing that Rome would be swamped, asked the Polish government and the Spanish and French bishops to arrange their own special commemorative ceremonies for John Paul. At a mass in Cracow over a million people were in the congregation. By early Tuesday morning, April 5, 2005, all the streets around the Vatican were clogged with pilgrims. When John Paul's body was placed on a bier in St. Peter's, mourners in the thousands filed by it, and some had to wait as long as twenty hours to file past the bier and say a brief prayer.

The requiem Mass was celebrated by all the cardinals, with Cardinal Ratzinger as chief celebrant. He also preached the homily, described by Weigel "as a masterpiece of ecclesiastical rhetoric, biblically grounded yet very personal, theologically strong yet accessible to all." He centered his reflections on John Paul's lifelong awe at the gift of his priesthood. The CBC's Brian Williams described the funeral Mass as "the human event of a generation." This was hardly an overstatement: it was estimated that two billion people watched the television coverage of the ceremony.

As some three million people took their leave of the Eternal City under the dark skies, Rome seemed to be weeping for the man from a far country who had said during his installation in 1978 that he was "now a Roman."

As the cardinals gathered in conclave to elect a new pope, Weigel surveyed the whole Catholic scene to decide who were papabili--possible papal candidates. Again Cardinal Ratzinger preached the sermon at the Mass preceding the election, and Weigel described it as classic Cardinal Ratzinger--richly biblical, emphasizing God's mercy and the importance of friendship with Christ, deftly drawing on theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Urs von Balthasar, calling his brother-cardinals to a "holy restlessness," a restlessness to bring everyone the gift of faith. Some of the Italian cardinals evidently thought that the time had come for a return to an Italian pope, but the man most frequently mentioned, Cardinal Ruini, Vicar of Rome, turned out to be working hard for the election of Cardinal Ratzinger. In the end there was no contest; Weigel has good reason to say that Cardinal Ratzinger was certainly God's choice.

"What was perhaps most striking about Pope Benedict's first public appearance," Weigel writes, "was his radiance. He was, in a word, glowing. For all the burdens of the papacy, this was a man who had now been liberated to be himself, after subordinating his personality for more than two decades to the work another had given him to do. This was someone manifestly unafraid--and likely to challenge others to a similar, joyful fearlessness, rooted in a profound Christian faith."

Chapter Five of Weigel's book, entitled "The Making of a New Benedict," describes the career of this courteous, humble, and remarkably intelligent man, who had once said that his ambition was to be a simple parish priest, to the point where Pope John Paul recognized his eminence and convinced him to accept the position of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He had now become, as St. Augustine once put it, "a good sturdy ox to pull God's cart in the world."

Looking into the future, Weigel emphasizes the importance of the new Pope's choice of name. Thanks to Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-c. 550) and his monastic legacy, the disappearance of the Roman classical civilization became the occasion for a new beginning: preserving, yet transcending classical civilization. Through the dual method of prayer and work, western monasticism secured the foundations of a true culture of freedom.

The "dictatorship of relativism" which Cardinal Ratzinger has deplored means a descent into a new darkness. The pope wants the Church to do for the 21st century what Benedict of Nursia and his monastic communities did for another world in transition: preserve what is best of the old world while marrying it to a truer and nobler understanding of who and what we are, to a new humanism which sees in the face of Christ the true meaning of our humanity. We are now open, Weigel writes and emphasizes, for "adventures in dynamic orthodoxy."