THE BIOGRAPHY THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
by George Weigel
A WEEK AFTER TAD SZULC'S BIOGRAPHY OF POPE JOHN PAUL II APPEARED
IN THE BOOKSTORES, DAVID SHAW, THE MEDIA CRITIC OF THE LOS ANGELES
TIMES, WROTE A REMARKABLE FOUR-PART SERIES ARGUING THAT THE
AMERICAN PRESS-OBSESSED WITH ISSUES OF SEXUAL MORALITY AND
INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING THE CHURCH IN TERMS OTHER THAN
THOSE DRAWN FROM POLITICAL CONFLICT AND PARTISANSHIP-HAD
LARGELY MISSED ONE OF THE GREAT STORIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:
THE DRAMATIC SAGA OF KAROL JOZEF WOJTYLA, FORMER DAY-LABORER,
QUONDAM POET AND PLAYWRIGHT, AVID SKIER, WORLD-CLASS
PHILOSOPHER, AND FOR THE PAST SIXTEEN YEARS BISHOP OF ROME.
Shaw's series was the latest piece of evidence that the managers,
molders, and, yes, manipulators of American opinion may, at long
last, be taking the Holy Father much more seriously, and on his own
terms.
This welcome trend seems to have begun in Denver in August 1993, when
the hundreds of thousands of participants in World Youth Day showed
America a vibrant Catholicism in which notably unalienated men and
women were gathered around the Vicar of Christ and on fire with the
love of the Lord. Then came <Veritatis splendor>; and the pope's
vigorous defense of objective moral norms as a reaffirmation of human
dignity and a secure foundation for democratic equality came like a
bracing tonic to a culture reeling from the effects of "doing it my
way." Shortly thereafter, the <Catechism of the Catholic Church>-an
initiative the Holy Father had encouraged and defended against its
many detractors-was a runaway bestseller and this astonishment was
soon followed by the remarkable sight of the pope's own book,
<Crossing the Threshold of Hope>, perched atop the <New York Times>
bestseller list for nine weeks. Concurrently, John Paul dominated
the world stage during the Cairo conference on population and
development: defending the sanctity of marriage and the family,
insisting on the dignity and equality of women, and thwarting the
designs of population-controllers and lifestyle libertines eager to
export the sexual revolution and aborton-on-demand to the developing
world. At the end of the <annus mirabilis> of 1994, <Time> finally
got the message and celebrated John Paul II, not merely as its "Man
of the Year," but as the only world leader of genuine stature on the
edge of the 21st century.
Many had hoped that Tad Szulc's book (<Pope John Paul II: The
Biography>, recently published by Scribner) would deepen and extend
this new (and long overdue) appreciation of John Paul II as a
remarkable human being, a historic figure of epic proportions, and
the most consequential pope in centuries. One comes away from Szulc's
volume convinced that its author admires, even reveres, his subject,
to whom he expresses gratitude for the "extraordinary access" the
Holy Father gave him during the preparation of the book. What is
closest to Tad Szulc's heart-John Paul's outreach to the Jewish
people and the State of Israel-is a story he tells well. What Szulc
knows from personal experience- the life of a small Polish city
during the inter-war years-he describes with sympathy and insight.
What he can grasp as a man conversant with Polish literature-the
special character of Wojtyla's poetry and plays-he writes about
sensibly.
But in virtually every other respect, Tad Szulc seems poorly equipped
to write a serious biography, much less "the biography," of John Paul
II. Szulc exhibits little understanding (and much misunderstanding)
of Catholicism: its doctrine, its liturgy, its organizational and
legal structure, its twentieth-century history. His
"acknowledgements" and bibliography include dozens of names of those
who have demonstrated considerable hostility to John Paul II, and
some of John Paul's thoughtful defenders are notable for their
absence from Szulc's detailed list of sources. Any responsible
biographer takes serious account of his subject's critics, of course.
But Szulc's ready acceptance of the standard caricature of the Holy
Father as socially progressive and theologically reactionary
demonstrates a crippling incapacity to discriminate in weighing
evidence, a lack of critical distance from the biographer's own
presuppositions, and, indeed, a basic ignorance about key dimensions
of the life of Szulc's subject.
All of which makes for a book that can only be described as a very
great disappointment, indeed.
One does not have to be a professional philosopher or theologian to
write the biography of a man who is both. But it helps to know
something about these disciplines. Tad Szulc, alas, lacks even a
beginner's grasp of matters philosophical and theological. And his
floundering at the shallow end of this particular pool leaves him
unprepared to grasp, much less seriously engage, the
self-understanding of John Paul as successor of Peter, the
distinctive role of the Petrine ministry in the Church, or the
innovative intellectual project in which Karol Wojtyla has been
engaged (as scholar and pastor) for over forty years.
Thus Szulc, at the beginning of his book, confuses Augustine with
Aquinas, and then wholly misapplies the Aristotelian/Thomistic
concept of God as "Prime Mover" to the Pelagian controversy. Jacques
Maritain's seminal study, <Integral Humanism>, was written, according
to Szulc, "to urge greater humanism in the Church." The
<ressourcement> theology of the 1940s and 1950s, dedicated to a
recovery and reappropriation of the Patristic theological witness, is
reduced to a proposal for "a greater involvement of priests with the
people in their parishes and dioceses." Phenomenology, the
contemporary philosophical method to which Wojtyla has made original
contributions, is dismissed as "a vaguely defined school. . . based
on the study of physical and spiritual phenomena and experiences in
human existence that has also led to existentialism." Harvey Cox, a
"leading American theologian," is trotted out to defend the tattered,
hoary claim that a struggle between "monarchic" and "democratic"
models of Catholicism is the best "definition of the crisis wracking
the Church in the second half of the twentieth century."
So it comes as no surprise that Szulc interprets the stirring
antiphons of John Paul II's magnificent inaugural homily on 22
October 1978-"Be not afraid! Open the doors to Christ!"-as a
re-assertion of authoritarianism rather than a bold evangelical
proclamation and a ringing defense of religious freedom.
Tone-deafness of this magnitude does not make for serious biography;
what we have instead is Peter Hebblethwaitism absent the late
Briton's personal animus against Wojtyla.
Thus for reasons of ignorance rather than malice, Tad Szulc
completely misses one of the great accomplishments of John Paul's
papacy: his re-orientation of the Catholic intellectual encounter
with modernity. Eschewing both the bunker strategy of the pre- modern
know-nothings and the eager acquiescence of the hyper-moderns, Karol
Wojtyla has been a leader in that small band of formidable Catholic
intellectuals who, for some four decades, have used modern critical
methods to scout the intellectual terrain on the far side of
modernity. Now, as the pope who hosts summer seminars that include
atheists and agnostics, John Paul II is seeking to articulate the
classic affirmations of the Creed and of Christian morality in a
language and conceptuality that challenges those he terms (in
<Threshold>) the "masters of suspicion:" those epigones of the
Enlightenment who deny the very possibility of human beings grasping
and articulating the truth of things.
Missing Wojtyla's root philosophical-theological conviction, that the
reality created through the Logos is an intelligible reality, Tad
Szulc also misses the Holy Father's most pressing ecclesial concern,
which has to do, not with some putative "crisis of authority," but
rather with a crisis of <faith>: a crisis of faith in God, to be
sure, but also a crisis of faith in man and in the future of the
human prospect. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Karol Wojtyla has long
pondered the meaning of modernity's forgetting God-which ior the
pope, as for the great Russian chronicler, is a phenomenon with
incalculable <public> consequences. Thus when John Paul II reads the
bloody history of the twentieth century through this distinctive
lens, he sees in the carnage of our times unmistakable evidence of
what happens when a genuine humanism that affirms the dignity and
value of every human person is replaced by hubris masquerading as
humanism. And what happens, of course, is that men and women are
reduced to being the objects of others' manipulative (and often
lethal) power, in the service of racial, ethnic, ideological, or
class ends.
The pope's first encyclical, <Redemptor hominis>, powerfully
proclaimed an alternative vision of human possibility: a
Christologically-informed humanism in which "Christ, the new Adam, in
the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully
reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling."
Here is the Christian claim confidently proposed as the antithesis of
that "alienation" which faith is alleged to visit upon us. (Indeed,
one can see retrospectively that <Redemptor hominis> presaged the
Christological-humanistic thrust of the entire pontificate.) But for
Tad Szulc, <Redemptor hominis> is merely "theological conservatism."
In parsing the collapse of European communism, Szulc quite rightly
wants to assign considerable credit to John Paul II. But Szulc's
interpretation of the dynamics and events leading up to the
Revolution of 1989 in east central Europe undercuts that intention
even as it contradicts (probably unwittingly) the pope's own analysis
of this history in <Centesimus annus>. Beginning with the (correct)
premise that the pope's diplomacy has not been taken as seriously as
it should have been by most analysts of the 1980s, Szulc nevertheless
ends up buttressing the argument that communism wasn't really
defeated; rather, it collapsed because its "internal contradictions"
rendered it hopelessly uncompetitive in a world of microchips,
cyberspace, and the digital revolution.
Szulc's Polish sources are especially suspect here. Indeed, in
Szulc's entire analysis of Polish history from the late 1960s on,
knowledgeable students will detect the fine hand of Mieczyslaw F.
Rakowski at work. Rakowski, former editor of the "liberal" communist
journal <Polityka>, was. as it happens, the last communist prime
minister of Poland; he was also one of the country's most
unsavory-some would add, unscrupulous-political intellectuals in the
decades immediately before and after the Solidarity revolution of
1980. It goes without saying that Mr. Rakowski has a vested interest
(now, largely vengeful) in putting a certain "spin" on the communist
crack-up; yet Szulc treats him as a privileged witness whose
recollections and analyses are to be taken at face value, and indeed
taken as definitive.
On this reading of things, and as the workers' revolt at the Gdansk
Shipyards in 1970 allegedly demonstrated, communism in Poland was
already crumbling when the archbishop of Krakow was elected pope in
October 1978. "Polish political dynamics," Szulc writes, "did not
really require an external stimulant" such as the pope's election and
June 1979 visit to his homeland; these only "played a part in
accelerating the march of events, at least in terms of the national
psychology." Throughout the 1980s, John Paul II usefully, even
skillfully, mediated Poland's lengthy transition from totalitarianism
to democracy. It was good that he was where he was; things went
smoother than otherwise might have been expected. But John Paul
cannot be regarded as an initiator of these dramatic events; that is
what "superficial commentators" hold.
Alas for Szulc's claim, those "superficial commentators" who
attribute an indispensable, initiating role to John Paul II in the
events that led up to the Revolution of 1989 include virtually
everyone who took an active part in the Solidarity resistance: which
is to say, the people who have a rather different view of what
happened in the 1980s than Mieczyslaw Rakowski and others eager to
re-arrange the historical record in order to salvage what honor may
be left to them.
The Rakowski/Szulc analysis of "1989" is, at bottom, banal. It
reduces the great human drama of the anti-communist resistance to the
inexorable working-out of historical forces, primarily economic. It
is, in short, a vulgarized Marxist analysis of the collapse of
Marxism. Which is not, one might say, without its ironic piquancy.
But what do we learn from it?
It seems retrospectively clear that the economic and technological
incapacities of Marxist-Leninist societies would have led, at some
indeterminate point in time, to the crumbling of the communist
project. Far from being "the future," communism's gross materialism
made it ultimately incapable of matching the performance of free
societies whose creativity, imagination, and flexibility gave them a
decisive competitive advantage. All of that can be granted, at a
certain level of historical abstraction. And yet granting it tells us
virtually nothing about the Revolution of 1989 as a distinctive
historical event.
The <how>, the <why>, and the <when> of the Solidarity revoluun how,
the why, and the when of the Solidarity tion (and its parallel
movements in other Warsaw Pact countries) is only explicable in terms
of a moral revolution-a revolution of the spirit in which men and
women freely chose, against great odds and at no small risk, to
affirm certain truths about themselves and about the human condition,
not the least of which was their fundamental right to religious
freedom. That revolution of the spirit, in turn, established the
conditions for the possibility of re-creating civil society, which is
precisely what communism had tried to destroy by its repressions, its
mendacity, its falsification of history, and its debasement of law.
Absent the foundation of civil society, workers' revolts against
communism in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had failed in
1953,1956,1968, and 1970. But the rudimentary civil society that was
painstakingly rebuilt in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s
proved capable of sustaining the non-violent revolution that swept
communism away, and without World War III.
And if you ask the people who made that revolution, "When did it
start?", they all answer, virtually without exception, "When John
Paul II came to Poland in June 1979." Yes, of course, there were many
other dynamics in play. Yes, there were antecedents. But <that>, the
June 1979 pilgrimage, was the decisive clarifying event; those were
the days in which people were galvanized to "live in the truth," as
they put it-to live "as if" they were free. To re-read John Paul's
sermons, addresses, and lectures during those eight days is to
experience the astonishing power of the preached word to move men and
women to conversion, and thereby bend the course of history. Szulc
lists the Polish edition of those allocutions in his bibliography;
but they seem to have made no impact on his analysis of the events of
the 1980s, for which they were the proximate trigger.
Szulc is also properly complimentary about the pope's diplomatic
skills. But he is pedestrian and unimaginative in his analysis of the
<Ostpolitik> of the Holy See during the 1980s. At one level, of
course, little changed when John Paul II succeeded Paul VI after the
brief interregnum of John Paul I: the negotiations with communist
states launched by Pope Paul and conducted by then-Archbishop
Agostino Casaroli continued, and attempts to create a bit more living
space for the Church in communist societies went forward. But in
another, and more crucial, respect, everything changed in the
<Ostpolitik> after 16 October 1978.
As he made unmistakably clear in <Centesimus annus>, John Paul II had
never regarded the Yalta bifurcation of Europe into "East" and "West"
as a <fait accompli>: regrettable, to be sure, but unavoidable in
1945 and permanent for the foreseeable future. To Wojtyla, however,
the post-war arrangement in Europe (meaning, in practice, the
subjugation of the historic nations of east central Europe as outer
provinces of the Soviet empire) was a moral outrage and the basic
cause of the threat of war that had hung over the continent since V-E
Day. Peace could not be built on any foundation other than freedom
and justice. Thus from the very beginning of his pontificate, as in
his response to the Polish government's telegram of congratulations
on his election (whose punch-line Szulc characteristically misreads),
Wojtyla's <Ostpolitik> had a distinctively evangelical edge of moral
challenge to it. The Casaroli negotiating track was amplified by a
new, assertive papal defense of basic human rights, with special
reference to religious freedom. Local Church leaders were expected to
take similar stands in their own situations. Those who would resist
knew that they had a vocal, tough-minded, and unflappable defender in
Rome. And behaviors changed accordingly (witness the transformation
of Prague's Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek from a pussycat into the grand
old lion of the Velvet Revolution).
The Ostpolitik of John Paul II was not simply the <Ostpolitik> of
Paul VI with a Polish accent. Szulc's suggestion that it was is
another indication of how poorly he has understood his man.
Tad Szulc's insistence that John Paul stands equidistant Pa Szulc's
insistence that John Paul stands from communism and "excessive
capitalism," invoking plagues on both houses, badly misses the
originality of the Holy Father's social thought. In <Centesimus
annus>, John Paul effected a re-orientation of Catholic social
doctrine, away from the old question of economic and political
structures and toward the new, "post-modern" question of a free
society's moral culture. Szulc seems wholly unaware that John Paul
has explicitly rejected a "Catholic third way" between socialism and
the market economy or free economy. Rather, the Holy Father's
creative contribution to the evolving tradition of Catholic social
thought has been to push beyond structural arguments (which he seems
to think are settled) and ask the deeper, more probing questions: How
shall we build a moral culture capable of disciplining and
channelling the energies of the free economy and the democratic
polity? How does the free economy avoid sinking into a cesspool of
self-indulgence-which, among other things, would mean the end of the
free economy? How do we challenge the flat majoritarianism and
proceduralism of so much contemporary democratic theory? How shall we
reconnect democratic practice to certain self-evident moral truths
about the human person?
To Tad Szulc, a man of the Left, John Paul II is a "progressive" in
economic matters: meaning, one supposes, that Szulc thinks of the
Holy Father as some sort of democratic socialist. But this obscures
more than it illuminates (it also tacitly attributes a host of
political-economic views to a man who insists that his address to the
worlds of politics and economics is religious and moral, not
technical, in character). Thus Szulc is oblivious to the Holy
Father's emphasis on the "right of economic initiative" in
<Sollicitudo rei socialis> and his celebration of the creativity of
entrepreneurship in <Centesimus annus>, even as he wholly ignores the
pope's sharp criticism of the stultifying effects of the Nanny State
in the latter encyclical. Szulc's own <gauchiste> predispositions get
him into similar difficulties in his pathetically ill-informed
discussions of liberation theology; thus he criticizes John Paul II's
performance at Puebla, Mexico in 1979 for having "left many of the
bishops. . . with the impression that he preferred that the Theology
of Liberation. . . be abandoned in favor of a more traditional Church
'Option for the Poor."' (As some of Szulc's and Wojtyla's elementary
school classmates would have said of such a blooper, "<Oy, vey!>")
The "social progressive/theological conservative" optic also
distorts, and badly, Tad Szulc's reading of John Paul's efforts to
energize Roman Catholicism for its entrance into the third millennium
of Christian history. Thus Szulc insists on referring to the pope's
call for a "new evangelization" as a "crusade" aimed at reimposing an
"iron discipline" on dissident theologians; and in doing so, Szulc
misses what has been perhaps the greatest accomplishment of John
Paul's papacy, namely, his transformation of the role of the pope
from CEO of Roman Catholic Church, Inc. into global evangelist.
<Redemptoris missio>, the Holy Father's 1990 encyclical on Christian
mission (and one of the greatest of teaching documents in a
pontificate notable for great teaching documents) is simply absent
from Szulc's book; so is <Christifideles laici>, the 1988 apostolic
exhortation on the laity.
Szulc also has a very weak understanding of John Paul's Marian piety,
treating it as more a psychological phenomenon-Wojtyla turning to the
Black Madonna after his mother's premature death, and to Our Lady of
Fatima after Agca's bullets missed killing him by millimeters-than a
deep theological conviction. So Szulc is in no position to assess the
long-term (and quite possibly dramatic) impact of John Paul's
appropriation of elements of Hans Urs von Balthasar's Mariology, in
which the "Marian Church" is prior to, and in some sense makes
possible, the "Petrine Church." Szulc is also curiously inattentive
to the pope's intense focus on the coming of the third millennium, a
theme that seems likely to dominate the next five years of the
pontificate.
But Szulc is at his clumsiest when he tries to deal with John Paul's
address to sexual morality and the life issues of abortion and
euthanasia. Here is an area where an elementary understanding of the
function of authority in the Church would have spared Szulc some
serious misrepresentations of his subject. Szulc cannot seem to grasp
the fact that John Paul, as pope, is the custodian of a body of
religious and moral convictions. He is not an autocrat laying down
the law on the basis of his own private conclusions about theology
and morality. He is Peter among us, interpreting the authentic
tradition of the Church. That tradition can develop over time; but as
John Henry Newman taught us, authentic development is always in
essential continuity with what has gone before.
The tenets of the Apostles' Creed are not subject to addition or
subtraction through a process of negotiation; they are subject to a
deeper appropriation and a more comprehensive understanding through
serious scholarship, prayer, and reflection on the lived experience
of the Church. Tad Szulc calls the Holy Father's affirmation of a
credal baseline for Christianity "theological rigidity." The truth of
the matter is that John Paul has been the exponent of a dynamic
orthodoxy, a new Christian humanism, that will be seriously debated
long after the agitations of Matthew Fox, John Dominic Crossan, and
Jean-Bertrand Aristide (all of whom are cited in the bibliography)
have been forgotten.
On the life issues, Szulc is both ill-informed and misleading. As on
matters of doctrine, he seems to think that the Holy Father's
position on abortion is a matter of the personal convictions of Karol
Wojtyla, rather than a non-negotiable assertion of Christian morality
(as John Paul has made unmistakably clear, yet again, in <Evangelium
vitae>). Szulc seems wholly innocent of the public dimensions of the
abortion controversy, and ignores the implications for a law-governed
society of a constitutionally-warranted right to lethal violence for
private ends. He badly misrepresents Vatican strategy and tactics at
last September's Cairo conference on population and development, and
seems unaware of the striking diplomatic success of the Holy See in
challenging the lifestyle left's attempt to hijack the Cairo
conference. David Shaw's series in the <L.A. Times>- hardly a
pro-life propaganda sheet-documented just how badly the prestige
press missed the "Church and Cairo" story; Tad Szulc's discussion of
Cairo seems to be based solely on the reporting that Shaw, a Pulitzer
prize-winning critic, deplores.
<Pope John Paul II: The Biography> is badly edited and, some
respects, shoddily reported. It is riddled with factual errors that
range from the relatively minor (cardinals don't receive "titular
sees," but rather titular churches, in Rome) and amusing (Cardinal
Tisserant, whom Szulc describes as presiding over Wojtyla's election,
died six years before the 1978 conclave), to the sloppy (Wojtyla
didn't receive a doctorate at age twenty-two; the Carmel at Auschwitz
wasn't a "shrine;" Tadeusz Kosciuszko became a hero of the American
Revolution before, not "after losing his own country") and the
ridiculous (Cardinal Wyszynski's insistence on communist recognition
of the Church's public functions was not a "legally unsound"
violation of the "widely accepted principle of the separation of
church and state"-whatever <that> meant in a communist
constitution!). The photographs are oddly chosen; almost half the
book is about John Paul's pontificate, but the last photograph is
dated 1969, nine years before his election as pope. All in all, one
has the impression of a book rushed to print.
No one reading the author's preface can doubt that Tad Szulc took up
his task with much good will, worked hard, and finished his labors
deeply impressed with his subject. But Szulc has not even come close
to the standard he assigns himself: "to capture the essence of the
persona of Karol Wojtyla of Krakow and John Paul II of the Holy See."
He has fallen, hard, for the cartoon character of
John-Paul-the-clerical- autocrat at precisely the moment when others
of his journalistic brethren are beginning to abandon it as
hopelessly inadequate. He has offered an essentially reform-
communist interpretation of the Revolution of 1989, thereby demeaning
the role of the pope whose accomplishments in that sphere he wants to
celebrate. He has written movingly about the pope's intense spiritual
life; but there is little in Szulc's portrait to suggest that he has
begun to grasp the "essence of the persona" of a man whose most
defining characteristic is the intensity of his Christian faith.
God seems not to be finished with Karol Wojtyla, though. And, in due
course, God may even provide this wonderful man, this great Christian
witness, this proud son of Poland who is the first citizen of the
world, with a biographer worthy of him.
GEORGE WEIGEL is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
His study of John Paul II's role in the Revolution of 1989, The Final
Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, is
available from Oxford University Press.
Recommended Reading on John Paul II
1. George Huntston Williams, <The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of
his thought and action> (New York: Seabury Press, 1981)-a reliable
introduction to the pope's intellectual formation and work in Krakow.
2. Richard John Neuhaus, <The Catholic Moment: The paradox of the
Church in the postmodern world> (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1987)-still the best analysis of the pope's evangelical thrust and
commitment to the full meaning of Vatican II.
3. George Weigel, <The Final Revolution: The resistance Church and
the collapse of communism> (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992)-traces the direct role of the present pontificate in the
liberation of Eastern Europe.
4. Kenneth L. Schmitz, <At the Center of the Human Drama: the
philosophical anthropology of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II>
(Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1993)- probing synopsis of the
philosophical basis supporting the pope's social teaching.- S.C.C.
This article was taken from the June 1995 issue of "Crisis" magazine.
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