Witness to Hope

October 4, 1999
Weigel's massive work aspires to be definitive: it is subtitled "the," not "a," biography of John Paul II. Weigel, a Catholic layman and a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., enjoyed the cooperation of the pope and access to top Vatican officials, so the book is rich in new detail. Determined to explain this papacy from the "inside out," Weigel successfully focuses on John Paul's trademark ideas: Christian humanism, the inner connection between freedom and truth, and culture as the driving force of history. As a guide to the pope's thought, Witness to Hope is invaluable. Yet as biography, it is often defective. Weigel frequently dismisses John Paul's critics rather than debating their ideas. The author's strong pro-Americanism leads him to misrepresent the pope as opposing a "third way" between capitalism and socialism and to treat his criticism of the Gulf War as a rare misjudgment. Though John Paul is a towering 20th-century figure, the assertion that his papacy is the most important since the Counter Reformation seems overblown. The book is well written (if somewhat repetitive, perhaps inevitably so with more than 900 pages) and Weigel's command of the material is impressive, but Witness to Hope reads more like a valedictory hagiography than a sober work of journalism.

September 1, 1999
Thanks to smaller body type and more crowded pages, Weigel's papal biography is considerably longer than Jonathan Kwitny's impressive and engaging "Man of the Century" (1997). It is also more distanced from the man Karol Wojtyla and more attentive to the pope John Paul II. Weigel furnishes fewer of the humanizing details about Wojtyla's childhood, adolescence, and early priesthood than Kwitny did, instead providing much more and deeper cultural context for Wojtyla as a Polish writer and intellectual and fuller, more theologically and philosophically oriented discussion of Wojtyla's thought and actions as a churchman, especially after he became John Paul II. Although nowhere in his book is Weigel as forthright about his personal admiration for the pope as Kwitny is in his, Weigel's biography is equally friendly. Indeed, it is basically authorized. Weigel had the pope's full cooperation and, as a respected lay Catholic scholar at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center in Manhattan, Weigel was predisposed to be sympathetic. Weigel is not about to differ from Kwitny's opinion that John Paul II is the person most responsible for the fall of totalitarian communism in Europe, but he stresses even more the pope's role as the premier evangelist of Christianity in our time, tirelessly seeking, in his dealings with the world's politicians, to assure the welfare of any Christians anywhere who are enduring persecution and other hardships and, in his colloquies with religious leaders, to unify the Christian church and to pacify and warm relations between Christianity and other religions. Whether in or out of school, students of this remarkable man ideally should read both Kwitny's and Weigel's accounts of him. ((Reviewed September 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)