To mark the twentieth anniversary of this pontificate, The Tablet has been publishing a series of assessments of John Paul II?s life and work. This week a papal biographer concludes. I HAD been writing about Karol Wojtyla for more than 15 years when I began working full-time on his biography in mid-1996. I thought I knew something about the man and why he did what he did. So, evidently, did the Pope; when we were discussing the project, he told me that my previous work had put me in a very good position to tell the full story of his life. Yet the most important decision I made at the very beginning of the project was not to lean on what knowledge I had about John Paul II, but to step back, look at him afresh, talk to him and many of his oldest friends at length, and see if what Henry James once called the figure in the carpet ? the pattern that explains the complex tapestry of a life ? began to emerge with greater clarity.

Karol Wojtyla, it now seems clear to me, cannot be understood unless one understands that he is, first and foremost, a Christian disciple. The 264th pope is not a deft statesman who just happens to wear a white soutane and who occasionally takes part in liturgical functions. This is a disciple for whom everything in life happens within the horizon of that discipleship.

The truth that drives John Paul II?s life has to be grasped from the inside, not the exter-ior, of the man. It has been said countless times before, but it bears repeating: neither John Paul II nor the historic initiatives of his papacy can be grasped if the man and his ministry are forced into the Procrustean bed of an essentially political analysis in which liberal and conservative are the dominant categories.

This caution applies with particular force to understanding a man of mystical sensibility who becomes the Bishop of Rome. When a member of the Johannine Church of disciples is transferred, so to speak, to the Petrine Church of office by the inexplicable will of the Holy Spirit, something singular is happening. That singularity is what the Church and the world have experienced during the 20 years of John Paul II?s extraordinary pontificate.

An evangelical Protestant locution helps here. Early on, certainly by the time he was 21, Karol Wojtyla had been convicted of the more excellent way of 1 Corinthians 12:31. This was not, for him, one religious option in a supermarket of lifestyle possibilities. It was the truth of the world. For the Church?s story, the story of salvation history begun in the story of Israel, is the world?s story, rightly understood. And under the tutelage of a mystical tailor from Krakow, Jan Tyranowski, the young Wojtyla learned that anyone committed to that truth should be so completely formed by it that nothing in life happened outside its ken.

Later, Wojtyla began to be fascinated by a philosophical problem: how is it that we can truly engage another person wisely and empathetically, so that our uniquenesses enrich each other? But his reflections on friendship and the many other dynamics of human encounter have never been merely speculative matters for Karol Wojtyla; they have always been deeply informed by his Christian commitment. Whether, as Pope, Wojtyla is meeting Boris Yeltsin, the members of the Italian Association of Hairdressers, Roman schoolchildren, or the bishops of Taiwan on an ad limina pilgrimage to Rome, he is meeting them as a disciple for whom the other, disciple or not, brings about an encounter with God?s purposes in the world. This is not, for him, a matter of piety but a metaphysical truth.

Secondly, I have learned that Karol Wojtyla?s thinking about the crisis of modern civil-isation and the Church?s appropriate response to it was profoundly shaped by the Second World War. The war and the Nazi occupation of his homeland were not, for him, unfortunate accidents on a chessboard of world history whose kings and queens were economics and politics. The war and the occupation, he came to think, were particularly cruel examples of what happened in the so-called real world when a principled, systematic scepticism about the human capacity to know the truth of things came to dominate a culture. If truth was a human invention with no tether to reality, and if the truth of history revealed itself in Hegel?s concept of dominance or Nietzsche?s will-to-power, then a lethal logic supported the Nazi plan to exterminate the Poles as Slavic Untermenschen. Those determined to offer resistance had to do more than stay alive; they had to combat the ideas that made plausible the perverse claims of Aryan racial superiority and the concept of history embedded in them.

The charge that Karol Wojtyla was a pious quietist during the war betrays a gross ignorance of the facts of the matter. For almost five years, he was deeply involved in several forms of cultural resistance in the midst of what the historian Norman Davies has called Gestapoland; had he been caught in any of them, death would have swiftly followed. This was not the resistance of armed partisans hiding in the forests with stolen guns and blowing up the occasional ammunition train. It was the resistance of Christians convinced that the power of words, and of the Word, was the most effective weapon against the Nazi attempt to eradicate the Polish nation, and, more broadly, against the unique form of tyranny that was totalitarianism.

Advocates of cultural resistance like Wojtyla believed that the Polish nation could survive after the Polish state had been crushed, if the nation held fast to its language, its literature, and its faith ? to its cultural identity. That was what had happened before, during the vivisection and subsequent partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century. And that was the strategy Wojtyla and his friends in the Rhapsodic Theatre and the UNIAresistance movement deliberately adopted in 1940.

This conviction that culture is the driving force of history and the most effective antidote to totalitarianism would later inspire several world-changing episodes in the pontificate of John Paul II: his epic pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, the beginning- of-the-end of European Communism; his pilgrimage to Chile in April 1987, the beginning-of-the-end of General Pinochet?s authoritarian regime; and his pilgrimage to Cuba in January 1998, which history will one day record as the beginning-of-the-end of Fidel Castro?s catastrophic revolution.

ON each of these occasions, John Paul II confronted tyranny by restoring to an oppressed people their authentic history, culture, and identity. It was a lesson he first learned during the Second World War, in occupied Krakow. And by deploying it around the world he has created the post-Constantinian papacy, which operates amid a radical disentanglement of the Church from reliance on worldly power.

Then there is John Paul II?s debt to his friendships with lay people. Asked to reflect on their formative experiences as young priests, previous popes might have described their years at the Accademia, the Roman training school for Vatican diplomats, or their early experiences in a seminary classroom. Pope John Paul II talks about his Srodowisko. This Polish word, which best translates (albeit clumsily) as milieu, is used as a self-description by some 200 lay men and women with whom Karol Wojtyla has been in intense conversation for decades, in some instances from the first years of his priesthood. For almost a half-century (in some cases), these men and women have called Wojtyla Wujek or Uncle. Originally a Stalin-era nom de guerre necessitated by the ban imposed by Poland?s Communists on priests working with young people, it remains the name by which Pope John Paul II is known by some of his oldest and closest friends.

That lay people were among the intimates of a priest and bishop was a marked contrast to the normal patterns of relations between clergy and laity in the Poland of the 1950s and 1960s. Far more importantly, though, Wojtyla?s Srodowisko had a marked effect on his thinking and teaching. We were an experimental field for his ideas, a veteran Srodowisko member once told me. These were the young adults with whom he discussed marital chastity and the Church?s sexual ethic, eventually producing the book Love and Responsibility; these were the people whose courtships he counselled, whose marriages he blessed, whose children he baptised, played with, confirmed, and watched grow; these were the men and women who taught him to love human love, as he put it in Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

Future historians, tracing the origins of the international World Youth Days, or looking for the intellectual taproots of John Paul II?s theology of the body, need look no farther than Wojtyla?s Srodowisko, in which he has remained faithful to the pledge he made when nominated a bishop in 1958: Wujek will remain Wujek. For here is the milieu in which Wojtyla learned to be the pope who rallied the young around the world as no rock-star in history has done. And these are the friendships that led him, as Pope, to describe marital intimacy as an icon of the interior life of the Trinity and thus to dispel the Manichaean shadow that had darkened Catholic thinking about sexuality for the better part of 15 centuries.

There is also the John Paul II who can only be understood as the product and self-conscious heir of the Second Vatican Council. I can hear the protests even as I write the sentence. But it seems to me the plain truth of the matter. To grasp it, though, requires disengaging one?s reading of the event of the Council from the political interpretation first advanced by Francis X. Murphy (Xavier Rynne) and assiduously promoted by many others.

When the Council?s ante-preparatory commission solicited opinions about the forthcoming conciliar agenda, many bishops sent in shopping lists of canonical, doctrinal, or disciplinary issues they wanted settled. (The Archbishop of Washington suggested that the Council discuss, in light of the doctrines of creation and redemption, the possibility of intelligent life on other planets; as a resident of the Washington area, I should have thought that His Excellency might first have inquired about the possibility of intelligent life in his own see.) Karol Wojtyla, then the 39-year-old Auxiliary Bishop of Krakow, submitted an essay on the crisis of humanism at the end of the twentieth century. That, in his judgement, was what the Council was for: it was its task to address the relationship between modern humanity?s highest aspiration, freedom, and the truth that Christ had told his followers would set them free in the deepest meaning of human liberation. The sundering of freedom and truth, he argued, had led to the crisis of late modernity, of which fascism, Communism, and rampant utilitarianism were the most dangerous public expressions. It was for the Council, in facilitating Catholicism?s long-delayed engagement with the modern world, to put freedom and truth back together again.

Condemnation of modernity was not an option because, for all its manifold flaws, modernity was in part the product of Christian civilisation. But neither could the Council acquiesce in modern secularism and its claim to be the vanguard of a matured humanity: the Gospel forbade it, and the history of this bloodiest of centuries had clearly falsified any such notion. Thus the Church?s address to modernity and its discontents had to be both supportive and critical. The Second Vatican Council had to affirm the modern quest for freedom (which John Paul II would describe at the United Nations, 35 years later, as the great dynamic of contemporary history), while critically re-orienting late modernity?s idea of the freedom it sought.

The key instrument for this, Wojtyla came to see, was Dignitatis Humanae, the Council?s declaration on religious freedom. In his view, this document was not only about the new Church-State relationships that had emerged in the West since the American and French revolutions; it was that, but it was more, just as the issue of religious freedom at Vatican II involved more than the defence of the liberty of the Church against communist tyranny. Dignitatis Humanae, in Wojtyla?s view, was the place where the Council confronted the cultural crisis of the late modern world at its root, which was the growing opposition between freedom and truth. Under the leadership of Wojtyla and others, the Council vigorously affirmed that the human person, precisely as a person, has an inalienable right to religious freedom. But, again under Wojtyla?s influence, the Council also taught that religious freedom is not a free-floating autonomy right, but is ours so that we may freely meet our obligation to seek and adhere to the truth, including the Truth which is God in his self-revelation.

Wojtyla would later develop this insight in his major philosophical work, The Acting Person (which is best read as an attempt to put a solid intellectual foundation under Dignitatis Humanae and the other Council document on which Wojtyla expended considerable energy, Gaudium et Spes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world). The human quest for meaning, he argued, is directed towards the good as a magnetic compass is directed towards the North Pole. And the person who seeks the good wants the object of that quest to be something that is, objectively, good. Thus the internal dynamism of our freedom, its impulse towards goodness, requires us to take seriously the question of what is, in reality, good, which is also what is true. The Church, he proposed, could show humanity a path out of the quicksand of philosophical scepticism and its attendant moral relativism precisely by taking the modern quest for freedom seriously and, in doing so, demonstrating that that quest is intrinsically ordered to truth and goodness.

None of this has very much to do with the Council understood as a struggle for ecclesiastical power between good liberals and wicked conservatives. Karol Wojtyla was, and is, no na?f; he was quite aware of the sharp elbows being thrown in (and outside) the Council aula on Dignitatis Humanae and other hotly contested issues. But, knowing all that, he continued to insist, as he does to this day, that the Council must be understood primarily as a spiritual event in which the chief protagonist was the Holy Spirit. Now, as Pope, John Paul II has broadened that analysis, describing Vatican II as the Spirit-inspired preparation of the Church for a springtime of evangelisation. And it all has to do with freedom, properly understood.

There are many other things to be said about Karol Wojtyla viewed from inside but these can be left for another day (and a book). As a concluding, unscientific postscript, though, another question should be faced: why is this immensely attractive human being so controversial?

The answer is, in fact, quite simple: John Paul II is controversial because he is a sign of contradiction. In a culture committed to the pleasure principle, to the assertion of human wilfulness as the highest measure of human freedom, John Paul II teaches that obligation and suffering are at the heart of Christianity, and that freedom is a matter of self-giving, not self-assertion.

To intellectuals who argue that human beings cannot know the truth of things, and especially to post-modernists convinced that there is your truth and my truth but nothing properly describable as the truth, John Paul proposes that truth is real, truth is apprehensible, and (though apprehended through a marvellous array of particulars) truth is universal.

Challenging technologically driven societies whose cultures imagine human beings to be infinitely plastic, and developed democracies whose legal systems often consider morality to be something we construct, John Paul defends the reality of a universal human nature from which we can read universal moral norms, rights, and obligations.

And for those who insist that What for? is the ultimate question, Karol Wojtyla has long been, and will long remain, a sign of contradiction. For life, and more than 60 years of intense reflection generated by personal experience and pastoral concern, has persuaded him that the utilitarian reduction of the other to an object for manipulation, economically, sexually, or politically, is as corrosive of human dignity and genuine freedom as were Nazism or Marxism-Leninism.

But being a sign of contradiction, some will want to argue, is one of the things a pope is for. This does not mean to be a scold, and despite the hyperventilations of the media, this has not been a scolding pontificate. In exemplifying an evangelically oriented papacy and in decisively breaking the bureaucratic-managerial mould set by his predecessors, John Paul II has been the kind of sign of contradiction Peter and Paul were: men who could take the highest aspirations of the Jewish and enlightened pagan worlds ? the messianic hope of the former and the quest for truth in the latter ? and show how they had been fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Which is why the late Andr? Frossard had it exactly right when he wired his Paris newspaper in October 1978: This is not a Pope from Poland. This is a Pope from Galilee.

? George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC. His biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, will be published by Harper-Collins in 1999.

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