Book Review

A grand sense of providence

Memory & Identity: personal reflections

On the day the Pope was taken into hospital for the second time last month, many of Rome’s journalists were attending an excellent Vatican conference on the Church’s need to embrace the communications age. Then the mobiles went off, and the journalists rushed to the Gemelli clinic – only to be met with a wall of silence.

The Pope’s new book is a bit like that. It seemed a good idea to publish on the week he fell silent: a typically Wojtylan dramatic paradox. According to the Vatican, the Holy Father needs a tube in his throat to allow him to breathe, and will not speak for some time; but there are many ways to communicate; and look, here is a transcript of some conversations with Polish philosophers back in the early Nineties, freshly touched up by the convalescent papal hand.

The idea, yes, was good. If you are the first non-Italian Pope for 450 years, and the second-longest-reigning in the Church’s history, and the catalyst for the end of Communism, and the target of an assassin’s bullet; and if you have watched world leaders come and go as you criss-cross the world continuously for two decades; and if you have put out an average of 30 pages’ worth of words every day of your papacy, and re-cast the See of Peter in unimagin-able ways – if you have done all this, you might well see convalescence as a heaven-sent chance for putting a little shape into things. A grand summary which at the same time offers a fascinated world a glance into daily life in the Palazzo Apostolico: what it is like to live with Parkinson’s, say; how you see the open display of your suffering as part of your grand defence of dignity, and all of a piece with the 1979 visit to Poland; what you are proud of, and what you regret, to be capped off, perhaps, with some rewarding nuggets for fellow pilgrims of the kind that Pope John XXIII (posthumously, as it happens) published in his Journal of a Soul.

Its publishers would like Memory & Identity to be that sort of book. It is not. Their pitch – that this is an insight into the Pope’s intellectual and spiritual journey, a chance to eavesdrop on his ruminations on the vexing questions of our time – is technically accurate. But the content is much duller than this sounds, despite the odd flashing insight, and falls far short of what readers want.

The problem is partly the form. Popes before John Paul II have rarely written books for publication (Journal of a Soul was a spiritual diary published after Pope John’s death). Wojtyla’s output has carried constraints – apparent in John Paul’s previous reminiscences, Rise! Let us go!, and his essays Crossing the Threshold of Hope. A book by a pope does not have the teaching authority of, say, papal encyclicals; it cannot break new ground by going beyond his own teaching documents. On the other hand, too much injection of personality might compromise the dignity of the papal office – hence the leaden “we” used throughout Memory & Identity. The books have lacked, as a result, any sense of intimacy and immediacy.

There are a few firecrackers. An early, hair-raising, passage appears to compare the Holocaust to abortion (it doesn’t, it just points out that democracies produced both), and by citing the move to legalise homosexual partnerships as the fruit of an “ideology of evil”. These apart, the first chapters are merely reprises of well-worn Catholic thinking on good and evil which will feel like eating greens to those familiar with it, while giving indigestion to almost everyone else.

But then, about halfway through, we begin to hear the Pope’s voice in his comment that the fount of twentieth-century evil lies in the rejection of Jesus. The eighteenth-century Enlightement denial of Christ “signalled a revolution” by cutting Man off from the Vine (Christ), says the Pope, thereby opening up a path that would lead to “the devastating experiences of evil” which followed in the twentieth century. For the Pope the cultural drama of the twentieth century and since is marked by this severance – although he is at pains to point out in a subsequent chapter that part of this rebellion was an unconscious attempt to return to the Gospel. The Second Vatican Council he describes as a “stimulating synthesis of the relation between Christianity and the Enlightenment”, an attempt at inculturation comparable to St Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Athens. But the Areopagites clung to their disincarnate “unknown God”, he says, just as post-moderns do today.

Poland, in the Pope’s view, has played a providential role in this battle. Karol Wojtyla’s election in 1978 “was not simply the summons of an individual, but of the entire Church to which he had belonged since birth”. The Church in Poland had clung to the Gospel in the teeth of totalitarian oppression, and its witness was now needed for the universal Church. The Pope recounts a conversation he once had with a young Flemish priest who wondered why the Lord allowed Communism to afflict Eastern Europe. “We were spared this in the West,” the priest mused, “because perhaps we could not have withstood so great a trial. You, on the other hand, can take it.” The Pope says over the years he has seen “ever more clearly the accuracy of his diagnosis”.

This begs questions: surely Poland fell victim to totalitarianism because of the weakness of its state and civil society? And what kind of God is it who singles out a single nation for 60 years of persecution because “it can take it”? It is typical of the divine design that dominates the Pope’s thinking, and a reminder of how much his heart remains in Poland still.

It also reminds us of the Pope’s great virtue: that in an age of banal introspection, he has had the courage to draw in big lines on a large canvas, unveiling the drama of salvation that lies beneath the surface of human history. The trouble is that the lines are drawn darker than most Western Europeans are able to recognise. It is Europe at the dawn of the new millennium that he singles out as the “continent of devastation”, rather than Africa or the Middle East. In Europe, the rejection of Christ has left wounds which “political programmes, aimed principally at economic development, are not enough to heal”. Eastern Europe, the Pope says, throwing another firecracker, still holds God to be the “supreme Guarantor of human dignity and human rights”; but “an uncritical submission to the influence of negative cultural models, widespread in the West” is eroding this fidelity. It is in Europe, says the Pope, returning to his canvas, that “a great spiritual confrontation is taking place, the outcome of which will determine the face of the new Europe which is being formed at the start of the new Millennium.” College of Cardinals, take note.

The prose is efficient and well edited. The question-answer of the book’s format would have worked if the questions were the ones we wanted answers to. But if Memory & Identity reveals anything about the Pope, it is that his acute sense of drama – his legendary ability to step on to centre stage at just the right moment – does not translate into his books. The world was hungry, especially at this time, for a profound personal text from the Pope. This is not it.

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