Book Review

From Krakow theatre to world stage

Universal Father: a life of Pope John Paul II

Garry O’Connor is a biographer by profession. There have been excursions into Eng. Lit., and even into modern French drama, but his stock-in-trade has been studies of playwrights (Shakespeare, though Samuel Beckett has clearly been a passion) and more particularly actors (Scofield, Guinness, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Olivier). This provides him with an unusual, and because unusual especially welcome, entrée into the life of Karol Wojtyla, the actor and playwright who abandoned, and not without regrets, a life in the theatre for one in the sanctuary. The writings of the young Wojtyla, poetry and plays, are convincingly mined by O’Connor for clues to his sensibilities, his youthful loneliness, his understanding of others. The writings are judged as works of art more generously than perhaps many would be inclined to do but, their worth aside, O’Connor illumines Wojtyla’s character, especially that of his youth and early adulthood, better than many of the biographers of the late Pope.

Well, perhaps not so much the late Pope as the late Karol Wojtyla. The first part of this volume is far more successful than the second. The inner man clearly appeals more to the author than does the public persona. It may be that the publishers hurried him on, as publishers are wont, especially in the context of the late Pope’s declining health. From the election of the Cardinal of Krakow as the 264th bishop of Rome, the book seems rushed, and there occurs a whole of raft of errors, many of which might have been avoided by competent copy-editing. But more of that anon. In the first half we have this complex, cultured personality laid out before us in a highly readable text. Perhaps the facts are much the same as those to be found in other biographies. I had not known that the mayor of Wadowice had leather shoes made for his dog, but in truth this adds little to the story. Wojtyla’s relations with women in these early years are examined in prurient detail leading to the conclusion – for which, rather curiously, Paul Johnson is cited as the authority – that he had at least one sexual relationship. For this there is, of course, absolutely no evidence beyond his surprisingly perceptive understanding of female, as well as of male, sexuality, as they are outlined in his 1960 book, Love and Responsibility. This knowledge, however, came not from personal experience but from the close relationships he had with young people, as a priest and later as a bishop: he inspired both confidence and confidences.

O’Connor’s knowledge of the Krakow years is well researched and illuminating. It is interesting to find confirmed the young Wojtyla’s rejection of armed resistance, setting a pattern for the rest of his life of opposition to the use of force in almost any situation. In these years, too, under first Nazi and then Communist domination, and drawn from Poland’s troubled history, was formed the conviction that religion was the carrier of culture, a conviction which surely contributed to his decision to become a priest. All this is well reported and analysed. Much less successful is what happened next. There is a reasonably confident discussion of Wojtyla’s ethical thinking. The section on Karol Wojtyla’s magnum opus, The Acting Person, on the other hand, passes swiftly over the book’s content and dwells more upon its author’s relationship with his translator. More disconcerting is the lack of theology in these pages. Where his post-election writings are dwelt upon these tend to be not his encyclicals, rather the late Pope’s autobiographical musings.

This may seem fair enough in what is, after all, a biography. The blurb put out by his publishers stresses that he is giving attention to the “inner” Karol Wojtyla. One would have thought that the late Pope’s theology was exactly what the “inner” man was about. Yet this is not a straightforward life story. There is an underlying purpose to O’Connor’s text. He resolutely defends Pope John Paul II’s conservatism, and for such an undertaking one might expect an examination of his theological thinking, and its relationship to Vatican II – Wojtyla’s contribution to which, in my view, O’Connor seriously over-estimates. But little or none of this is to be found. Indeed, at one point he seems to suggest that the conservatism was a matter of prudential judgement rather than theological conviction. “Under this pope”, he writes, “the Catholic Church sustained its refusal to change the basic rules, in order to avoid the risk of serious schism. Even more gentle modernisation had alienated millions of Catholics worldwide.” O’Connor clearly approves of such a strategy, and takes to task those who raised doubts – John Wilkins, Margaret Hebblethwaite and, particularly, John Cornwell (described as “crafting papal demolition into a lifelong habit”). Had he, I wondered, in this defence of what he takes to be Catholic tradition, given any thought to Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, to take but one example, which changed the Church’s fundamental stance towards other religions? It broke with the doctrine in force at least since Pius IX right to the eve of the Council. True, this revolutionary Declaration on Religious Freedom occasioned perhaps the only serious schism in the Church in the last century, that of Archbishop Lefebvre, but it was a document greatly welcomed by the then Archbishop Wojtyla.

An even more surprising lacuna – more surprising because it is, one might think, more readily intelligible to the general reader – is that of Pope John Paul II’s contribution to the Church’s social doctrine. There is general talk of his commitment to human rights, and specifically of his encounter with General Pinochet, but only the merest mention of Laborem Exercens and equally briefly Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. There is none at all of Centesimus Annus, with its reflections on the events of 1989 and their significance for the world. To some, these count among the late Pope’s most enduring contributions to the life of the Church. For them to be passed over in almost total silence is extraordinary.

I indicated earlier that, as a guide to the early life of Karol Wojtyla, this volume is hard to fault. This is, alas, not true of the remainder. Latin titles of documents are cited incorrectly (they turn up again, correctly, in the useful table of the late Pope’s writings to be found at the back of the book). He describes Cardinal Mercier as a “neo- or transcendental Thomist” as if the two expressions were identical rather than almost totally different. He appears to believe that John Paul II conferred the “presidency” of Focolare on Chiara Lubich, which will come as a surprise to that movement’s foundress. He locates the famous “silencio” episode in Nicaragua in Managua Cathedral rather than in one of the city’s parks. He claims that Albino Luciani, John Paul I, was the first pope from a “purely working-class background” – but what about John XXIII, unless a subtle, and rather pointless, distinction is being made between peasantry and proletariat? There are more such errors, enough to shake one’s confidence in the text and cause one to hesitate before commending it, despite its undoubted readability. In compensation, on page 289 there is a rather good joke.

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