John Paul II, Intellectual (2000)

AS THE SPIRITUAL LEADER to almost a billion Roman Catholics for the past 22 years, Pope John Paul II has stood astride the world stage as few others. But the magnitude of his influence is not just a function of the numbers of his followers. As George Weigel argued in The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (Oxford, 1992), the current pope played a greater role in defeating communism in Central and Eastern Europe than any figure besides, perhaps, Ronald Reagan. This fact is all the more remarkable since, unlike his pre-modern predecessors in the papacy, the current pontiff commands no armies and thus can neither impress nor intimidate his opponents with military might. Unlike Reagan, then, John Paul's role in world history is unambiguously a result not of weapons and the threat of warfare, but of words and ideas. In a battle fought with argument and rhetoric, most contemporary statesmen would find themselves defenseless against the current pope. After all, here is a world leader who holds two Ph.D.s (in philosophy and sacred theology) and is fluent in virtually every language of the West. And although Karol Wojtyla was an accomplished author long before he was elected to be the 263rd successor to St. Peter in 1978, he has, if anything, become more prolific in the intervening years. Since 1979, he has produced no less than 13 book-length encyclicals, as well as countless speeches, letters, and other public pronouncements, on subjects ranging from the moral foundation of human rights to the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism as an economic and social system. One need not be a Catholic to recognize and admire the formidable power of John Paul's intellect. And yet, strangely, the pope's considerable intellectual contribution to our times is far from being widely recognized. In the U.S., at least, only conservative Catholics and their liberal antagonists take regular note of John Paul's writings -- the former first and foremost because of religiously-inspired veneration, the latter out of contempt for what they take to be his indefensible moral conservatism and inegalitarianism. Aside from Michael Novak's acclaimed writings on the subject, Weigel's magisterial 1999 biography of John Paul, Witness to Hope (Cliff Street Books), is the greatest work to emerge from the first group. At 1,000 pages, the book attains a level of thoroughness unlikely to be matched for some time. Like most authorized biographies, its approach to its subject is largely admiring; this in turn leaves room for a more exhaustive critical assessment of the pope and his ideas. As for the liberal Vatican-watchers, Garry Wills's recent book, Papal Sin (Doubleday, 2000), is particularly noteworthy , both for its venom and for the transparency of the author's theological-political agenda. Reading his book, one gets the sense that Wills would be satisfied with nothing less than the wholesale transformation of Catholicism into Unitarianism -- and that his indignation at the Papacy arises above all from its resistance to such a transformation. As for the rest of us, the pope's ideas are greeted largely with indifference (in vivid contrast to the considerable attention the media pay to his actions -- for example, his recent and much heralded visit to Israel). The reason for this neglect is far from clear. Maybe it arises from the anti-intellectualism in American life that Richard Hofstadter noted some years ago; if so, our lack of interest in the pope would be little more than an instance of our indifference to the life of the mind more generally. Or perhaps, instead, it has its roots in very old American worries about sectarianism -- that is, in suspicions about Catholicism's presumption to speak for all Christians and its history of seeking a very public role for religion. Many Americans seem to attribute the remarkable degree of religious freedom and pluralism in their country to the rejection of both opinions; apparently it is democratic bad taste for one sect to consider itself superior to others, and, as its corollary, for such a religion to make public pronouncements intended to apply to all. …