George Weigel’s two biographies of St. John Paul II—Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning—are widely considered the authoritative volumes on the life and work of the Polish pope. Weigel has a new book out, Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II (Basic Books), which focuses on his decades-long friendship with St. John Paul and on the inspiring witness the pope offered the world in the face of great suffering in the last years of his life.
Weigel recently spoke to CWR editor Carl E. Olson about his new book.
Carl E. Olson, for CWR: At the start of Lessons in Hope, you note that you thought Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning, which totaled about 1,600 pages, contained all you could or would say about St. John Paul II. Why this third book? In what ways is this “album of memories,” as you describe it, different from the two biographies?
George Weigel: Lessons in Hope is almost entirely anecdotal; it tells the stories that wouldn’t have “fit” into two volumes of biography, but that illuminate, in one way or another, interesting facets of John Paul II’s personality and way of conducting the papacy. I’ve discovered in recent years that this is what people want, now: not so much analysis of a remarkable personality and his accomplishment, but story-telling that brings him alive in a personal way.
CWR: You write that the “experience of learning John Paul II and his life taught me a new way of looking at events in my own life…” What are some examples of that? And what are some of the events that paved the way for you to become John Paul II’s biographer?
Weigel: At Fatima in 1983, one year after the assassination attempt that came within a few millimeters of taking his life, John Paul said, “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.” What we think of as “coincidence,” or just happenstance or randomness, is actually a part of God’s providential guidance of history that we just don’t understand yet. That insight of his helped me to see how, for example, my philosophical and theological studies in college and graduate school, my work as a columnist and essayist, the people I met at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1984-85, and a week in Moscow in 1990 fomenting nonviolent revolution were all providential experiences that prepared me to take on the job of being John Paul II’s biographer.
CWR: One point made in several places is the importance of understanding John Paul II’s philosophical perspective and project. What are some key features of his philosophical work? And how has this been either misunderstood or even misrepresented?
Weigel: John Paul II is persistently misunderstood as some sort of pre-modern mind, when in fact his was a thoroughly modern mind with a distinctive critique of modernity. At the heart of that critique was the conviction that ethics had come unglued from reality; that the moral life was wasting away into subjectivism and sentimentality; and that human beings (and society) were suffering as a result. The entire philosophical project he and his colleagues at the Catholic University of Lublin launched in the 1950s was an attempt to get the moral life back on a sound footing: not from top down but from bottom up—through a rigorous and compelling theory of the human person, our capacity for responsibility, and the dynamics of our moral decision-making. That’s why his philosophical masterwork was called “Person and Act.”
CWR: How did you first meet John Paul II and how did your friendship develop?
Weigel: Our first real conversation was in September 1992, when I gave him a signed copy of The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, which he had already read on galley proof. Things snowballed after that, both in terms of personal conversations and correspondence, and both conversation and correspondence continued after the publication of Witness to Hope. The details of how our relationship evolved over the course of my preparing Witness to Hope and afterwards—during the dramas of the Long Lent of 2002, the Iraq War, and his last illness—are described in detail in Lessons in Hope.
CWR: John Paul II strongly encouraged you to meet with many of his friends from his time in university. Why was that so significant to him? How did that period of time shape the rest of his life?
Weigel: It was not so much his friends from his own time in university (although I did meet with the surviving members of his underground wartime theatrical troupe, the Rhapsodic Theater), but the friends he made while he was a university chaplain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As he was helping form them into mature Catholic adults, they were helping form him into one of the most dynamic and creative priests of his generation. He thought that story was crucial to understanding him “from the inside,” so he encouraged me to talk with these men and women, several of whom are now close friends of mine.
CWR: You emphasize, as you have many times over the years, that your two biographies of John Paul II were not “authorized biographies.” What does that mean and why is it so important?
Weigel: An “authorized biography,” in the usual sense of the term, is one that has been vetted (and perhaps edited) by the subject or the subject’s heirs, in exchange for access and documents; so an authorized biography should be read with a certain reserve, given what one has to assume was the vetting involved. At the very outset of the Witness to Hope project, I told John Paul over dinner that he couldn’t see a word of what I wrote until I gave him the finished copy of the book, and he immediately responded, “That’s obvious.” He knew, as I knew, that there could be no one looking over my shoulder as I wrote if the book was to be credible; he also thought that the book was my responsibility and he wasn’t about to change a lifelong pastoral habit of challenging others to be responsible without imposing his own judgments. So while I hope Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning are as authoritative as possible, they are in no sense “authorized.” I also hope that Lessons in Hope ends, once and for all, the urban legend that John Paul II asked me to write his biography. He didn’t. I suggested the project and he agreed to cooperate with it.
CWR: What were some of the more challenging aspects of researching the life of John Paul II?
Weigel: There were a lot of people in the Roman Curia who weren’t as eager for me to have full access to people and documents as John Paul II was, and the stories of my adventures in getting through that Italianiate obstacle course are very much part of Lessons in Hope. Then there were the problems posed by my predecessors in the papal biographers’ guild, like Tad Szulc and Carl Bernstein: people who had spoken freely with them felt that they had been burned, in the sense that Szulc and Bernstein had slotted their reflections into what these men and women who knew John Paul II well thought were nonsensical analyses. And it took a while for me to convince some of them that I was different. There was also the challenge of inviting a man with a deep sense of privacy to talk about aspects of his life he had rarely if ever discussed before; but John Paul answered every question I posed to him and in fact pushed me into exploring areas of his life to which I might otherwise have given short shrift.
CWR: In discussing the “Long Lent”—the clerical sexual abuse scandal that broke in early 2002—you explain that there existed an “information gap” between Rome and the United States. Why did that gap exist? How well or poorly was John Paul II informed of what was happening?
Weigel: The gap existed because of curial incapacity and the general Roman sense that “things can’t be as bad as all that,” which is too often applied to crises. The story of how the Pope got more fully informed of the situation, and my role in helping facilitate that, is told in detail in Lessons in Hope.
CWR: What are some lessons from John Paul II that you think are especially apt now, in 2017?
Weigel: In this time of turbulence in the Church it’s important to remember that we’re not in 1978. The growing parts of the Church throughout the world are the parts of the Church that have embraced what I’ve come to call “all-in Catholicism” as exemplified by the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and the dying parts are those parts that continue to embrace Catholic Lite. This distinction is true of pastoral life, Catholic intellectual life, and the Church’s public witness. And that makes for a very, very different circumstance than the situation in 1978, when Catholic Lite pretty well ruled the roost. Catholic Lite is a failure and has no future; there is a compelling alternative to it, created by the Second Vatican Council as authoritatively interpreted by John Paul II; and if we all remembered that, things would be a little calmer these days.
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Although it may be matter of opinion I don’t believe most well read persons believed John Paul II was a throw back to pre Vat II thought. From his earliest years as a priest he was influenced by Max Scheler, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was sanctioned by German Hierarchy for Scheler’s ethical thoughts on feelings and the “totality of good”. Following his initial doctorate [Faith in St John of the Cross] at the Angelicum Fr Wojtyla earned a second doctorate in Poland on the ethics of Scheler in an effort to accommodate the latter’s ethical thought and the compatibility of phenomenology with classical metaphysics. “In response to questions put to him by a Polish confrere a few days after being made pope, Karol Wojtyla replied I would say that in my life I’ve had two great philosophical revelations — Thomism and Scheler” (Catholic Culture). The book you refer to is titled The Acting Person first published in 1969 in Analecta Husserlianna. In the Acting Person we find affinity of “feeling” as understood by Scheler, and what Aquinas calls an “inner sense” in ethical discernment. John Paul II broke ground here not only for philosophy in a reconciliation of the Husserlian phenomenological effort to return to existence and St Thomas Aquinas. He also couched ethics understood as virtue rather than legalistic duty [Kant] in language more comprehensive to modern man evident in Veritatis Splendor. For example the person who acts virtuously is intent on the good of the act, its object as ordered to his understanding of the goodness of God rather than entirely on good intent. The acting person acts freely when he acts virtuously. As an anecdote I watched him and sought as a priest to identify with his virtuous suffering end stage Parkinson’s during the Liturgy at St Peter’s. It was that heroic example he gave priests that for myself most defines the man.
This is all quite well said, except the book originally translated into English as “The Acting Person” was originally titled in Polish “Person and Act.” The original English translation has almost from the beginning come under heavy fire for the application of editorial discretion in the direction of phenomenology and away from the more metaphysically grounded perspective Wojtyla was obviously going for. So “Person and Act”, which I believe was retranslated later, is closer to Wojtyla’s actual thought. Again, I think the rest of this is well said.
Thanks Stephen. The English translation I read at the Angelicum was an unpublished hand written copy by a Polish priest. Aside from the title there was more of an emphasis on Aquinas’ metaphysics than the standard translation that the priest meant to correct. There is another anecdote in relation to Max Scheler. Scheler following his conversion was responsible for the conversion of Edith Stein, an atheistic Jew and fellow philosopher at Gottingen. You likely know she became Sr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Stein was deeply immersed in the meaning of the Cross and the works of St John of the Cross. As was Karol Wojtyla. Apparently the future John Paul II had a fondness for Stein and was instrumental in her canonization. I read her noted work The Problem of Empathy in which she identifies an ethical awareness in empathy understood as a “religious consciousness,” a “kind of act of perceiving sui generis”. It was this existential form of phenomenology developed at Gottingen that attracted Pope John Paul II.
Most, perhaps. I recall that Fr. Andrew Greeley, back in the late 1990s, called JPII a “fundamentalist”, which was both pathetic and revealing. I don’t think that was unusual at all among many progressive Catholic theologians and scholars, who mostly had very low for JPII’s thought and work.
Sounds much like slams today about “rigidity,” etc.
If I may add, G Weigel’s reference to Providence understood by John Paul II is extremely important, relevant to our extraordinary challenging moment in Church history. That events are not accidental. That God has some purpose as was evident in his own as well as the Pontiff’s life. It’s assurance to be reminded that whatever may transpire Justice will prevail.
Thank you for your thoughts, Father Peter. I learned more today 🙂
I am glad to see the comparison between “all-in” Catholicism and “Catholic-Lite”. Much better than “Evangelical and Counter-Reformation” Catholicism which was just divisive and a non-starter.
I would refrain from categorizing the great mind of St Pope John Paul II as pre-modern or modern, or anything other than Catholic, universal and timeless. His works are still fairly unknown as they should be known, and the current papacy is doing all in its power to obliterate the work of St John Paul. I grew up during his papacy and he has been a great source of learning and inspiration, not just for me. I am currently reading his private diary, which covers the period of 1962 to 2003. From these pages one can feel and see already the great faith and genius of that blessed soul. That was a man who wasn’t afraid to question himself, who lived a life completely given to Jesus and His Church, who truly understood the mystery of the Cross and didn’t allow his early life trials to hinder his faith and ministry. He did all this in all humility and in submission to Jesus and to the one who ushered salvation into the world, Our Blessed Mother.
I remember when St. John Paul the Great came out on the Loggia. I was disappointed as the liberals who condemned anything before Vatican ll rejoiced that yet another tradition had been broken in the Church as Pope John Paul was the first non-Italian Pope in over 400 years. The Holy Father said what caused dread to Traditional Catholics, “The Church is always in need of reform, and I will keep reforming it according to Vatican ll”. At that time, the Church was being destroyed by Bishops, priests, and laity alike in the name of Vatican ll, so one can understand the disappointment of Traditional Catholics. My great joy was that what he said wasn’t what we thought he meant. St. John Paul the Great spent his papacy restoring and fixing the damage that the “spirit of Vatican” Catholics caused in the Church.