Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II - Softcover

Weigel, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060932864 ISBN 13: 9780060932862

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2001

Synopsis

An authoritative chronicle of Pope John Paul II's life, drawing from comprehensive research and unusual access to the Pope and his associates, offers previously unknown information about his connections to historical events, examples of his poetry, and more. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Witness To Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel is as comprehensive a biography of its subject as can be hoped for while the Pope still lives. Weigel, a journalist who came to the Pope's attention after the publication of his book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, wrote Witness To Hope with his subject's encouragement and assistance. Weigel had unprecedented access to the Pope's correspondence (with, among others, world leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev). He reports lengthy conversations with many members of the Pope's inner circle, and he occasionally reveals vivid details of the Pope's daily life (for example, at the beginning of each day, the Pope's adviser's hear moans and groaning from John Paul's solitary prayers in his private chapel).

According to Weigel, the Pope told him that other biographies "try to understand me from outside. But I can only be understood from inside." Unfortunately, Weigel's method for understanding the Pope "from inside" depends on psychological conjecture ("It may help to begin by thinking of Karol Wojtyla as a man who grew up very fast") and is weakened by his extreme eagerness to praise his subject ("the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead"). More troubling, Weigel does not ask some of the really difficult questions about this Pope--regarding his involvement with sects such as Opus Dei, for example, or the relationship between his innovative "theology of the body" and his conservative stance on homosexuality, or even the vicissitudes of prayer life. Witness To Hope is a valuable book because it reports many facts that others have not reported. But for incisive analysis of this Pope's theological and political significance, or for insight into his spiritual life, readers will have to wait until the principals in his life story are free to speak more frankly with some future biographer. --Michael Joseph Gross

About the Author:

George Weigel is the author of the international bestseller Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. A Roman Catholic theologian and senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, he is one of the world's preeminent commentators on the Catholic Church.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0060932864
• ISBN 13: 9780060932862
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1040