Religious books
Pope of the kingly people
Peter Hebblethwaite
John Paul II: A Man From Krakow George Blazynski (Weidenfeld £5.95) Man from a Far Country Mary Craig (Hodder £1.00) The Acting Person Karol Wojtyla (D. Reidel £7.75) Easter Vigil and Other Poems Karol Wojtyla (Hutchinson £2.95) One of the results of last October's surprise papal election is that the pope-industry is booming. Biographies are needed to satisfy curiosity about this 'man from a far country' — the way he presented himself to the Romans on the night of his election — and to predict his likely attitudes. His own prolific writings in various genres are hastily translated and will be ransacked for clues. There is almost a book for every publisher who wants to speculate on continuing interest in Pope John Paul II, or Jean Polak as Le Canard Enchaine neatly calls him.
He was acclaimed in October as the first non-Italian pope for 455 years. But the most important fact about him is not that he is non-Italian. It is that he is Polish. Fiercely Polish. Unashamedly Polish. But not narrowly Polish. He is well-read and an excellent linguist, and as one of his friends told me, 'though he is not in the least cosmopolitan and will not want to shed his Polishness, he does have a concept of "cultural collegiality": What Halina Bortnowska, who has edited many of his works in Krakow, meant by this phrase was simply that he can recognise and appreciate cultural differences, and that he will not try to impose his Polishness on the rest of the Church.
But of course it will make a difference to the style of his papacy. It will affect his judgement on controverted issues. A good biography should explain where he is likely to go. George Blazynski starts out with the advantage of being Polish, but unfortunately he squanders thisby errors and inaccuracies.
The book was produced at break neck speed, so perhaps charity is in order. But the persistently hagiographical tone is a more serious defect. On the one hand there are the stereo-typed communist villains (`The powerful Soviet magnetic field that tends to align everything towards Moscow and Marxism-Leninism') while our hero takes them on in single-handed combat, giving as good as he receives and behaving with a certain hauteur. He dismissed one local party official on the phone with the brisk remark: 'Until you recognise us officially. I don't see how we can talk to each other. Good day.'
The reader, too, has the right to expect some illumination on the philosophical work of Wojtyla as manifested in The Acting Person. Admittedly it is a daunting and in places opaque work, and so far I have not yet met anyone, apart from myself, who has actually finished it. But it is not good enough simply to say that his contributions to philosophical congresses 'electrified' the participants, or that his paper was a 'sensation' or that the popular story (i,e. the would-be joke) went the rounds that 'it is a real phenomenon for a cardinal to be a phenomenologist'.
By the time Blazynski reaches his final page, he admits that some readers may feel that euphoria has distorted perception. He is right. The man is so clever, so gifted, so direct, so holy, and everyone always knew he was going to become pope one day (though they kept it to themselves). B lazynski's defence is that it is all true. The only criticism he could ever elicit in Poland was that, sometimes, Wojtyla's sermons went on too long and that his 'written Polish is too heavy and involved'. But these are minor blemishes and he concludes that 'men like Wojtyla exist only in the stories of the lives of saints'. Too true. Hagiography has swallowed up analysis.
The hint about the tortuous Polish style of John Paul H would have been well worth following up. It would explain, for example. why his speech at Puebla, his most important test so far, was said — according to the newspaper you read — to be an attack on or a defence of 'liberation theology'. It could also explain why his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, made so little impact. Asa leader in the Tablet miffily remarked: 'In these days of instant communication it may be thought that the shorter more specific message is likely to be the more effective.'
Mrs Craig is more sensitive to problems of style, and deftly weaves in quotations from the peoms of Karol Wojtyla at appropriate moments. I have to declare an interest and say that she is an old friend. She makes her mistakes, too, and knows it, and was not responsible for the invention of someone called Max Buber. Her Polish connection began when she worked with Sue Ryder among the survivors of the concentration camps; her other book in an industrious year, Blessings, explains the link with Poland more fully. In my view the interested foreigner makes a better biographer than the exiled Pole, perhaps because she is more aware of what we need to have explained.
She sensibly usesAshes and Diamonds to catch the atmosphere of post-war Poland. She digs out one of Hitler's orders to Hans Frank, his Polish overlord. After saying that Polish intellectuals will be rooted out, it concludes: 'The task of a priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted'. This remark throws a revealing light not only on Wojtyla's decision to become a priest in the darkest days of the war, but on his con ception of the role of the priest, whatever totalitarians happen to be strutting selfimportantly about: the task of the priest will be to disprove that monstrous suggestion. He will keep Poles alert and intelligent. He will, as he says in one of his poems. 'touch forces that expand the mind'.
Biographical information apart, both books are useful in providing quotations from earlier sermons and lectures. Pope John Paul is always talking about 'kingliness'; in the light of previous statements this is not an observation about monarchy but simply another way of referring to the dignity of the 'kingly people of God'. The early texts also prove that he is obsessed with 'cultural problems' because he has lived in a regime which claims total control over the educational system and the mass media. It is not surprising that for him the family, with its traditional morality, should appear as 'the alternative society', and that he should move, with ease, from the battle for cultural rights to the battle for human rights more generally. By the end of his time in Poland he had become a barely tolerated dissident.
His literary output has been remarkable for someone who had so many other things to do. Most bishops complain — and the late Cardinal Heenan boasted —that they cannot find time to read books, let alone to write them. However. Spectator readers would not be grateful if I attempted to expound The Acting Person. It will be enough to say that it adopts the phenomenological method developed by Husserl and leads, eventually, to a modern restatement of Thomist positions. Wojtyla is aware of the work of Ayer and Ryle — they appear in his footnotes — but not greatly impressed by them. Why did he embark on this laborious project? His own introduction explains: 'Having conquered so many secrets of nature, the conquerer must have his own mysteries ceaselessly unravelled anew'. And he begins from the sense of wonder, the 'first cognitive impulse', which gets us out of the rut of habit.
No doubt that is why he wrote poems, always, until he became pope, under Pseudonyms. I feel sympathetic towards a Philosopher or theologian who is impelled to write poetry: it proves that he can feel as well as think and that, like Thomas Aquinas, he knows that so much theology is mere straw. Wojtyla's poems are the best introduction to the man. The Quarry has been much admired as a reflection of his wartime experience's as a worker. I now prefer The Birth of Confessors in which he talks about confirming people in a mountain village. 'Images of dams and electric currents flow organically together to produce a vivid statement about what he thinks he is doing: I am a giver. I touch forces that expand the mind; sometimes the memory of a starless night is all that remains.
If not exactly a programme for his pontificate, it could at least serve as a motto.
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