Witness to Hope - George Weigel

This comprehensive portrait of John Paul II covers many of the major questions facing the modern world, including issues such as the meaning of freedom, the nature and challenges of living a moral life, the transcendent mystery of sexuality, and the necessity of building a “civilization of love”. Interwoven with these themes, Weigel uses his unprecedented access to the Pope to give us a thoughtful exploration of John Paul’s youth, his call to the priesthood, his artistic and philosophical gifts, his understanding of and veneration for Vatican II, his thinking behind his major papal writings, and his dramatic refashioning of his role as pastor of the universal Church. A masterful biography, this account of John Paul’s life also attempts to weigh his papacy’s impact on the Church and the world in terms true to the transcendent faith that John Paul has both embodied and served for his entire life.

The life of John Paul II invites superlatives, and George Weigel is not unwilling to employ them. This Pope, he asserts, is "the most compelling public figure in the world, the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead." "He is arguably the most well-informed man in the world." "No human being in the history of the world had ever spoken to so many people, in so many different contexts." Weigel might perhaps have added that no one has been the subject of so many biographies, and such long ones, published in his own lifetime. Beginning with George H. Williams' The Mind of John Paul II (415 pp., 1981), we have seen a stream of serious biographies, each longer than its predecessors: Pope John Paul II: The Biography by Tad Szulc (542 pp., 1995); His Holiness, by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi (582 pp., 1996); Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II by Jonathan Kwitny (754 pp., 1997). In subtitling his book The Biography, Weigel seems to be deliberately challenging the claim of Szulc. More