The Greatest of Men

The Greatest of Men | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | November 18, 2010

I.

My friends, William and Anne Burleigh, from Kentucky, were in town visiting their daughter, Sister Anne Catherine, O.P., the principal of Mt de Sales Academy in Maryland. Bill is also Chairman of the Board of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where George Weigel hangs his hat when he is not everywhere else in the world. They brought me a copy of Weigel's new biography of John Paul II, The End and the Beginning—the Omega and the Alpha.

  By chance, I had just finished a novel of William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, the last chapter of which is also entitled "The End and the Beginning," and for somewhat the same reasons, namely, what is our life all about? And who will tell us what it is? More than perhaps any man in our history, John Paul II told us—you are an unrepeatable person made in the image of God destined for eternal life. And when we did not understand or want to understand, he showed us.

It so happens that I ended up in the hospital for a few days with asthma, which I think the Lord sent to me so that I would read Weigel's new book. It is a spectacular book. Here, I will not write a "review" but, as I did in the case of two of Msgr. Sokolowski's books [here and here], the David Walsh and the Tracey Rowland books [here and here], I will simply write an appreciation of Weigel's work.

First of all, the book is not about Weigel. It is about John Paul II, a man that Weigel has known, admired, and written about. His earlier massive biography, Witness to Hope, remains the standard text on the life of Karol Wojtyla and is certainly worth rereading in the light of this second volume.

The present book, as its title indicates, is able to complete what could not have been accomplished when Witness to Hope was written in 1999. Essentially, the book deals with what we now know of the earlier life of Karl Wojtyla, especially in the light of the documents that have appeared from the East German, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, and Russian secret police. It deals with their massive efforts to undermine and follow him, to infiltrate even the Vatican, and to counter his words and actions. To their credit, from early on these fumes of iniquity understood better than most of us the power of this man. His magnetism, as Weigel points out often, they recognized but could not understand, a force of grace and personality, yes, charm and insight and energy, that the world has seldom, if ever, seen.

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