Lessons in Hope:
My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II
by george weigel
basic, 368 pages, $32
Czesław Miłosz once said that, in terms of moral grandeur and personal presence, St. John Paul II could have been one of Shakespeare’s kings. No less a judge than Joseph Ratzinger noted that it was JPII who had “made [the world] recognize once again the spiritual dimension in history.” In the twentieth century, only Churchill and Solzhenitsyn might be thought of as somewhat comparable public figures.
George Weigel has been the great chronicler and interpreter of Karol Wojtyła’s life and thought. His Witness to Hope is the definitive biography, which both for its access to the pope and his closest friends, as well as its insight in dealing with every aspect of the subject, is unequaled. (It was even used as a source in the pope’s process of canonization: “Your book is the bible in this office,” the official postulator told him.) And the sequel, The End and the Beginning, carries the story forward with previously unavailable material on the communist era until the pope’s final years and death.