I have to read this book by George Weigel

Volume II of his biography of Pope John Paul II. From a review:

This brings us to an important and often overlooked historical point. In the matter of knowing their enemies, as opposed to most others, the communists were generally right — and this is nowhere more obvious than in the case of John Paul II. While most Western intellectuals looked on the beginnings of Wojtyla’s papacy with bemusement, if indeed with any interest at all, communist kingpins from Moscow to Krakow to East Berlin saw something else: a mortal threat to the regimes they were defending and to the profound lies about human beings on which those regimes were built. By no coincidence Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by then in exile in Vermont, was almost alone in the West in grasping immediately the shattering historical significance of Wojtyla’s election. Upon hearing of it, he “threw out his arms,” Weigel reports from an exclusive family interview, and exclaimed, “It’s a miracle! It’s the first positive event since World War I, and it’s going to change the face of the world!”

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here are also walk-on parts aplenty in Weigel’s story for the noncourageous as well — and the mendacious, and the overly ambitious, and those on the communist tattletale payroll. By 1967, he reports, local clergy and laity in Poland included some 270 active informants. What was true of the Polish Church — that the communists attempted to riddle it with spies — was true at the global level as well. In what will come to many readers as one of the most shocking reports in the book, Weigel details how Vatican II itself was similarly infiltrated by a motley band of compromised clergy, hopeful reformist dupes, spies hiding beneath the banner of Polish radio, and more.

Against this backdrop of global ideological warfare, extraordinary faith and courage, and extraordinary perfidy and treachery at the same time, the struggle for and against communist domination played out. On one side stood a world power fabled for having no legions at all, as Stalin once famously sneered; on the other, another world power fabled for having nothing but. Then, in 1978, came the Polish pope. Playwright, actor, poet, philosopher, intellectual; sportsman, linguist, diplomat; a hardball ideological player outside the Catholic world even as he was revered for his pastoral humility within it: One might almost say that if Karol Wojtyla hadn’t been born, history herself would have had to invent him, so perfectly were his outsized gifts and faith a match for the outsized times.

Among various summaries of his activities as pontiff, Weigel reports that this pope went on pilgrimages to 129 different countries, travelling a total of some 750,000 miles; visited 1,022 cities outside Rome and delivered 3,288 prepared addresses; held 1,164 general audiences, attended by 17,665,800 people from around the world, as well as some 1,600 meetings with heads of state, heads of government, and other political figures. There is also his intellectual legacy within the Church itself via a prodigious outpouring of encyclicals, apostolic letters, catacheses, and other documents — including even an international bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), a papal first. Somehow, in between the Cold War, the Masses, the world leaders, and the rest, Weigel summarizes, John Paul II also created “a body of papal teaching with which the Catholic Church — and indeed the entire world of human culture — would be grappling for centuries.”

Even his dying and death took place on the world stage, with the image of the crippled, nearly immobile Pope leaning on a crucifix for support unforgettably emblazoned on the minds of many, many millions. As that purposefully public dying also went to show, Wojtyla was above all else a Catholic priest. This was true whether his pastoral setting were the woods outside of Krakow, where as a young man he took students on camping trips and used his kayak as an altar; or inside the overpowering St. Peter’s Basilica, where his words echoed beneath Bernini’s breathtaking baldicchino; or for that matter via the open-air Masses said during his papacy, among the largest gatherings of human beings in the history of the world. Wherever he was, John Paul II’s Christian message remained the same. All that changed were the numbers of people hearing it.

And what about the “real” Karol Wojtyla, as lesser writers telling his life story might have promised? “The interior lives of great men,” Weigel observes, “are often cloaked in mystery,” and far from being an exception, it is his biographer’s belief that John Paul II proves the rule here. In the end, he cites as Wojtyla’s indispensible inner core the Catholic understanding of metanoia, or complete turning to God and losing of self. The paradox of John Paul II’s life, concludes Weigel, is that “all this emptying of self leads to the richest imaginable human experience: a life unembittered by irony or stultified by boredom, a life of both serenity and adventure.”