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Lessons in Hope
My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II
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In Lessons in Hope, George Weigel tells the story of his unique friendship with St. John Paul II. As Weigel learns the pope “from inside,” he also offers a firsthand account of the tumult of post-Vatican II Catholicism and the Cold War’s endgame, introducing readers to the heroes who brought down European communism. Later, he shows us the aging pope grappling with the post-9/11 world order and teaching new lessons in dignity through his own suffering.
A deeply humane portrait of an eminent scholar learning a saint, Lessons in Hope is essential reading for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of a world-changing pope.
Excerpt
A Dinner of Consequence
IN EARLY DECEMBER 1995, I FLEW FROM WASHINGTON TO ROME TO give the keynote address at an international conference on secularism and religious freedom. One of the oddities of European academic conferences is that the "keynote address" is sometimes the finale of the proceedings, so my paper was slotted at the end of a three-day meeting. This curiosity of scheduling set the table for something even stranger, however. For the chairman of the conference's closing session, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, former secretary of state of the Holy See, devoted his remarks to a refutation of me and of the analysis of the Church's role in the collapse of European communism I made in a 1992 book, The Final Revolution.
The cardinal's suggestion—that I didn't quite understand Pope John Paul II and ought not be taken quite so seriously as an interpreter of the Pope's thoughts and actions—was more than a little ironic. And the irony turned on a dinner conversation in the Vatican the night before, of which Cardinal Casaroli, the Pope's "first collaborator" for more than a decade, was completely unaware.
The previous day, as the conference's postlunch session was about to begin, I had slipped into the back row of a large auditorium and sat down beside my friend Father Richard John Neuhaus. As was often the case, we were thinking the same thing: the moment called for a nice winter's nap, our heads enclosed in earphones as if we were paying close attention to the simultaneous translation while several colleagues droned on. There would be no napping that day, however. For no sooner had I muted the earphones than a seminarian, somewhat excited, began tapping me vigorously on the shoulder. I looked around, removed the headset, and heard him say several times, "Don Stanislao is on the telephone for you." He spoke in slightly awed tones, for my caller was Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, John Paul II's highly competent secretary and the man to whom few people in Rome wanted to say no.
I took the call and Dziwisz, as usual, got straight to the point: "Come over for dinner tonight and bring Father Neuhaus with you." I returned to the auditorium, where Richard was fast asleep, and gave him a gentle nudge. When he came to, I leaned over and said, "If your calendar permits, we're dining with the Holy Father tonight." Richard allowed as how that might be fitted into his social schedule.
So at 7:15 that evening we presented ourselves at the Portone di Bronzo, the Bronze Doors of the Apostolic Palace, and were duly led to the Terza Loggia, the third floor, and the papal apartment. We waited a bit in one of the apartment's small parlors, which, like the rest of the apartment, conjured up "middle-class Italian family," not "Borgia decadence." Then, without any ceremony, John Paul II and Msgr. Dziwisz came in, greeted us, and led us into the dining room, where Fr. Neuhaus and I were seated across from the Pope. John Paul said his usual rapid-fire Latin grace before meals and we tucked into an antipasto followed by roast chicken with a local red wine.
Conversations at John Paul II's table typically covered a lot of territory. The Pope was insatiably curious and used his mealtimes to keep himself abreast of new arguments, new books, trends in the world Church, and people his guests thought he should meet. But the table talk seemed disjointed this time, as if the Pope's mind were elsewhere. At one point, Fr. Neuhaus raised the issue of whether a thorough biography of the Pope wouldn't be a good idea and whether I should do it—an idea I had broached with John Paul's press secretary, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, seven months before and had talked over with Richard more recently. The Pope immediately changed the subject, as if this were something he didn't want to discuss. So the conversation drifted into other matters, with John Paul looking into the distance from time to time as if pondering how to say something.
Then, completely out of the blue, the 263rd Successor of St. Peter abruptly and forcefully said to Fr. Neuhaus, while glancing at me, "You must force him to do it! You must force him to do it!" "It," of course, was the biography, and "him" was me. Richard said that he didn't think that any force was going to be required. I simply exhaled. John Paul II smiled.
Later that night, after we had shared a scotch or two with Monsignor Timothy Dolan, the rector of the Pontifical North American College and our host during this Roman excursion, Richard said, "You know, this is going to change your entire life." I told him I didn't think so; I'd do the biography over the next few years and then return to the life I was leading at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Washington think tank that had been my professional home since 1989. "No," Richard insisted, "this is going to change everything."
He was right, if in that slightly exaggerated way that was one of his trademarks and one of his charms.
Becoming John Paul II's biographer didn't change everything. But it did become the pivot of my life. I began to see a lot of what had gone before in a new perspective, and I gradually came to understand that I had taken on a responsibility that would define me in the future, in ways I could not have anticipated that December afternoon in Rome when a nap seemed in order.
This album of memories is one unanticipated consequence of that dinner and what flowed from it.
When the second volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning, was published in 2010 and I was promoting the book in its various language editions, I discovered that what my audiences most wanted to hear were stories: stories about the man who had gone home to the Father's house in 2005, stories that would make him present again by rekindling memories or illuminating previously unknown aspects of his rich personality. That yearning to get to know more personally a saint who bent the course of history in a humane direction, and to know him in ways that didn't quite fit the genre of serious biography, struck me as the impulse that inspired the informal "lives of the saints" over the centuries. Responding to that curiosity seemed another way to honor the pledge I made to John Paul II at the end of his life: that I would complete the task I accepted at his dinner table on December 6, 1995.
Doing so, however, requires widening the anecdotal lens and exploring how it was that someone who never expected to become a papal biographer became just that. When I finished The End and the Beginning, I had devoted two large volumes, totaling some sixteen hundred pages, to chronicling the life of the emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century—and I thought there was no more to be said. My readers and my audiences taught me I was wrong about that, just as I was wrong in dismissing Fr. Neuhaus's prediction that writing the Pope's biography would change everything.
John Paul II thought he was finished with poetry when he wrote his valedictory to Kraków, the poem "Stanisław," en route to Rome for the conclave that elected him pope. But toward the end of his life, he discovered there were things he wanted to say that could only be said in poetry, and the result was Roman Triptych. I thought I was finished with the making of John Paul books in 2010. But like the Successor of St. Peter who unexpectedly became a friend and the defining personality in my life's work, I now find that there are other things to be said and other stories to be told.
So, like him, I now look back on a remarkable journey by making a triptych: in this case, a third panel to flesh out the portrait of John Paul II, and of many of the notable people around him, that I offered in Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning.
COINCIDENCE AND PROVIDENCE
Arriving at the Marian shrine of Fátima on May 12, 1982, on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving for his life having been spared when he was shot a year before, John Paul II said, "In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences." That brief remark summed up his view of God's ways with the world and with history.
Much of what happens to us over the course of a lifetime can seem mere happenstance or coincidence. Some might view the fact that Mehmet Ali Agca's bullets tore into the Pope on the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Fátima as coincidence. It didn't seem that way to John Paul II, for whom salvation history was world history read in its fullest dimension. In salvation history—that inner core of world history in which God's purposes are worked out through the action of divine grace on individual lives—there are neither happenstances nor coincidences. Rather, what appears to be sheer happenstance or coincidence is an aspect of Providence we don't yet grasp.
Karol Wojtyła, the man who became John Paul II, thought about coincidence and Providence for a long time. In his vocational memoir, Gift and Mystery, he remembered a fellow underground seminarian, Jerzy Zachuta, with whom he used to serve Mass for Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha during the Nazi occupation of Kraków in World War II. One day Zachuta didn't show up. Wojtyła went to his friend's home after the early morning Mass and discovered what had happened: the Gestapo had come the night before and arrested Jerzy Zachuta, who was later shot. As John Paul wrote more than a half century later, "Sometimes I would ask myself: so many young people of my own age are losing their lives, why not me? Today I know it was not mere chance."
That same conviction—that nothing is mere chance—explains why John Paul II came to Fátima a year after he was shot in his front yard, St. Peter's Square. Some might have thought it mere coincidence that a professional assassin, shooting at point-blank range on May 13, 1981, the day the Church's liturgy commemorated Our Lady of Fátima, failed to kill his target. But John Paul had come to a different understanding of his life and of history. As he put it more than once, "One hand fired, and another guided, the bullet." Providence acting through Our Lady, not ballistics, guided the bullet that missed his abdominal aorta by a few millimeters. He was spared, and for a reason. There was a mission to complete, and the Lord of history would see that he was given the opportunity to complete it.
The experience of learning John Paul II and his life taught me a new way of looking at events in my own life that might once have seemed happenstance or mere coincidence but that I came to see as remote preparation for being the Pope's biographer. The first of these non-happenstances came early, when I was a little short of nine years old. Others unfolded over the next three decades. Each is a piece of the puzzle of how I came to know Pope St. John Paul II and became his biographer.
LENT IN THE THIRD GRADE
BALTIMORE, 1960
IN SEPTEMBER 1957, I ENTERED THE CATHEDRAL SCHOOL IN downtown Baltimore. The granite-faced redbrick building at 7 West Mulberry Street was built in 1830, and the school was an adjunct to the Cathedral of the Assumption, a Federal-period masterpiece designed by the great Benjamin Latrobe, one of the first architects of the US Capitol.
The cathedral's eight-grade elementary school was conducted by the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a religious community founded in Bavaria that had flourished in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. When I arrived, the oldest of these black-gowned and white-wimpled ladies was Sister Mary Grace, thought to be the resident Methuselah because she had been at the Cathedral School since the days of Cardinal James Gibbons, who had died in 1921—meaning that her temporal relationship to the great cardinal was the same as mine, today, to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In any event, and despite the thrashing religious sisters frequently take in popular culture, my memories of the sisters at the Cathedral School are happy ones. My first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Moira, was a gentle soul who could teach a rock to read, and I maintained contact with my second-and third-grade teachers for decades.
It is none of these fine religious women, though, whom I remember when thinking about the remote anticipations of my life with John Paul II. It's the school's principal, Sister Mary Euphemia.
Ash Wednesday in 1960 fell on March 2, and a few days prior to our being marched into Latrobe's cathedral for penitential ashes, Sister Euphemia announced that each grade would pray for the conversion of a communist dictator throughout the impending six weeks of Lent. We third graders hoped we would draw Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as our designated prayee; he was the only communist dictator any of us had ever heard of. But Khrushchev must have been reserved for the lordly souls of the eighth grade. So there was disappointment, quickly giving way to puzzlement, when, on Ash Wednesday, Sister Florence wrote the name of our guy on the blackboard in block letters, absent the proper Polish orthography: W-L-A-D-Y-S-L-A-W G-O-M-U-L-K-A. I doubt that even my classmates of Polish extraction knew of this miscreant. And while I can't remember how we pronounced his name during the next month and a half of prayer for his conversion, I'm sure we pronounced it incorrectly.
Had anyone told me that, some thirty years later, I would write books in which Władysław Gomułka's complex role in postwar Polish history figured prominently, I would have thought the prognosticator mad. Yet there it is. And please don't tell me those weeks of Lenten prayer in 1960 for Comrade Gomułka's conversion—seemingly unanswered—didn't have something to do with planting in me a seed that would finally flower in a passion for Polish history and literature—and a determination to tell the story of a then-forty-year-old auxiliary bishop of Kraków whom Gomułka and his associates foolishly thought a mystically inclined intellectual they could manipulate.
FIRST STEPS IN PHILOSOPHY
BALTIMORE, 1969–1973
THE FIRST FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN PAUL II IN ENGLISH, written by veteran journalist Tad Szulc, suffered from numerous defects, one of which was a marked lack of interest in John Paul's intense intellectual life. But perhaps Szulc, who died in 2001, should be granted a measure of posthumous absolution on this point: Karol Wojtyła, the philosopher, was not easy reading, and getting inside his philosopher's mind was virtually impossible for someone without some formal training in the discipline. Which brings me to St. Mary's Seminary College, the liberal arts undergraduate division of St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, where I studied from 1969 to 1973, taking a philosophy degree on graduation.
I wasn't enthusiastic about studying philosophy when I entered the college in the fall of 1969. But I was a seminarian, philosophy was a prerequisite to the graduate study of theology, and in any case a degree in philosophy was the only degree St. Mary's offered when my parents drove me to 711 Maiden Choice Lane in Baltimore's Catonsville neighborhood to begin my baccalaureate studies. So, for better or worse, philosophy it would be.
For better, as it turned out.
It took me about two weeks in the required introduction to philosophy course taken by all freshmen—Philosophy of Man, as it was known in that politically incorrect age—to discover the intellectual excitement of abstract thought. There were two texts in the course, both written by a Dutch Augustinian priest, Father William Luijpen, who would not rank, then or now, as a great philosopher. (Some of his more exuberant and grating phraseology sticks in my mind more than four decades later, eruptions such as "Ah, the call of the Absolute Thou!") To his credit, though, Fr. Luijpen, who was in close touch with contemporary currents in philosophy, never lost a tether to the conviction that reason could get at the truth of things. Out of that heady mix of the classical and the modern, Luijpen created what he called "existential phenomenology": a way of getting at the truth not from the top down, as classical philosophers had done, but from, so to speak, the bottom up.
Whatever his rank among modern Catholic thinkers, his impact on me was like an intellectual electric jolt. Were I to reread them today, I might laugh, at least discreetly behind my hand, at his books. But it would be a friendly chuckle, not a mocking one, for Fr. Luijpen opened up to me a world of adventure I had never before imagined: the adventure of disciplined abstraction. That excitement was stoked by some fine teachers, for the study of philosophy at St. Mary's Seminary College, which closed a few years after my graduation, was like a light bulb that glowed most brightly at the end.
Father Thomas "Butch" Leigh, SS, one of the sweetest of men, led us neophyte philosophers through Luijpen, thereby getting me hooked on philosophy. James Anderson took us into, and out of, Plato's cave and into the bright, sunlit uplands of Aristotle. A freshman-year seminar in the philosophy of mathematics made me enjoy math in a way I had thought impossible since getting befuddled by Algebra II in high school.
Two men stand out as teachers whose work on me, and for me, yielded major dividends when it came to drilling into the mind of Karol Wojtyła.
Francis Kane introduced me to the modern Continental thinkers who had such an impact on Wojtyła, including Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology. His teaching ranged all over the history of philosophy, though, so it was Kane with whom I read the British empiricists, the contemporary linguistic analysts, and political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, Marx, and Mill, with pit stops along the way at Augustine, Hobbes, and Rousseau. His metaphysics course also introduced me to the "pleasures" of reading Immanuel Kant.
John Donovan taught me Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but above all he got me acquainted with Thomas Aquinas, who was rapidly being jettisoned in many post–Vatican II philosophy programs as impossibly old hat. In my senior year, Donovan gave me a good grounding in the thought of the Angelic Doctor, a lifelong respect for Thomas's intellectual achievement, and thus some understanding of the foundations on which John Paul II's philosophical project rested.
While I was getting intellectually excited by philosophy, the same thing was happening in theology, which I chose to pursue in graduate school as a layman on deciding that my vocation lay elsewhere than the priesthood. These two intellectual interests were connected, I came to understand. There are theologians who write as if they never studied philosophy at all—and it shows, usually in confusion. I was fortunate enough to learn as a young man that philosophy is the essential prerequisite to doing theology seriously, and has been since the first synthesis of biblical and Greek thought was forged in the late second century AD. Then there are theologians who are indeed formed, although ill-formed, by philosophy—and their attraction to inadequate (or false) philosophical approaches or systems also shows up in their theology, to bad ends.
Understanding this linkage between philosophy and theology—between sometimes unarticulated presuppositions and theologizing—was more than a matter of good intellectual hygiene for me. For there is no way to understand John Paul II's magisterium—his teaching as pope—without understanding the rudiments of his philosophical position and his general philosophical instincts. Nor is there any way to grasp John Paul II's critique of certain modern and contemporary theologians without grappling with his philosopher's critique of the philosophical positions that underwrote what he thought were their defective theologies. This was obviously true, for example, in John Paul's challenge to those forms of liberation theology he thought dependent on a Marxist philosophy of history. But it was just as true in his critique of certain trends in post–Vatican II Catholic moral theology, which he thought false philosophically before they led to trouble, theologically and pastorally.
None of these applications of what I had learned at St. Mary's could have been imagined when Cardinal Lawrence Shehan handed me my bachelor's degree on May 20, 1973. But the foundations had been laid. And looking back, I am immensely grateful that my adolescent skepticism about philosophy and its utility in the contemporary Church was overcome so quickly in September 1969, and so decisively in the four years that followed.
CONTESTING THE COUNCIL
TORONTO, 1973–1975
MY GRADUATE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. MICHAEL'S College in Toronto, from the fall of 1973 through the spring of 1975, took place when the Second Vatican Council and its immediate implementation were regarded as insufficiently radical by most of the principal personalities in theology in Western Europe and North America.
I don't believe we ever read a document of Vatican II in my Toronto classes; the Council was regarded as a good thing but an incomplete thing, thanks to what most of my colleagues thought was Pope Paul VI's timidity. According to the prevailing view, that timidity then overflowed into disaster in the 1967 encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (which reaffirmed Latin-rite Catholicism's commitment to a celibate priesthood) and in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (which reaffirmed the Church's classic teaching on marital chastity). There were some reverberations along Lake Ontario of the 1972 split among prominent theologians that led Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, and others who would play large roles in John Paul II's pontificate to found the journal Communio as an alternative to what they deemed a rigidly enforced progressive Catholic party line in Concilium, the journal they had helped establish during Vatican II. But this effort to maintain pluralism in Catholic theology was largely dismissed as irrelevant, even craven, in the world of Toronto theology.
Thus the idea that there was an alternative view of Vatican II—that the Council was a good thing but John XXIII's intention to dialogue with the modern world for the sake of converting the modern world had too often become a wholesale surrender to an increasingly incoherent modern world—was notably absent in Toronto. As for the possibility that the Council might be getting its most thorough pastoral implementation in an ancient diocese in the south of Poland, well, that was quite unimaginable.
Despite this hothouse atmosphere of progressive or liberal Catholic self-certainty, I learned important things in Toronto, especially from a gifted teacher, Father Daniel Donovan. I read a lot of what was known as "Transcendental Thomism" with Fr. Donovan, especially the Christology of Karl Rahner, on which I wrote my master's thesis. And if I later came to understand the limits of Rahner's theological project, that dissertation taught me something important for a then-unimagined future: that philosophical anthropology—the idea of the human person that animates a theologian's work—has a lot to do with how that theologian does theology.
The most famous and mediagenic member of the St. Michael's faculty in those years was Father Gregory Baum, the Berlin-born son of a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, a war refugee who had made it to Canada in the nick of time, a multilingual scholar who had become a Catholic, then an Augustinian priest. During Vatican II, Baum was recruited to the staff of the conciliar Secretariat for Christian Unity, the liberal counterbalance to the more conservative conciliar Theological Commission. Thus "Gregory," as everyone called this friendly and gregarious man, was at the epicenter of the internal struggles of Vatican II.
Gregory was a man of pyrotechnic intellectual dexterity who discovered one new disciplinary interlocutor for theology after another: different forms of philosophy, psychology, and so forth. I was his teaching assistant in a 1974–75 undergraduate course on the sociology of religion, then his newest fascination. He was a brilliant lecturer, if not the deepest of thinkers, and I enjoyed working with him. But what sticks in my mind from our time together is a casual remark he made at a party while regaling us with tales of Vatican II intrigue—secretly printing documents and covertly distributing them; lobbying the bishops (assumed by the progressive periti, or Council theologians, to be a little dull); battling the retrograde Roman theologians and their intransigent ways. All in all, Gregory smiled, "it was a theologian's paradise." The implication was that, were we lucky, we nascent theologians would have a similar opportunity in the future.
Over time, however, I came to understand that what Gregory Baum was referring to that night was not the clash of great ideas in the service of great causes; he was talking about power. And by that I don't mean to suggest something necessarily dishonorable. Gregory and those like him truly believed that the power they wielded—especially over those sometimes-dim bishops—was in aid of noble objectives: ecumenical reconciliation with other Christian communities, a new dialogue with Judaism, an openness to modern intellectual culture, an intensified focus on work for justice in the world. The point, though, is that they really liked that power and the purposes to which it could be put. And they were not hesitant to use the whip hand to keep the theologians' guild in line. In their view, the ratchet of theological and ecclesial history turned only one way, and they were prepared to enforce that conviction by exercising their power to quell deviations from the guild's line.
Shortly before I left St. Michael's there was a North American challenge to this liberal theological hegemony in the 1975 Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation—quickly dubbed (and dismissed) by many in Toronto as the "Hartford Heresies." The Concilium versus Communio
Genre:
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"Lessons in Hope offers an intimate understanding of John Paul II in action... Weigel's astute analysis of the pope's life and thought is sprinkled throughout with anecdotes from their interviews and encounters... John Paul's "rock-solid confidence in God's guidance of his life... made him the freest man in the world." Those who desire to have such freedom and clarity, especially in our days of ecclesiastical and political confusion, would do well to read this book."
—Weekly Standard - "For anyone in need of hope, this volume -- with its reliable understanding of history and Catholic witness, sound analysis, and the humor of both the author and the saint -- delivers in abundance."—National Review
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"[A] touching and insightful memoir...Weigel never loses sight of his main purpose: to illuminate the character and mind of the 'emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century.'"
—Commentary -
"[F]ascinating and insightful...Weigel details the many personal meetings he had with John Paul, as well as with his friends and collaborators, both in Poland and the Vatican. These lengthy and substantive encounters provided much of the rich material for his biography...Weigel's fine intellect and delight in friendship shine forth in this memoir... The book is written with Weigelian verve, replete with quotable anecdotes that are often amusing and always telling."
—The Catholic Thing - "An enchanting biography about a popular pope."—Publishers Weekly
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"A page-turner for fans of John Paul II, devotees of papal history, or those who simply enjoy a good and literate personal story."
—Kirkus -
"A delightful series of linked, autobiographical vignettes."
—Catholic Standpoint (UK) -
"There's no better eyewitness to the life and papacy of St. John Paul II than George Weigel, and this touching, intimate memoirs tells the story of their improbable friendship. It's a must-read, not simply because it adds to recent Church history, but because it feeds the heart and soul."
—John L. Allen Jr,. Editor of Crux -
"In this album of memories, George Weigel not only gives us an affecting intimate portrait of Saint John Paul II, but an up-close and personal view of the men who helped shape Holy See diplomacy during the late Pope's eventful pontificate. Lessons in Hope is much more than a memoir, for no one understands Catholic international relations theory better than Weigel, and no one has written with more sympathetic understanding of the challenges facing the post-conciliar Church."
—Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, Learned HandProfessor of Law, Harvard University - "This book recalls a particularly splendid moment in the recent history of Catholicism, a time when a saintly Pope exerted a decisive influence on both the Church and the wider society. But above all, it tells a compelling story of divine providence, the manner in which God wove two lives together--George Weigel's and John Paul II's--for their mutual benefit. Briskly written, intelligent, funny, filled with good stories, Lessons in Hope will be a joy to anyone who reads it."—BishopRobert Barron
- "For literary as well as spiritual pleasure, one new offering of interest to anyone who luxuriates in reading is George Weigel's Lessons in Hope. With settings as panoramic as those of a thriller, and anecdotes about some of the most fascinating figures and scenes of the twentieth century, it's a moving, personal, melodically rendered memoir of the biographer's times with the late great saint."—Mary Eberstadt , The Claremont Review of Books
- "Reading Lessons of Hope is like watching a play about the making of a play. It's a book about the making of the most comprehensive and compelling biography of Pope John Paul II. No other writer enjoyed anything like the personal access that George Weigel did; no one else can speak now with more authority about the Polish pope's remarkable life journey and its impact. And no one else can tell the story behind the story better than Weigel does in this insightful, revealing postscript."—Andrew Nagorski, former Newsweek Rome and Warsaw bureau chief and author of The Nazi Hunters and Hitlerland
- On Sale
- Sep 19, 2017
- Page Count
- 368 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780465094295
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