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« Back to Witness to Hope main page    Transcript for: Witness to HopeTHINK TANKSaturday, October 23, 1999 ANNOUNCER: Brought to you in part by ADM, feeding the world is the biggest challenge of the new century, ADM is promoting soil conservation, so history doesn’t repeat itself. ADM, supermarket to the world. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Pope John Paul II is surely one of the most consequential figures in the 20th Century. An acclaimed new book, Witness To Hope: The Biography Of John Paul II, sets out to capture the man, his life, his achievements, and his times. The author is George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Weigel describes this Pope as a paradox. John Paul II is perhaps the most visible man in world history, and yet me may be the least understood major figure of the 20th Century. We hope to unlock some of that paradox in the next half hour. The topic before the house, Pope John Paul II, Witness To Hope, this week on Think Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: George Weigel, welcome to Think Tank. MR. WEIGEL: Thanks, Ben. Good to be here. MR. WATTENBERG: His name before he became Pope was Karol Joseph Wojtyla. Why don’t we go through it, where was he born and what happened? MR. WEIGEL: He was born in a small town outside of Krakow, son of a retired army officer. His mother died when he was nine. His dad, I think, was the single most influential figure in his early life, a man of iron integrity, a man who taught him that manliness and piety went together, weren’t antonymous. And then came what I think I discovered in the course of preparing this biography, was the formative experience of his life, the Second World War. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. World War II starts on September 1st, 1939. MR. WEIGEL: Six o’clock in the morning, young Karol Wojtyla walks across the Vistula River to serve mass in Laval (sp) Cathedral. At 7:00 in the morning the bombs start falling from the Luftwaffa. The masses rapidly, if decorously ended. He runs home to get his aging pensioner father, and they start out fleeing east, towards a little town called Tarniff (sp), in this terrible stream of refugees fleeing Krakow. MR. WATTENBERG: Is he already a seminarian? MR. WEIGEL: No, he’s just a university student, a plain old university student studying Polish language and literature. Two-hundred kilometers east of Krakow, fleeing the German army coming from the west, they meet the Soviet army coming from the east, and that’s even worse. Better to go back to an occupied Krakow than to be sent off to the gulag or the middle of nowhere in the Soviet Union as many Pols were. So they come back to Krakow and he begins four years of life under a draconian occupation, in which he participates in a host of underground resistance activities, aimed at saving Polish culture. Helps reconstitute the underground Jagiellonian University. And in the course of all of that begins to discern a vocation to the priesthood. MR. WATTENBERG: So he’s a student, a poet, an intellectual, a very social creature. And does this continue during the war, or is that when he starts in the seminary? MR. WEIGEL: In February 1941 his father died, so he’s all alone. He’s 20 years old in this occupied city. At this point he’s a manual laborer, he’s breaking rocks in a quarry, because if you didn’t have what was called an arbites carta, a work card, you were -- MR. WATTENBERG: From the Nazis? MR. WEIGEL: From the Nazis, you were off to the concentration camp or you were shot, period. It’s during that experience as a manual laborer, first in the rock quarry, later schlepping barrels of lye in a chemical plant, that he begins to sense a call to the priesthood, which he frankly admits he resisted, because he wanted to be an actor, a philologist, a lay Catholic living his Christianity in that way. But, I asked him once at a dinner in which we were talking about his experience of the war, I said, Holy Father, what did you learn from all of that, what did you learn from all of that, because you talk about what an influence it was on you. And he said, I learned the great experience of my contemporaries, humiliation at the hands of evil. We were being daily humiliated at the hands of evil. Now, some people respond to that by simply going mad. Other people responded to that by becoming terrible cynics. He responded to it by making this radical commitment to defending the dignity of the human person. And I think it’s in that context that a vocation to the priesthood began to make some sense to him. MR. WATTENBERG: That is, as I understand it, the theme that runs through his life intellectually, defensor hominis, is that how it’s pronounced? MR. WEIGEL: Right, defender of man. MR. WATTENBERG: Of the rights of man? MR. WEIGEL: Of the rights of man, yes, right. And that emerges out of this wartime experience. I mean, it was not simply, although it was certainly the experience of Communist Poland that deepened this in him, but it was the experience of the occupations. The man is very much a product of the Second World War. MR. WATTENBERG: And then the West wins the war, but Poland, which was occupied by the Nazis from the West, and the Soviets from the East, does not win any war? MR. WEIGEL: World War II Pols say is the war they lost twice. They lost first at the end of September 1939, and they lost second at Yalta. And the Yalta division of Europe, consigning Poland to the Soviet outer empire, taking this historically, Catholic, and indeed Western oriented country and making it an outpost of the Soviet empire became a metaphor for John Paul II for the great political problem of the second half of the 20th Century. How do you assert human freedom in the face of this totalitarian system from the Soviet Union? MR. WATTENBERG: And this, as you write about it, it is not -- in his person not a political view, but a religious feeling, a religious sentiment. MR. WEIGEL: I think a moral judgment. MR. WATTENBERG: It’s a blending, that’s really what we’re talking about with the Pope is a blend of political thought and spiritual thought, they both come to the same thing, which is human rights? MR. WEIGEL: I think that’s right, yes. This is a religiously informed moral judgment, that something is fundamentally awry when a people’s authentic history, and authentic culture is being taken away from them in the name of political power. And that’s the way he always read the Cold War. And that’s why he could be such a powerful opponent in the Soviet system, because he knew what its most vulnerable point was. MR. WATTENBERG: He becomes a bishop and then a cardinal under the Polish Communist state? MR. WEIGEL: They had a very bad idea. They thought this was a guy they could manipulate. MR. WATTENBERG: They, the Polish Communists? MR. WEIGEL: The Polish Communists thought that -- MR. WATTENBERG: In some thrall to the Soviet empire? MR. WEIGEL: Well, very much enthralled to the Soviet Empire, but also very much believing their own propaganda, that ideas don’t count in history, what counts is raw power. And that here was this intellectual who could be manipulated. Well, they found out something quite different. In the 14 years that he was the arch bishop of Krakow, he became the -- MR. WATTENBERG: The Polish Communist government had veto authority over who would become the -- MR. WEIGEL: Yes, they couldn’t nominate, but they could veto. MR. WATTENBERG: That was the deal they cut with the church? MR. WEIGEL: In 1953, by 1975 or ’76, 12 years into the job, he was the man, Voitiwa, they most feared and hated, because they didn’t know where he was going to hit them next, and they did not expect this intellectual poet to become an enormously compelling public presence, hammering on human rights issues, in public, and saying all the things that weren’t supposed to be said. So I think they were somewhat relieved when he was elected Pope. MR. WATTENBERG: They had a tiger by the tail. MR. WEIGEL: They had a tiger by the tail. MR. WATTENBERG: Maybe not even by the tail, a tiger. MR. WEIGEL: And he got progressively more assertive as the years went on. It was a most striking performance. Now, when he was elected, the Pols may have breathed a sigh of relief that he was -- MR. WATTENBERG: The Polish Communists? MR. WEIGEL: The Polish Communists might have breathed a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to be on their case. But, as I think I show in the book, one of the guys who figured out very early that this was very bad news was Uri Andropov, the head of the KGB, and probably the only guy in the senior Soviet leadership with enough mental power left at that point to figure this out. I mean, Brezhnev was kind of his in his vegetative condition. But, Andropov within I would say six weeks had figured out this is very bad news, not just for Poland, but for the internal Soviet empire, for Ukraine, Lithuania, all of those parts of the western Soviet Union that the Communists had consolidated. MR. WATTENBERG: Tell me, because it’s going to be relevant what Stalin said at Potsdam? MR. WEIGEL: Sure, how many divisions has the Pope? MR. WATTENBERG: Sarcastically they came up, in the negotiations with Truman and Atlee and he said, how many divisions has the Pope? MR. WEIGEL: Well, he had enough. MR. WATTENBERG: He had enough, as it turned out. So he is elected Pope in what year? MR. WEIGEL: October 16th, 1978. MR. WATTENBERG: And then he goes back to Poland? MR. WEIGEL: In June ’79, 9 days on which the history of the 20th Century, I believe, turned in a fundamental way, because all of the Solidarity people I talked to, religious and secular, and indeed a lot of what were then called dissidents in Czechoslovakia, most of whom were not religious, all said when I asked them, when did this start, when did the revolution of 1989 begin, everybody says without exception between June 2nd and June 10th, 1979, when the Pope came to Poland. MR. WATTENBERG: The first non-Italian Pope comes back to his homeland in Poland. MR. WEIGEL: And preaches a gospel of human dignity, saying all of the things that could not be said for the previous 40 years under the Nazis and the Communists. And I think what he did then during that period is he gave the Polish people back their history and their culture, which had been hijacked from them under two totalitarian systems. And out of that came, within 13 months, the Solidarity movement, and out of that, after another 8 years of struggle, came the collapse of European Communism. MR. WATTENBERG: And how much later is the assassination attempt? MR. WEIGEL: Two-and-a-half years later, May 13th, ’81. MR. WATTENBERG: There was obviously much speculation that the fine hand of the Soviets was in that, how do you come out on that? MR. WEIGEL: I think that’s the most plausible explanation. There’s no question that Aja (sp) did not act alone, Memed (sp) Ali Aja, this Turk who did the shooting. I mean, he didn’t act alone. And the trail that has been established of his life for the previous two years clearly connects him to the Bulgarian secret service. No one who knows what Eastern European intelligence services were like would think that the Bulgarians would change the brand of Kleenex they would use, much less try to pull off a papal assassination without the Soviets. MR. WATTENBERG: He is still imprisoned? MR. WEIGEL: Aja is still in prison, Aja is a madman, Aja is a lunatic. MR. WATTENBERG: So he has never confessed or opened up? MR. WEIGEL: He’s never talked about any of that, no. And it’s not the kind of thing we’re ever going to get a slam dunk answer on, because it’s not the kind of documents you leave in the files. But, I think the question, who benefitted makes it clear that the Soviets were not innocent. MR. WATTENBERG: George, you view John Paul II as the first modern Pope, and as you expressed to us here today, that he was a shaper of the last half of the -- the second half of the 20th Century. Yet, as you know, his critics argue that his social views, particularly, are essentially pre-modern, abortion, birth control, women in the priesthood, and so on and so forth. How do you square that? MR. WEIGEL: I don’t think these liberal-conservative categories make sense, applied to an ancient religious tradition, or to the world’s oldest institutional office. Nobody asks whether the Dali Lama is a liberal or a conservative Buddhist, because it doesn’t occur to us to ask that. That’s not the way we understand religious systems to operate. The Pope is, by definition, the custodian of an authoritative religious tradition. He’s not the master of that tradition, he’s the servant of it. And I think what John Paul has tried to do -- MR. WATTENBERG: Hold on. George, I mean, this is a Pope who, as you point out quite eloquently, has broken new ground. He has broken new ground about how Catholics regard other religions. He has broken ground that the Catholic church’s root, core conviction is human rights. These are not things that were in the deck, certainly not as prominently, before Pope Carol Voitiwa, is that right, came onto the scene. So it is -- I’m suggesting, is it a little disingenuous to say, well, he’s only the custodian. If he were just the custodian he wouldn’t say it’s most important at the end of the 20th Century. MR. WEIGEL: To be the custodian means to help the tradition develop. It also means to help it develop within some boundaries that are fixed, I mean, that are not utterly permeable, and that tell you whether a development is authentic or not. MR. WATTENBERG: You made a point in a talk you gave not very long ago about what has happened to the Catholic church, which in the 20th Century, going against the grain of what sort of the intellectuals has predicted would happen. I wonder if you could do that for me just briefly, I mean, go back to that Voltaire thing if you can. I love that one. MR. WEIGEL: Yes, I mean, in 1899, I’m sure most intellectuals would have said the 20th Century upcoming is going to be the century in which religion withers away, as a maturing humanity schleps off its need for these kinds of props. Of course, behind all of that was Voltaire’s wish that the last king be strangled with the guts of the last priest, and these were the institutions that impeded the human project in history. Well, at the end of the 20th Century, the Catholic church to take one example of a vibrant religious community, is a billion human beings, spread out all over the world, growing fastest in Africa, half of world Catholicism is now in Latin America. The church is becoming a Third World church, demographically. It’s old heartland, Western Europe, is that part of the Catholic church that’s in the toughest shape right now. But, I think we’re looking forward in the 21st Century to the delicious prospect of Western Europe being re-evangelized from black Africa, which is producing missionaries at a great rate. So I will not be around to see that, but I hope I have a seat in the future from which I can observe it. MR. WATTENBERG: He is vigorously pro-scientific, isn’t he? MR. WEIGEL: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Which is also not -- I mean, it’s not a change necessarily, but it’s surely a different emphasis. He has no fight with the cosmologists and the astronomers, and that? MR. WEIGEL: No, he has them to his place every two years for seminars. I mean, he has this seminar with physicists out at Casto Gadalfo (sp) to find out what’s going on. He began a personal conversation with the hard sciences, physics, chemistry, and so forth, in the early 1950s. I mean, he’s fascinated by this. And he fascination reflects, I think, his profound Christian conviction that all truth leads to the one Truth, capital T, who is God. So why be afraid of the truth, why be afraid of the truth? MR. WATTENBERG: He is very modern in the scientific sense, and yet I know some Catholic theologians, our friend Michael Novak for one, who is less than convinced that the Vatican has quite got the idea of what modern capitalism is. Is that valid? MR. WEIGEL: I think they’re beginning to catch on to the fact that you can think about the free economy, which is the Pope’s preferred term, in the way that you think about every other aspect of the human condition. You can think about this through a moral prism, and find great value in entrepreneurship, in creativity, in human ingenuity, applied to economic matters. The Pope has said on numerous occasions, the problem is not wanting to have more, improving your material condition, the problem is identifying having more with being more, that the Lexus is the answer to all of the problems of your life. And I think there’s a great truth to that. MR. WATTENBERG: Perhaps it’s changing now, but if you had to characterize the economic views of his papacy, you’d come out, and it’s an important moral part of what he has been saying, you would come out with the idea that he is sort of a Social Democrat, rather than a free market type? MR. WEIGEL: I think he certainly began that way, but like many Social Democrats in recent years, he has come to recognize that the market has some things, some very important things to be said for it. And the market can be understood as an expression of the creativity that God built into the human person from the beginning. So I think he’s going to appear to be a pivotal figure in Catholic social doctrine, Catholic thinking about economics. He’s certainly the first Pope who has taken the empirical reality of economics seriously. I mean, previous Popes this was a rather abstract matter. This is a guy who actually wants to know how this stuff works. MR. WATTENBERG: George, you are so clearly in deep admiration of this man, can your book be objective? How do you -- I mean, it is not a puff piece, that’s not what I’m saying. MR. WEIGEL: Right. MR. WATTENBERG: Nor has it been reviewed that way, it has been reviewed, as I have seen it, across the board in extremely salutary ways. But, it is said that this is authorized, even though it wasn’t vetted by, it’s a pro-Pope book? MR. WEIGEL: Well, in the first instance, I don’t believe a biographer has to begin approaching his subject as a prosecuting attorney. I think this is a silly convention of recent years. Secondly, the Pope is an adult, and so am I. And asking or encouraging me to do this I think would be the more proper way to put it. He was asking me, in a sense, to judge him, and to make critical judgments about what had worked, and what didn’t. And he would be the last person to suggest that everything has worked out the way he had hoped or planned, and I identify, I think, a number of problems, initiatives that didn’t work out, strategies that failed, appointments that didn’t work. What I also try to do, and I think this is what any biographer owes his subject, whether you know him personally or not, is to try to understand how the decision looked to that person at the time, what were the available options, not what were the options that might be available in retrospect. So the book, I think, provides what in my judgment is a balanced assessment of the Pope’s work. And I never felt the constraint of admiration preventing me from telling what I thought was the truth. He’s a truth teller, and you owe him that. MR. WATTENBERG: And you think that he was asking you to judge him? MR. WEIGEL: He was asking me to make critical judgments about what had worked and what hadn’t. This is a man of acute critical intelligence, and he would not imagine suggesting to me that I spin the story, so that everything has a happy ending. MR. WATTENBERG: If you had to pick the most important man in the 20th Century? MR. WEIGEL: I think he’s a strong candidate. I think he’s a strong candidate. I don’t know anyone who has confronted every heart of darkness in the 20th Century so successfully, in the sense that he comes out of that a man of hope, a man of confidence in the human future, a man who talks about a springtime of human freedom in the 21st Century. And I think he has also diagnosed the great problem of our time, which is that deficient concepts of the dignity of the human person, married to technology, have created unprecedented human suffering. Therefore, you’ve got to go back to the beginning, get straight who we are, and then the human project can unfold. MR. WATTENBERG: At the very least, no more Polish jokes. MR. WEIGEL: No more Polish jokes. MR. WATTENBERG: George Weigel, thank you very much. And thank you. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1150 Seventeenth Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at www.pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank. This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content. Brought to you in part by ADM, feeding the world is the biggest challenge of the new century, ADM is promoting soil conservation, so history doesn’t repeat itself. ADM, supermarket to the world. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. (End of program.) Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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