Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

Witness To Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel is as comprehensive a biography of its subject as can be hoped for while the Pope still lives. Weigel, a journalist who came to the Pope's attention after the publication of his book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, wrote Witness To Hope with his subject's encouragement and assistance. Weigel had unprecedented access to the Pope's correspondence (with, among others, world leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev). He reports lengthy conversations with many members of the Pope's inner circle, and he occasionally reveals vivid details of the Pope's daily life (for example, at the beginning of each day, the Pope's adviser's hear moans and groaning from John Paul's solitary prayers in his private chapel).

According to Weigel, the Pope told him that other biographies "try to understand me from outside. But I can only be understood from inside." Unfortunately, Weigel's method for understanding the Pope "from inside" depends on psychological conjecture ("It may help to begin by thinking of Karol Wojtyla as a man who grew up very fast") and is weakened by his extreme eagerness to praise his subject ("the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead"). More troubling, Weigel does not ask some of the really difficult questions about this Pope--regarding his involvement with sects such as Opus Dei, for example, or the relationship between his innovative "theology of the body" and his conservative stance on homosexuality, or even the vicissitudes of prayer life. Witness To Hope is a valuable book because it reports many facts that others have not reported. But for incisive analysis of this Pope's theological and political significance, or for insight into his spiritual life, readers will have to wait until the principals in his life story are free to speak more frankly with some future biographer. --Michael Joseph Gross

• The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II -- The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy
• Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II
• The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity
• Saint Joseph Guide for the Liturgy of the Hours: For 2019
• A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century
• Sermons in Times of Crisis: Twelve Homilies to Stir Your Soul
• In God's Hands: The Spiritual Diaries of Pope John Paul II
• Saint Joseph Guide for Christian Prayer: The Liturgy of the Hours (2019) (48)
• The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark
• A Life with Karol: My Forty-Year Friendship with the Man Who Became Pope