Current reading

I’ve started reading Jonathan Kwitny’s Man of the Century, which seems a competent account of the Pope’s life by a very industrious New York journalist well-known as an investigative reporter. The author’s basic outlook is that of a mainstream New York journalist—my guess is that he’s a secular Jew—but he admires the Pope and has no special ax to grind. He mostly likes digging out the “real story”—puncturing myths, and discovering little-known connections between his subject and other men and events. All of which makes the book an interesting read, if not necessarily something to swallow in all respects.

I had had no idea of the extent of Wojtyla’s involvement in theater, his success as a pre-marital counsellor, or his leanings toward contemplation and asceticism. It all makes the way he acts as Pope more comprehensible: the love of large audiences, the interest in establishing contact and finding common ground with everyone everywhere, and the utter confidence that one can do that without danger of losing focus. Very likely that really is true of the Pope, but I still can’t help but think that the all-things-to-all-men approach can create problems for the Church as a whole. It seems that most of us not-so-saintly-or-ascetic types do better with clearer definitions, boundaries and limits. Such, at any rate, is one lawyer’s view.

[ADDENDUM: further reading discloses that Kwitny does have some axes to grind, mostly having to do with the Reagan administration, U.S. foreign policy, capitalism and so on. As a result, he spends a lot of time on things I don’t want to spend time on, and he’s further handicapped by a tendency to reduce things to the dimensions of his journalist’s world. Also, his comments on disciplinary and doctrinal matters evidently reflect the influence of a “prominent theologian who has asked to remain anonymous,” who “donated enormous time” to the book—presumably for a reason. Still, Kwitny does make an effort to control partisanship in the interests of fairness and accuracy, you don’t have to read every page or take the interpretations seriously, and the strictly biographical materials in the first half of the book remain quite interesting.]