Recently I paid  $5.98 at B. Dalton's Bookstore in the Asheville Mall on
Tunnel Road for POPE JOHN PAUL II: THE BIOGRAPHY by Tad Szulc (N.Y. , Scribner, 1995, 542 pp., dust jacket price $27.50.) Tad Szulc of Washington D.C. is an established  journalist and author of 18 books. He speaks Polish and has traveled with the Pope.

No man is born a Christian or a Catholic. Unlike the Dalai Lama, the bishop of Rome is not discovered in infancy--certainly not the first non-Italian pope in 456 years.  Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born May 18, 1920 in a newly independent Poland. He was elected leader of the world's largest centralized religious body in 1978. Szulc probes the 58 years before that election and 16 of the 19 years since. [NOTE: review was written 1997. TPK 06/07/2001] The biographer's thesis: before he is anything else, the pope is first, last and forever Polish. Few know
better and embrace more lovingly than the pontiff  Poland's history, its
literature and its culture.  After a good classical education in village
schools, the young Wojtyla was determined to make his mark in literature. He became an actor, playwright and acclaimed poet. Later he  immersed himself in the study of ethics, the phenomenological methods of Max Scheler, in theology and canon law.

Karol's life has been filled with personal tragedy. Before he was 22 his
whole family was gone:  a sister and a brother, his mother when he was only eight and his father at 20. He has been shot once and has been  the object of at least two other assassination attempts since becoming pope.

This man is a charmer. But he is also baffling. He combines  theological and ethical rigidity with a passionate crusade for human rights, especially social justice for the poor and disadvantaged. Szulc's biography leaves unexplained why the young, devout Karol Wojtyla, verging on adulthood when Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939 , was at that time all but oblivious to politics.  For him literature and the theater were everything. But during the Nazi occupation he also did hard outdoor manual work in a quarry and then demanding factory work. He has empathized with working people ever since. He began clandestine studies for the Catholic priesthood. But when did he begin to think about the power of politics? How do these facts explain the pope's later political adeptness?

When World War II ended, Wojtyla was ordained a priest in Krakow, did a brief stint in a parish, then was sent to Rome for further studies. When in Poland the future pope's assigned work gave him much time for working with university students and intellectuals. He also led students on long skiing, hiking and kayaking journeys without arousing inordinate suspicions among the communist security apparatus.
Karol Wojtyla, at the age of 38, was ordained an auxiliary bishop, just one month before the election of Pope John XXIII. When Pope John in short order initiated the Second Vatican Council, Bishop Wojtyla's talents began to be exercised in an increasingly appreciative international church forum. In 1967 Pope Paul VI invested Wojtyla and 26 others as cardinals.

Eleven years later the two Italian "candidates" deadlocked and suddenly there was a compromise pope:  the Cardinal of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla. The year was 1978. The new  pope was a relatively youthful 58. He seemed not at all taken by surprise. He obviously had an agenda and he set out to realize it with supreme self-confidence. There followed more church reform, re-centralization of authority earlier diffused by the Second Vatican Council, international activism and thunderous demands that governments everywhere respect human rights. There were  speeches in many languages. There were encyclicals and messages on many subjects There were papal travels, especially to Africa. There was an unprecedented number of
beatifications and canonizations of heroic Catholics from many lands and from different centuries. Line by line, according to Tad Szulc the pope reviewed the revised  texts of canon law and the fresh Catechism of the Catholic Church.  As no pope since Gregory the Great, he has stood up for Jews.

Whence such assurance? Szulc falls back on his vision of this pope as
incarnation of the unique, 1,000 year old synthesis of Catholicism,
Slavism, geography, mysticism and political tightrope-walking which is
Poland.  POPE JOHN PAUL II: THE BIOGRAPHY is the story of a remarkable man and Christian whose ways of thinking are rooted in those European borderlands  where Teutonic Knights fought Russians and where the Roman and Orthodox forms of Christianity interacted and competed. If one is not familiar with overall Polish history, modern Polish literature, the history of the Jews in Poland and many other aspects of both Polish greatness and Polish failures, then the Szulc biography is a first-rate introduction. But is understanding "Polishness" enough to understand John Paul II, the warm-hearted, brilliant man of peasant stock, one of the few popes to have done heavy manual labor? He taught himself Spanish in order to read Saint John of the Cross. He learned German in order to read Immanuel Kant. Somehow young people relate to him despite cultural divides. In 1955 he spent a three week holiday with thirteen students on six kayaks reading and
discussing C.S.Lewis.

One way to measure the salience of historicaI personalities to oneself is to ask how much effort we would expend for some quality
face-to-face time with some particular great man or great woman. Like
Hillary Clinton, I would go out of my way to speak with Eleanor Roosevelt. I can not, however,  think of any U.S. president later than Truman who would pass my personal test. Still  I would  relish coming face to face with the young Karol Wojtyla in the mid 1940s when he had just survived the Nazis, was settling in to oppose the Russians and  the Communists, was pouring out plays and poetry and mulling over God's will for the rest of his life.  Yes, to exchange views with such a man I would go as far as Cracow.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE

[NOTE: Tad Szulc died of cancer in June 2001. TPK 06/24/2001.]