A winter of discontent
The pope in winter: the dark side of John Paul
"Tell me, who were those people?" Pope John Paul II is said to have asked an aide, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and his entourage departed a papal audience. This puzzlement on the part of the pontiff, reports John Cornwell, surfaced after John Paul and the head of the Anglican communion had just sat through a formal meeting, exchanging gifts and fraternal greetings (the Pope's speech was read for him).
Nor is this story the most startling revelation of John Paul's infirmity to be found in The Pope in Winter. During a conversation with the Irish president, Mary McAleese, the Pope asked her to remind him where the Basilica of St John Lateran was to be found. Since the basilica is his cathedral as Bishop of Rome and the adjoining Lateran Palace was for centuries the papal residence, the question, as Cornwell notes, was more or less the equivalent of the Queen of England asking for directions to Windsor Castle.
Such anecdotes are only asides in the latest foray into papal chronicling by the author of Hitler's Pope and The Thief in the Night but they have predictably earned Cornwell the ire of a certain kind of Catholic commentator. Staunch defenders of the present Pope like to dismiss reports of his physical and mental decline - clear to the world though it is - as evidence of the reporter's malice towards the church. So Cornwell is now routinely accused of being a disloyal Catholic and a purveyor of scurrilous gossip because of what he has written - which is not, of course, the same as declaring these stories to be false.
The Mary McAleese story could hardly be denied, for she herself was the source of it, in an interview with the British Catholic newspaper The Universe. And the Rowan Williams story derives from a Vatican official whom Cornwell dubs "Monsignor Sotto Voce", and who is the source of much else that gives this book the gritty flavour of inside information.
Yes, it's gossip but not all gossip is scurrilous; the reporting of political scandals is often reliant upon it and no one accuses political reporters of moral turpitude when they use it judiciously, as Cornwell certainly uses his snippets from Sotto Voce.
But Cornwell is, of course, doing more than a reporter's job in The Pope in Winter. He remains a practising Catholic and the book is a judgement on the long pontificate of Karol Wojtyla. "Winter" is a recurrent metaphor among Catholic writers critical of the course on which the Pope and his lieutenants have taken the church, evoking as it does both a time of barrenness and the hope of a new spring.
When Wojtyla was elected in 1978 and took the name of his short-reigning predecessor John Paul I, many Catholics unfamiliar with the then Archbishop of Cracow wondered whether, as the first non-Italian pontiff in more than 450 years, he might usher in that spring. The Pope in Winter is Cornwell's explanation of why such hopes were bound to be dashed.
Little in the book is new. Apart from the anecdotal contributions of Sotto Voce and Cornwell's other sources, it is largely a sifting of material already published: the chapter on the Vatican's glacial response to the clerical pedophilia crisis, for example, draws heavily from Vows of Silence, by the US investigative journalists Jason Berry and Gerald Renner. This synoptic approach tends to accentuate Cornwell's polemical stance, which is perhaps why even some critics who might normally be expected to share his attitude to the present Pope, such as the US priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley, have complained the book is unfair.
Contestable though some of Cornwell's particular judgements may be, however, the broad picture he paints of Wojtyla/John Paul II is not. A single-mindedness bordering on intransigence characterised the young man who studied secretly for the priesthood while his country struggled under the successive tyrannies of Nazism and communism, and the same qualities are manifestly present in today's invalid in the Vatican. John Paul may be stricken by memory lapses and the physical incapacities of Parkinson's disease but a paranoid combativeness, formed in his image, pervades the church over which he presides.
Cornwell's account of the origins of that spiritual paranoia does not seek to belittle John Paul's role in the convulsive events that swept eastern Europe in the late 1980s, leading to the collapse of communism in the pontiff's own country and its neighbours. As Mikhail Gorbachev declared, nothing that happened in that tumultuous time can be explained without reference to the Polish Pope.
The very brightness of that achievement, however, raises more forcefully the fundamental question posed by the Wojtyla papacy: how can a man who so resolutely upheld the ideals of democracy and respect for human rights in a particular struggle have been so relentlessly hostile to calls for tolerance and pluralism in the church and in the wider world?
The answer lies only partly in the inertia and inherent defensiveness of a great global institution whose cultural memory stretches back far beyond the origins of modern liberal democracy. It lies also, as Cornwell delicately traces, in the troubled journey to adulthood of a lonely little boy who had a martinet for a father but knew no mother except a sexless and idealised one, the Virgin Mary.