Assessing The Pope Book Delves Deeply Into John Paul Ii’s Roots But Gives Short Shrift To Other Areas Of Pontiff’s Life

“Pope John Paul II: The Biography” By Tad Szulc (Scribner/Lisa Drew Books, 542 pages, $27.50)

Is he a prophet leading a renewed church into the next millennium? Or is he a magnificent dinosaur, the brightest and best specimen of a clerical Catholicism that is bound to change no matter how he roars?

Has he led the Catholic Church forward or backward?

Or will history judge that he did both - led the church ahead on some paths and back on others?

Those questions become more germane as the shadows lengthen over the reign of Pope John Paul II, who turned 75 on Thursday. With speculation already beginning - prematurely or not - over who the next pope will be, John Paul II is certain to attract a swarm of biographers over the next few years.

Tad Szulc, former New York Times reporter, has gotten a jump on them with his new book, “Pope John Paul II,” an earnest but flawed portrait of the man who has made the papacy, unexpectedly, a major force in world affairs.

In some ways, Szulc is an ideal biographer for the pope. He was born in Poland, where John Paul II spent the first 58 years of his life as Karol Wojtyla. Szulc speaks Polish and had the cooperation of the pope, who advised him to study Polish history and literature in depth and suggested old friends and acquaintances for him to look up. (Szulc hastens to tell us that his work is not an authorized biography.)

Szulc’s long experience covering international affairs for the Times stands him in good stead when he writes of the pope’s involvement in world affairs, especially in Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, the sections of the book dealing with John Paul II the Pole and John Paul II the statesman are the book’s strongest.

But Szulc’s strength is also his weakness. He concentrates so heavily on John Paul the Pole that he scants some significant aspects of the pope’s reign, including his sometimes strained relationship with the church in the United States and Western Europe.

This book could have been more accurately subtitled “The Polish Pope.” Even the photographs come from the prepapal days, with the exception of one picture of a Polish friend taken after Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II.

“To understand John Paul II, the first nonItalian Pope elected in 456 years, one must strive to understand Karol Jozef Wojtyla, the man,” Szulc writes. “And to do so, it is crucial to grasp and comprehend the fact of his Polishness. … He remains a Polish patriot, a Polish philosopher, a Polish poet and a Polish politician. .. Indeed, it often appears that he tends to judge the world through the prism of his Polish experiences and traditions.”

Karol Wojtyla was born in the southern Polish town of Wadowice in 1920, just as Poland was establishing its independence after 123 years of partition. He was the youngest child of Karol and Emilia Wojtyla.

His boyhood was tinged with sadness. By the time he was 21, everyone in his immediate family was dead. His father was the last to die.

“His family tragedies inevitably shaped Wojtyla’s character as a man and priest,” Szulc writes. “He speaks of them often in private, especially of his poignant loneliness when his father died.”

Life was not easy. The elder Wojtyla was a military pensioner, and his income did not amount to much. Young Karol experienced poverty and then oppression, first by the Nazis and then by the communists.

Still, he was able to nourish an incipient mysticism with piety and a study of Polish literature. He became deeply involved in the theater and “began composing remarkably good poetry in his late teens.” And although he tended to be a loner, he had a gift for popularity.

“As student, worker, priest or actor, Wojtyla was always the most popular person in his milieu,” Szulc writes.

Once he decided on the priesthood, after his father’s death in 1941, his rise through the Polish church was meteoric. He was named a bishop at 38, “shone at Vatican Council II,” became archbishop of Krakow at 43, and was elevated to cardinal at 47.

He was 58 when he was elected pope in 1978, making him the youngest pope since 1846.

As a bishop, he quickly learned the intricacies of dealing with a communist government, giving a little here, standing firm there. He pursued a “twotrack policy of negotiations and compromise when convenient, and toughness when indicated,” Szulc writes.

Szulc makes a good case for the proposition that John Paul II played a “central role in the demise of communism and of Soviet sway in his native land and the rest of Eastern Europe.”

His description of John Paul’s relationship with such communist leaders as Wojciech Jaruzelski, Polish prime minister and president, and Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet communist party leader, is fascinating.

But the pope is, after all, primarily a religious leader. And when Szulc turns his focus from international affairs to religion, he becomes tentative and almost naive.

His writing, so assured when reporting on the doings of Gorbachev and Jaruzelski, takes on a halting, sometimes unclear, quality, as if he were trying to express himself in a foreign language.

In a bizarre passage that verges on silliness in its misunderstanding of the doctrine of predestination, he speculates on whether Karol Wojtyla was predestined to become pope, and confuses predestination with foreknowledge, as if it had been revealed to John Paul in advance that he would someday be elected pope.

Szulc also keeps referring to the contradiction between John Paul’s religious conservatism and his bold advocacy of human rights and social justice. But the two are not contradictory at all, and John Paul is not the only theological conservative with a progressive social agenda. You can find others throughout the black churches of the United States.

Szulc has one other bad habit in this book: He litters his work with passages that border on hagiography at its most credulous, as when he recounts a legend that has Padre Pio, the famous Italian mystic of several decades ago, fall on his knees before young Father Woytyla, who had come to confess to him, and predict that the visitor “would be called to the Throne of St. Peter and be the target of an assassination attempt.”

He notes that neither John Paul II nor the Vatican has ever commented on these reports, but Szulc writes as if they were true.

Despite its limitations, Szulc’s biography gives us a valuable study of a complex international leader, a thoroughly human man who delights in the suspense of opening wrapped gifts and who hated wearing neckties in his student days. He shows us a man whose closest friends still address him in private by his boyhood nickname, Lolek.

He shows us a man who “may be best remembered for his quintessential human decency.”

But he also shows us a man who is unbending (rigid or inflexible, some might say) in his leadership of the church, who takes a “tough, monarchical approach” to governing his flock.