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Witness to Hope

The Biography of Pope John Paul II

ebook
100 of 100 copies available
100 of 100 copies available
This definitive biography of Pope John Paul II explores his historic influence on the world stage: "Magnificent. A tremendous achievement" (Washington Post).
As head of the Catholic Church from 1978 until his death in 2005, John Paul II was one of the world's most transformational figures. With unprecedented cooperation from the Pope, as well as the people who knew and worked with him throughout his life, George Weigel offers a groundbreaking portrait of him as a man, a thinker, and a leader whose religious convictions defined a new approach to world politics—and changed the course of history.
The Pope played a crucial yet underexplored role in some of the most momentous events of his time, including the collapse of European communism, the quest for peace in the Middle East, and the democratic transformation of Latin America. With an updated preface, this edition of Witness to Hope explains how this "man from a far country" did all of that, and much more—and what both his accomplishments and the unfinished business of his pontificate mean for the future of the Church and the world.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 4, 1999
      Weigel's massive work aspires to be definitive: it is subtitled "the," not "a," biography of John Paul II. Weigel, a Catholic layman and a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., enjoyed the cooperation of the pope and access to top Vatican officials, so the book is rich in new detail. Determined to explain this papacy from the "inside out," Weigel successfully focuses on John Paul's trademark ideas: Christian humanism, the inner connection between freedom and truth, and culture as the driving force of history. As a guide to the pope's thought, Witness to Hope is invaluable. Yet as biography, it is often defective. Weigel frequently dismisses John Paul's critics rather than debating their ideas. The author's strong pro-Americanism leads him to misrepresent the pope as opposing a "third way" between capitalism and socialism and to treat his criticism of the Gulf War as a rare misjudgment. Though John Paul is a towering 20th-century figure, the assertion that his papacy is the most important since the Counter Reformation seems overblown. The book is well written (if somewhat repetitive, perhaps inevitably so with more than 900 pages) and Weigel's command of the material is impressive, but Witness to Hope reads more like a valedictory hagiography than a sober work of journalism.

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  • English

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