Driving home from the airport on April 2, 2005 after visiting my daughter in Tunis, I learnt of John Paul II’s death on the car radio. Tears filled my eyes. Catholics throughout the world had the same reaction. This being so, I want to read anything that tells me more about the life of this saintly pope.
George Weigel’s book, Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St John Paul II (Basic Books, 368pp, £25), completes his excellent earlier two biographies – Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning – and describes how he came to know the Holy Father well for more than 15 years, adding his own personal touches to the story of this towering figure.
Weigel shows how providence was at work at all times in the pope’s life and how providential for his own life was their friendship. An orthodox Catholic himself, Weigel understood why a liberal interpretation of John Paul II’s personality, shown in the 1995 biography by Tad Szulc, was wholly inadequate: the Polish pope could not be “pigeon-holed on some conventional liberal-conservative spectrum”.
Weigel writes ironically about what he calls “Vaticanology 101”: the Byzantine workings of the Curia. Most moving and instructive are his meetings and conversations with the Holy Father’s old Polish friends who had known him as both companion and pastor in Kraków before he became a bishop. Another Polish friend, Sister Emilia Ehrlich, a nun who tutored the then Cardinal Wojtyla in English, told Weigel of the “constant winnowing” of the pope by providence, relating: “There is an odd regularity to his life. Whenever he has a big religious experience, someone dies or is stricken …What would be great moments for anyone else also [involve] tragedies for him.”
First published in 1927 and republished this year, Dietrich von Hildebrand’s classic defence of the “radiant virtue of purity” deserves a wider readership. Certainly, intelligent, open-minded atheists should read In Defence of Purity (The Hildebrand Press, 174pp, £20), if only to acknowledge that the Catholic idea of purity is not remotely puritanical or kill-joy. To live the virtue properly is to experience joy, whether in marriage or in consecrated virginity, in a manner that ordinary human happiness doesn’t begin to approach.
Unusually for a philosopher and theologian, von Hildebrand writes in a way that is accessible to the lay person. Elegant (even in translation) and lucid, his prose is a pleasure to read. Indeed, as one reads his reflections as to why, for example, seduction and lust are degrading and corrosive for the soul, one realises that they are borne out of a life spent in prayerful contemplation of what it means to be human. Great writers have always known this. Recently I watched a film, made in 1960 from a Chekhov short story, The Lady and the Little Dog, about an unhappy love affair between a couple who are both married to other people. The desolation they experience in their clandestine encounters would have been obvious to von Hildebrand.
…….
One sign of bad travel writing is when it is too autobiographical. Good travel writing takes the reader imaginatively to the place described. The best travel writing provides a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of the people, their culture and their country. Richard Lloyd Parry, a foreign correspondent in Japan, is in the last category with Ghosts of the Tsunami (Jonathan Cape, 320pp, £16.99). Taking as his starting point a 2011 earthquake in Japan followed by a tsunami which killed up to 18,000 people, he travelled to Okawa, a small community on the coast and spent months talking to local survivors. It made the tragedy real to him. The reader comes to know how individuals were affected by this appalling natural disaster; what spiritual resources they employed to carry on living; their daily habits and their intricate family relationships.
What happened after the devastation caused by the tsunami, not reported in the international press, was that “At a stroke thousands of spirits had passed from life to death, countless others were cut off from their moorings in the afterlife. How could they all be cared for? Who was to honour the compact between the living and the dead?” An ancient and strange civilisation is brought alive.
Robert Louis Stevenson settled in Upolu in Samoa in 1890 for health reasons, dying there suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in 1894. All lovers of his books will want to catch a glimpse of the romantic adventurer and fine story-teller in Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa by Joseph Farrell (MacLehose Press, 352pp, £20) – a well-researched book describing Stevenson’s final years.
Along with his widowed mother, a respectable Edinburgh matron, his somewhat temperamental wife, Fanny, his step-son and his servants, Stevenson held court in the house he built (now a museum). Unlike conventional colonials, Stevenson loved and respected the Polynesian people, who became his wider family.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.