John Paul II
By Peter Hebblethwaite
To try to assess an incomplete pontificate is a daunting task, all the more when one does not know how much longer it will last. Karol Wojtyla was born at Wadowice, a market town not far from Krakow in southern Poland, on 18 May 1920. Thus if he lives on he will be 75 (the usual retirement age for bishops) in 1995, and 80 (the imposed retirement age for cardinals) in the year 2000. Both Pope John and Pope Paul were over 80 when they died.
Having declared 1990-2000 the decade of evangelization, he would be hardly likely to want to resign before seeing it through and preserving the Church from the anxieties that beset the end of any millennium. He sees his mission as that of bringing 'the joy of faith to a troubled world' (to use one of the headings of Redemptor Hominis, his first encyclical).
The second difficulty in speaking of a living pope lies in the nature of his office and the hopes it arouses or disappoints. A pope has the right to expect loyalty, respectful attention to his words, and if one were forced to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit had abandoned the pope altogether, then one would in practice have despaired of the Catholic Church. But these qualifications do not mean that one should not be free to speak frankly.
The best approach to this problem was well put by Melchior Cano, the great Dominican theologian, at the Council of Trent: 'Peter has no need of our lies or flattery. Those who blindly and indiscriminately defend every decision of the Supreme Pontiff are the very people who do most to undermine the authority of the Holy See '“ they destroy instead of strengthening its foundations.'
The emphasis here will fall upon the relationship between the pope and Vatican II. What does he really think about Vatican II? In his first major address after his election, he apparently answered this question fully and unambiguously:
We consider our primary duty to be that of promoting, with prudent but encouraging action, the most exact fulfilment of the norms and directives of the Council. Above all we must favour the development of conciliar attitudes. First one must be in harmony with the Council. One must put into effect what was stated in its documents; and what was 'implicit' should be made explicit in the light of the experiments that followed and in the light of new and emerging circumstances (17 October 1978 (italics added)).
The italics are added to bring out the remarkable degree of commitment to Vatican II this programmatic statement expresses. Conservatives heard these words with alarm. Away in his mountain fastness of Econe, Switzerland, dissident Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre must have thought he had waited in vain for the death of Paul VI.
However, more than ten years later, few could put their hands on their hearts and say that John Paul has done what he said he would do so soon after his election. The passage contains no hint of any of the 'dangers' or 'excesses' that were later alleged to be the fruit of the Council. Thus, according to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, named prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 21 November 1981, these 'dangers' and 'excesses' were the real reason why Vatican II was chosen as the subject of the 1985 Extraordinary Synod. The difference between Ratzinger and Lefebvre was this: Lefebvre said the Council was a bad thing with bad fruits; Ratzinger said that although it was a good thing 'in itself', it had alas been misinterpreted, manipulated, and thus had some distinctly rotten fruits.
Yet curiously enough, this was not a theme developed by the pope when he announced the Synod. On the contrary, he seemed to echo his 1978 sentiments when he declared:
For me the Second Vatican Council has always been—in a particular fashion during these years of my pontificate—the constant reference point of every pastoral action, with conscious commitment to translate its directives into concrete, faithful action, at the level of every Church and of the whole Church (25 January 1985 (italics added)).
It would be harder to put the case more strongly – but now he is no longer talking about a future programme, but claiming to have realized one. Pope John Paul thinks his pontificate is the fulfilment of Vatican II. Here, it seems we have a pope who can think of nothing else. Yet that is not what many observers see.
How can one explain this apparent optical illusion? Is John Paul insincere? Is he saying one thing and doing another? Such explanations are certainly to be rejected, for no one so exposed to the public gaze, however skilled an actor, could keep up this pretence for so long. And what motive would he have? The key to the mystery is rather to be provided by asking what content he puts into the 'Council' and 'Vatican II'. Utterly sincere when he declares his commitment to them, he nevertheless does not mean by 'Council' and 'Vatican II' what most people in the West mean by these terms.
The way to test this hypothesis is to read his book Sources of Renewal (Wojtyla, 1980). The Polish edition, published in Krakow in 1972, was and remains the introduction to the Council for Poles. Poland did not have the flood of books expounding the new insights of the Council that streamed from European and American (North and South) publishers in the heady few years just after the event. It took a long time even to translate the Council texts into Polish. The Poles did not have the review Concilium – their bishops rejected the idea of a translation on the grounds that all Polish theologians could read other languages; the same argument, however, was not used against the rival publication, Communio. What the Poles had was Karol Wojtyla's U Podstaw Odnowy.
He wrote the book, he explains, as an expression of his 'debt' to Vatican II:
The Council had a unique and unrepeatable meaning for all who took part in it, and most particularly for the bishops who were Fathers of the Council. These men took an active part for four years in the proceedings of the Council, drafting its documents, and at the same time deriving great spiritual enrichment from it. The experience of a world-wide community was to each of them a tremendous benefit of historic importance. The history of the Council, which will one day be written, was present in 1962-65 as an extraordinary event in the minds of all the bishops concerned; it absorbed all their thoughts and stimulated their sense of responsibility, as an exceptional and deeply felt experience (Wojtyla, 1980, p. 9 (italics added)).
This seemed a rather odd way to be talking about the Council. It is made to sound wholly content-less – as though its most remarkable feature was that it had happened at all. Again, it is presented as a private and largely incommunicable experience of bishops, as though it had not aroused expectations and enthusiasm among so many in the Church. And the remark about the as-yet unwritten 'history of the Council' shows scant respect for the work of Giovanni Caprile and Vorgrimler's five-volume commentary, not to mention more ephemeral works.
Another feature of Cardinal Wojtyla's account of the Council, is that it appears as a wholly tranquil and harmonious event; one would never guess that there had been fierce rows at the time, and raging controversies afterwards. This is an imaginary picture of the Council, a pleasing and delightful fiction.
As his friend, Halina Bortnowska, pointed out in her introduction to the simplified Italian version, L'Arrichimento delta Fede:
Sources of Renewal was a first and provisional sketch. The author hides behind numerous quotations from the Council. Often he does not give his own thoughts ... The Council texts, and they alone, occupy the stage, and there is no reference to post-conciliar or even conciliar debates. One has a feeling of great abstractness and remoteness from the lives of people seeking some guidance for their lives (Bortnowska, 1981, p. 17).
This is a penetrating judgement, and it helps to explain why Pope John Paul devised a new kind of synod from which the press was excluded and where secrecy reigned: that is how the Council would have been had not the likes of Xavier Rynne and Henri Fesquet been muddying the waters.
John Paul's motive for calling an Extraordinary Synod on Vatican II in 1985 was not that of Ratzinger. He wanted to recapture the dream of sweetness and light that he remembered so well. Or, as he put it, 'to revive in some way the extraodinary atmosphere of ecclesial communion which characterized that ecumenical assembly through mutual participation in sufferings and joys, struggles and hopes, which pertain to the Body of Christ in the various parts of the world' (25 January 1985). Once again, the Council is, as it were episcopallv privatized.
So one can say in summary that the Council in Poland was differently perceived and differently 'received' (in the technical sense). Few Poles knew much about the Council or expected much from it. That included the cardinal primate, Stefan Wyszyński. This great hero of the faith told Pope Paul VI, as the Polish bishops said farewell to him:
We are aware that it will be very difficult, but not impossible, to put the decisions of the Council into effect in our situation ... Everything that occurs in our Church must be judged from the standpoint of our experience (Stehle, 1981pp. 341-2).
In short, we know Poland better than you do.
Wyszyński was quite blunt about why he didn't like the Council. It had revealed a lack of enthusiasm for popular piety, processions and pilgrimages that were so important in Polish Catholic life. It had downgraded Mariology. The 'kiss of peace', he averred, would 'turn the church into a salon'. Above all, the Council's eagerness to 'learn from the world' expressed in Gaudium et Spes would sow confusion in his well-disciplined ranks. Paul VI equally bluntly told him that the Council would be implemented 'energetically and willingly' in Poland as elsewhere.
One can see why, therefore, Paul VI made Wojtyla a cardinal in 1967, when he was only 46, and pinned his hopes for the implementation of the Council in Poland on him. Wojtyla enjoyed the Council while Wyszyński bore it stoically, thinking of the Polish millennium due in 1966. Wojtyla was 'for' the Council in a way Wyszyński manifestly was not. Wojtyla appeared more 'to the left' or 'more liberal' than Wyszyński . And in Polish terms he was both. But the version of the Council he would make available for Poles would be adapted to their own special needs as an oppressed and staunchly Catholic people living under a regime they had not freely chosen, and from which, for geo-political reasons, they could not escape.
This explains why John Paul so regularly misquotes Pope John on the most fundamental question: What was the Council for? Here is John Paul II addressing the United States bishops in Chicago:
On the opening day of the Council John XXIII made the following statement: 'The Greatest concern of the ecumenical Council is this: that the sacred deposit of the Christian faith should be more effectively guarded and taught.' This explains Pope John's inspiration; this was what the new Pentecost was to be; this was why the Bishops of the Church - in the greatest manifestation of collegiality in the history of the world '“ were called together, 'so that the sacred deposit of faith should he more effectively guarded and taught' (5 October 1979).
So the purpose of the Council was essentially defensive. It was a matter of warding off errors, of preserving the deposit of faith.
But this was not what Pope John thought at all. 'Our duty,' he said 'is not only to guard this precious treasure as if we were concerned only with antiquity, but to dedicate ourselves . . . without fear to that work which our age demands of us' (Abbott, p. 715). That is clearly envisaged as a new task. As for 'defending the deposit of faith', Pope John explained that the purpose of the Council was not to 'restate the doctrine that has been repeatedly taught by the fathers and by ancient and modern theologians'. He added a remark that Pope John Paul blots out of his memory: 'For that [i.e. the restatement of familiar doctrine] a Council was not necessary' (Abbott, p. 715). So John Paul II attributes to the Council a defensive aim which John XXIII specifically repudiated.
Again one has to understand the psychology at work here. The anti-religious propaganda department of the Polish government (in which, sadly, many ex-priests found their only means of livelihood) presented in the mass media a Council that stressed only its 'progressive' aspects. They contrasted Pope John and the luminaries of the Council with the fuddy-duddy Polish bishops. The Polish bishops responded by saying that they were the only authorized interpreters of the Council.
It is also true that they consistently defended at home all the positions they had already put forward in Rome – whether this was the majority view of the Council or not. Karol Wojtyla was by far the sharpest-minded Polish bishop present, and usually acted as their spokesman. His interventions have been studied in detail by Jan Grootaers (1981, pp. 152-66). The following picture emerges.
On ecclesiology, he did not much like the term 'people of God' because for him it failed to reflect the Church's nature as a 'perfect society'. On the other hand, when it was accepted as the controlling concept, he agreed that it should come before the chapter on the hierarchical nature of the Church. He strongly defended the idea of the Church as 'communion', said he did not want a passive laity, and urged 'intra-ecclesial dialogue'. But he continued to hold that the Church was a 'perfect society', and therefore underplayed its pilgrim status and need for constant reformation.
Religious liberty was a cause close to his heart, not out of any special ecumenical concern (postwar Poland, with its frontiers shifted westwards, was much more homogeneously Catholic than ever prewar Poland had been), but as a claim made against the atheistic state. In talking about ecumenism, he warned, one should stress the links between liberty and truth, freedom and responsibility in order to guard against 'liberalism' or 'indifferentism'. On civil liberty, he echoed the thunderous speech of Wyszyński of 20 September 1965, on the folly of making 'public order in conformity with juridical norms' a limitation on freedom. His own government, he pointed out, could use that to suppress any expression of opinion it did not like. So the phrase became 'public order in conformity with the objective moral order' (ordini morali objectivo conformes). This eventually became 'the just requirements of public order' of Dignitatis Humanae (2,3). Grootaers concludes that Wojtyla's role was to mediate on this matter between Wyszyński and the Secretariat for Christian Unity (Grootaers, 1981, p. 167).
It is somewhat easier to pinpoint his contribution to Gaudium et Spes, because the Polish bishops were so disappointed with the draft at one stage that they proposed a 'Polish alternative' that had a certain, though limited, impact. We know that Wojtyla was its chief author. The Poles showed themselves deeply worried by 'secularization', which they thought of primarily as something from which they suffered at the hands of their atheistic government; but they also saw 'secularization' invading democratic societies as well. The different situations, and different questions involved, were not sufficiently distinguished.
Wojtyla personally stressed the perils of 'horizontalism'. The 'optimism' of some Western Europeans, notably the Dutch and the French, often attributed to the influence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, seemed to him to be highly dangerous. He shared the 'German' view that the ravages of sin should be more forcefully brought out. He was therefore inclined to a 'pessimistic' judgement on the world and unaided human society.
This recall of his role at the Council helps to explain most of his attitudes as pope. The Extraordinary Synod of 1985, seen in this light, was an attempt to put back in to the Council texts elements that the Council itself failed to emphasize. In this regard, The Ratzinger Report acted as a trial-balloon for the Synod, and if Ratzinger did not wholly get his way, the main theses he had been advocating were duly incorporated into the final report (including a deep scepticism about the theological status and authority to teach of episcopal conferences).
In this new ecclesiology Lumen Gentium is modified by reducing chapter 2, on the people of God, to a metaphor that is dangerous because of its 'democratic' connotations (see on this, Ratzinger, 1988, pp. 3-28). Then chapter 1, on the Church as 'Mystery', is extolled as the antidote to a one-sidedly 'institutional' or merely 'sociological' view which is said to have prevailed in the last few years. Self-critically, the Synod asks, 'Have we not put this idea into [i.e. young people's] heads by talking too much about reforming external structures and too little about God and Christ?' (Synod Final Report, A,4). Finally, having substituted mystery for sociology, one can give the central place to chapter 3 of Lumen Gentium, on the hierarchical nature of the Church, drawing special attention to the Nota Praevia which tilts the balance of collegiality towards the primacy (Synod Final Report, C 4).
The personal stamp of John Paul II appears more clearly still in the Final Report's treatment of Gaudium et Spes, which harks back to the 'Polish alternative' rejected in 1965:
The Church as communion is the sacrament of the world's salvation '¦. In this context we assert the importance and the great relevance of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes. At the same time we observe that the signs of the times differ to some extent from those which the Council discerned, for today anguish and suffering have increased. All over the world today there is hunger, oppression, injustice, torture, war, terrorism, and other forms of violence of every kind. This demands a new and deeper theological reflection to interpret such signs in the light of the Gospel (D,1).
So Gaudium et Spes represented an insufficiently deep level of theological thinking. (The italics here signify that the passage was added at the last moment.)
While accepting that the afflictions listed are very much part of the contemporary scene, one has to add that they subvert the meaning of 'signs of the times' as understood by John XXIII and Gaudium et Spes. In Pacem in Terris John found positive signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the emancipation of women, the growing prosperity of the workers, and the end of colonial rule.
Gaudium et Spes follows this same positive fine, and speaking of the concern for human rights and where the impulse to defend them comes from, says:
God's Spirit, who with a marvellous Providence directs the unfolding of time and renews the face of the earth, is present to this development. The ferment of the Gospel arouses in men's hearts a demand for dignity that cannot be stifled (GS 26).
Of course it is difficult to make this idea comprehensible to suffering people in Kampuchea, the Lebanon and South Africa. Their way is more obviously the way of the cross. But all Christians have to pass by the way of the cross with varying degrees of intensity. There are no short cuts to Easter Sunday.
That is not in question. What is questionable is to turn the 'signs of the times' theology into a banal synonym for 'whatever happens to be going on at the moment'. Yet that is what John Paul regularly seems to do. Here is an early example that set the tone. Addressing religious women in Washington on 7 October 1979, he said:
As daughters of the Church . . . you are called to a generous and loving adherence to the authentic magisterium of the Church, which is a solid guarantee of the fruitfulness of all your apostolates and an indispensable condition of the discernment of the 'signs of the times'.
Additionally, we are no longer dealing here with optimistic versus pessimistic readings of 'the signs of the times', but with who is to discern them. Gaudium et Spes sees this as a task for the whole Church:
With the help of the Holy Spirit, it is the task of the entire people of God, especially pastors and theologians, to hear, distinguish and interpret the many voices of our age, and to interpret them in the light of the divine word (GS 44).
It is a big jump from that to saying that adherence to the magisterium is the criterion of true discernment.
With the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium and the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes thus re-edited, how do other Council documents fare?
We have seen what Cardinal Wojtyla thought of Dignitatis Humanae, the declaration on religious liberty. If it has not been repudiated, neither has it been celebrated; and in one respect it has been systematically undermined. John Paul believes that in countries where Catholics can achieve this goal, legislation on moral issues such as divorce, contraception, abortion, IVF and even sexual orientation, should reflect official Catholic moral teaching. This is a frequent theme of his exhortations, especially during visits to traditionally 'Catholic' countries like France and Spain.
His remarks on this subject were most politically explosive when he visited Argentina in spring 1987. President Raul Alfonsin, who had returned the country to democracy, not only sought to bring to justice the torturers and killers of the previous military regime, but also by introducing legislation on divorce and abortion, to reflect the fact that Argentina was by now a very mixed and pluralistic society.
John Paul thundered against this, showed little enthusiasm for the restoration of democracy, conspicuously failed to denounce the 'dirty war', and in the name of 'reconciliation' (his alternative to the semi-Marxist 'liberation') urged a punto final, an end to the pursuit of guilty officers. Not surprisingly, there was a military revolt a week after he left, and Alfonsin's position was rendered deeply insecure. One might be tempted to conclude that John Paul's reading of Dignitatis Humanae does not allow for pluralism in a 'Catholic' society.
Argentina proved relatively fertile ground for Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. John Paul's dealings with him illustrate his attitude to Sacrosanctum Concilium and the liturgy. Very early in his pontificate—indeed in November 1978— Pope John Paul gave Lefebvre the private and secret audience Paul VI had always refused. This was followed by three meetings with Cardinal Franjo Seper, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Clearly, a 'solution' was being urgently sought. But none was immediately forthcoming.
Then, on 3 October 1984, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued an indult which gave permission for the 1962 (i.e. Tridentine missal) to be used under certain conditions. This looked like a concession towards Lefebvre, and a pre-emptive strike against a gathering of 228 bishops and experts who met at the Congregation's invitation later that same October. The guests were angry because in 1981, polled by Notitiae, the Congregation's house-organ, their verdict was that the Tridentine Mass was now definitively and irrevocably superseded, and that its restoration would do nothing to bring back dissidents like Lefebvre – since the traditionalists' basic objection was not just to what they called 'the hybrid and democratic Mass of Paul VI', but to the Council as a whole.
There were further meetings, this time with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Seper's successor, in the summer of 1987, and then, during the Synod on the role of the laity in the Church and the world, two rather stunning events occurred. The first was a passage in a homily by Pope John Paul on 11 October 1987, the 25th anniversary to the day of Pope John's address to the Council. The following paragraph was hastily added at a late stage:
The Council was able to complete the enormous task of re-affirming the Church's doctrinal patrimony and building on it a contemporary, up-dated, programme for Christian life and behaviour at both the personal and community level. Hence, the teaching of the Council, in its entirety, rightly understood in the context of the previous Magisterium, can well be called a programme for action for the present-day Christian (I leave this in the translation provided by the Vatican Press Office).
Was this an olive branch held out to Lefebvre? He was, after all, prepared to accept the Council 'rightly understood in the context of the previous Magisterium' if by that one meant, for example, that Dignitatis Humanae should be read in conjunction with the nineteenth-century teaching that 'error has no rights', and Gaudium et Spes' optimism qualified by the 1864 Syllabus of Errors.
A week later, Ratzinger told the Synod that 'the hoped for definitive solution based on the presupposition that there exists the obedience due to the Supreme Pontiff and loyalty to the Magisterium of the Church' was at hand (17 October 1987). Once again, there was ambivalence about what precisely was meant by 'loyalty to the Magisterium'. The rest of the story is less relevant here. In May 1988 Lefebvre accepted, and then—the next day— rejected the generous conditions offered to his Society of St Pius. Despite Roman pleas he went ahead with four Episcopal ordinations before the world's television cameras on 28 June, and was inevitably excommunicated. Much time and energy have since been devoted to 'recuperating' the traditionalists, and it has been noted that liberation theologians, for example, have not been given such gentle treatment.
This discrepancy can be explained if Pope John Paul, who has never willingly given Communion in the hand and appointed Georg Eder, who prefers to say Mass with his back to the people, as Archbishop of Salzburg, Austria, actually connives to some extent with Lefebvre. In December 1988 he announced a new document commemorating Sacrosanctum Concilium which said that the 'reform of the liturgy . . . must be continued, sustained, and, where necessary, purified' (The Tablet, 17 December 1988, p. 1469). However, he is a resolute supporter of the vernacular liturgy, in all the fifty-three languages he has used on various occasions.
This may seem a harsh judgement on a pope whom some ecumenical partners hail as a great communicator and a great leader. Within the Church, a right-wing magazine assured us that Pope John Paul's pontificate 'is leading to a certain euphoria about the 'recovery' after the great post-conciliar recession' (Thirty Days, December 1988, p. 46). Readers may decide for themselves how much evidence there is for 'euphoria' and how it has been induced, if at all.
Two Polish judgements can help us conclude. Halina Bortnowska, already mentioned, holds that his most important magisterial document is the apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris (dated 11 February 1984). Why prefer this to great social encyclicals like Laborem Exercens (1981) with its support for co-partnership, and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) with its post-Chernobyl hints on the ecology crisis found in the telling phrase 'solidarity with the earth'? Because he speaks about suffering not as a philosopher nor even as a theologian discoursing on 'the problem of evil', but as a human being who has experienced collective suffering in Poland and personal suffering when Mehemet Ali Agca shot him. Watch how he lingers over the sick, demonstrating what ministry (in one form) means. The most moving moment on his visit to Britain in 1982 was in Southwark cathedral when the pope and seventy priests fanned out among the people lying on their mattresses and gave them the sacrament of the sick.
Kryzysztof Sliwiński , another Polish intellectual, has made the surprising (for foreigners) point that after more than ten years away from home. Pope John Paul has become less Polish and much more 'Western' in his thinking. He gave two examples. He alleged that John Paul 'shocked' some Polish priests during his 1987 visit home by the place he gave to the laity in the Church. A rather more serious example is the fact that Mulieris Dignitatem , read in the West merely for the paragraph that rejects women's ordination, in fact takes aboard much of the feminist agenda. It says, for example, that 'women symbolize the human' better than men; it rejects the Victorian idea that the sexual sins of men are the result of irresistible feminine provocation; it shows the compassion Jesus showed towards the woman taken in adultery.
One sees the point. But John Paul still has a long way to go. All this talk of 'feminine genius' recalls Goethe's das Ewigweibliche (the eternal feminine) which draws us upwards. But it is found in Mary, who stands for agape, rather than Eve, who represents eros. This is romantic poetry more than theology, and it fits in with Polish gallantry and the supremacy of Mariology. John Paul has spoken about sexuality, shame, animus and anima and related topics with greater frankness than any previous pope (see Durkin, 1983, for his originality; Ms Durkin is Fr Andrew Greeley's sister).
One would like to hope that John Paul continues to learn from his stay in the west, not to mention from his world-wide journeys; and that he might spend as much time trying to understand the rest of us as we have spent trying to understand him. It may be that his providential role is to test the conservative hypothesis to breaking-point. At the conclave that elected him, it was possible to argue that the Church needed a strong hand on the tiller. At the next conclave, that argument will not wash: the conservative option will have been tried, and may well be found wanting. In the spiritual life, everyone fails. The seed falls into the ground and dies. But this will be a magnificent, heroic failure on a cosmic scale, with that special Polish dash.
John Paul II: Bibliography
Abbott, Walter M. (1966) The Documents of Vatican II. London, Geoffrey Chapman
Blazynski, G. (1979) John Paul II: A Man from Krakow. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Bortnowska, H. (1981) L' Arrichimento della Fede. Rome, Vatican Press.
Durkin M. G. (1983) Feast of Love: John Paul II on Human Intimacy. Chicago, Loyola University Press
Frossard, A. (1984) Be not Afraid!' Andre Frossard in Conversation with John Paul II London, Bodley Head.
Grootaers, J. (1981) De Vatican II Ã Jean-Paul II, le Grand Toumant de L'Eglise Catholique . Paris, Centurion
Hebblethwaite, P. (1982) Introducing John Paul II: The Populist Pope. London, Collins
Malinski, M. (1979) Pope John Paul II: The Life of my Friend Karol Wojtyla. London, Burns & Oates.
Ratzinger, J. (1988) Church, Ecumenism and Politics. Slough, St Paul Publications.
Stehle, H.-J. (1981) Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917-1979. Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press
Whale, J., ed. (1980) The Pope from Poland: An Assessment. London, Collins.
Williams, Huntston G. (1981) The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of his Thought and Action . New York, Seabury Press
Wojtyla, K. (1979) The Acting Person (originally Krakow, 1969), Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Dordrecht, The Netherlands. D. Reidel Publishers.
Wojtyla, K. (1980) Sources of Renewal (originally Krakow, 1972). London, Collins; New York, Harper & Row.
Wojtyla, K. (1981) Love and Responsibility (originally Krakow, 1960). London, Collins.
[Reproduced with permission from Modern Catholicism - Vatican II and after, Adrian Hastings ed., 1991, SPCK London/Oxford University Press New York]
