Former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan believes most biographies of Pope John Paul II “locate” the late pontiff in the context of history and explain his place in it. What they often “avoid,” she says, is speaking “at any great length of what he believed at his core."

In John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father, Noonan does examine his core beliefs because, as she writes, “what he believed is the reason for his greatness, the explanation of his power.”

With her characteristic flair for storytelling, Noonan captures that greatness and power in a collection of tales, anecdotes from a variety of insiders, and reflections of her own experiences that artfully celebrate both the mortal man and the transcendent soul.

Noonan begins with the medieval pageantry surrounding one of the pope’s public appearances at the Vatican. There – during the sweltering Roman summer of 2003, less than two years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 – she saw him, “broken,” “bent,” soon to leave the world, but “a lion” among leaders who compelled those in his presence to alternately sing and weep.

Noonan then launches into the life of Poland’s Karol Wojtyla – destined to become Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pontiff in over four centuries – and the enormous roles he would play in collapsing the Soviet Union, expanding the church’s reach throughout the undeveloped world, and spreading a message of genuine hope to all.

The book goes on to describe John Paul’s deep, pious communing with God: The pope’s prayer life was reported to be “mystical,” she says. It was a fact that got the attention of Poland’s former Communist government and even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the latter mentioning the Pope’s “mystical essence” in a profile the agency was developing on him during the 1970s. Vatican press secretary Joaquin Navarro-Valls described feeling “a kind of lightening, or even giddiness” in the presence of the praying pope. Others reported finding John Paul “at times lying face down on the floor of his chapel, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross,” Noonan writes, adding that she often tried to imagine his face when he prayed. A friend would tell her, when his eyes were shut tight and he muttered or winced, the Pope was in his “interior world” of prayer.

Beyond his spirituality, John Paul was a tough, athletically gifted man’s man. As a boy, he was a soccer star. He swam, skied, and kayaked. He even wrote poetry and plays, and learned to speak seven different languages. As a man, he climbed mountains – literally and figuratively – and he knew first-hand what it meant to labor in a factory. He was able to relate to both common people and the elite. He was a serious man, but with a sense of humor.

John Paul also was “an intellectual and yet warm, but with an honest warmth and not just a charming one; sweet but skeptical, emotional but not sentimental,” Noonan writes. His sincere warmth and compassion, even compelled him to meet with and forgive his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot and nearly killed the pontiff in 1981.

When it came to church doctrine and the teachings of Christ, the Pope was a staunch traditionalist, believing that 2,000 years of “church thinking” could not be discarded by modern man with his own ideas of revamping that thinking to justify his own behaviors. Truth is truth, whether man likes that truth or not. And the Bible is the word of God: Not some marginally inspired work to be re-interpreted and amended to suit man’s whims. Even so, the Pope was a “progressive thinker who embraced science and the arts,” says Noonan. “His thoughts on the big bang theory of creation might well be true, that it is not incompatible with the church’s teachings.”

Noonan adds, “John Paul liked to remind scientists that the big bang theory was conceived in the mind of a scientist who was a priest, Father George Lemaitre of Belgium, whose work was applauded by Albert Einstein.” Continued...